| Product | Rating | Most Used By | Product Summary | Starting Price |
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 pfSense | N/A | pfSense is a firewall and load management product available through the open source pfSense Community Edition, as well as a the licensed edition, pfSense Plus (formerly known as pfSense Enterprise). The solution provides combined firewall, VPN, and router functionality, and can be deployed through the cloud (AWS or Azure), or on-premises with a Netgate appliance. It as scalable capacities, with functionality for SMBs. As a firewall, pfSense offers Stateful packet inspection, concurrent… | $179 per appliance | |
 SonicWall TZ | N/A | SonicWall TZ is an entry to mid-tier NGFW for small to mid-sized companies. It is a Unified Threat Management solution, with additional native decryption and deep-packet inspection capabilities. | $329.60 |
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| Entry-level Setup Fee | No setup fee | No setup fee | ||||||||||||||
| Additional Details | — | See pricing link for TZ Series (Gen6) editions. All prices have been converted from pounds. Conversion rates may change. | ||||||||||||||
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| Considered Both Products |  pfSense  Luiz Eduardo Garcia System Administrator Chose pfSense Both products listed above, are very great solutions, but payed ones. If you are looking for open source firewall solution, pfSense is the one. Based on FreeBSD, it has strong security features and is very easy to deploy, configure and manage. pfSense also plays network simple …  Pablo Mojica Systems Administrator Chose pfSense PFSense is not a fully featured and supported enterprise-grade solution; however, it does offer a lot of similar functionality at a fraction of the cost for more minor requirements.  Jerry Riggin President Chose pfSense Cisco is too complex to configure unless you are a security guru. Seme with Fortinet  Mario Matinelli Director Chose pfSense Overall, pfSense is the most complete solution in terms of features included even though it currently lack of a centralised management interface.The Ubiquiti firewall offering is often appealing being well integrated within the Ubiquiti dashboard and it is often a solution of …  Pretty Varughese IT Executive Chose pfSense We were using Sophos XG Firewall in our environment before but we need a product that is customizable & provides low cost high security features. pfSense provided us high security features with customizable options as it's kernel is based on freeBSD.  Chirag Deol Chief Marketing Officer Chose pfSense We were using Sophos XG firewall in our environment but when it comes to cost it's more expensive with limited features. After using [pfSense] we are getting more security features at less cost. After pfSense provides a bundle of security features such as anti-spamming, …  James Freeman IT Consultant Chose pfSense pfSense is just a more flexible, lower-cost solution—it can be installed (if you wish) on just about any x86 hardware or even virtual machines - the community edition is free and so enables rapid prototyping and low-cost prototyping and lab build out—something that isn't …  Christian Shaheen Owner Chose pfSense pfSense itself is free and can be installed on just about any hardware so from a hardware cost perspective it can beat out anybody. In terms of features it's above many pro-sumer/small business solutions like Ubiquiti. It can't really stand against high-end gear like Cisco but …  Allan Leung IT & T Manager Chose pfSense First of all, I don't need to be a Cisco professional to manage VPN, load balance, multiple WAN/LAN, Firewall and etc. pfSense has an easy-to-use web interface and I can do everything and add packaged add-on services. Moreover, for Small & Medium Enterprise, IT budget is …  Jay Moore CIO Chose pfSense I have not seen a single thing that these other products do that pfSense does not. In fact, the performance/throughput of pfSense is better in my opinion.  Aaron Smith Information Technology Manager Chose pfSense While you can get the performance out of other products, pfSense offers the unique ability to put other services on the same device. Products such as Untagle's NG Firewall and SonicWall's TZ series offer cost effective options for firewall and VPN services, having incoming load …  germary zambrano jefe del departamento de informatica Chose pfSense pfSense is a new and innovative platform that has learned from the errors of older systems, which helps it cover the needs that aren't covered by Smoothwall.  Jim Rubenstein Chief Technology Officer Chose pfSense Before pfSense we were using consumer and small business rated network appliances from Linksys, Cisco, Buffalo and Netgear. We were replacing them on average of every 6-12 months because they'd fail or would offer poor wifi availability. Switching to pfSense allowed us to use …  Victor Arana IT Manager Chose pfSense It's an open source solution can support from 50 to 700 user without sweating and with the half of the standard bundle investment that will take to deploy a Fortigate UTM, or a Cisco ASA, also a Sophos UTM that are quite remarkable units but to pFSense saves you money and will …  Paolo Daniele Senior Network Engineer Chose pfSense Real competition was between Pfsense and OpnSense that integrates first the bootstrap Twitter framework. But with OpSense there are configurations that create some problems with a specific client (we've experienced that by creating an IPSec tunnel both with OpSense and …  Rikia Kosaka Senior Systems Engineer Chose pfSense I've used a number of routers like Cisco, Sonicwall, Juniper, Home based routers, etc. pfSense is like most routers but with the benefit of load balancing and multi-wan. Well many support multi-wan but load balancing is usually a separate device like an BIGiP F5 or Cisco CSS.  Jim Nitterauer Senior Systems Administrator Chose pfSense Neither of the Cisco devices are designed to compete. pfSense does tons more. | SonicWall TZ  Valery Mezentsau IT Department Manager Chose SonicWall TZ Pretty much similar functionality. SonicWall TZ400 compared to ASA 5506 has better hardware performance. SonicWall licenses cost less money which makes it better for the same needs and functionality. However, the Cisco ASA Internet unity and knowledge base are bigger then …  Benjamin Hale Freelance IT Advisor/Specialist Chose SonicWall TZ Our previous firewall, from Xyzell, couldn't handle the bandwidth that video files needed within the internal LAN, so we looked at alternatives. SonicWall came recommend by a different IT professional for its solid performance and good documentation. We further researched the …  Jhoneis Milano Project management Chose SonicWall TZ because it is multiprotocol, has continuous support and is also economical  Derek Schroeder Service Manager Chose SonicWall TZ SonicWall and WatchGuard are both fine appliances, but I am accustomed to the Barracuda NG. The Barracuda Control Center is so powerful and useful that it beats out the other two. SonicWall does a great job of dividing up firewall rules and NAT policies, but this is a …  Ramon Vazquez IT Director Chose SonicWall TZ SonicWall TZ is a much better product. Easier to administer and use and much more elaborate in its rules. I would choose it over Watchguard any day.  Alan Matson, CCNA:S, MCP Senior Network Security Engineer Chose SonicWall TZ Costs, features and ease of use were the determining factors. The UI alone outweighs the CLI from the ASA and SRX, features were easier to understand and licenses were more easily obtained. |
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| Small Businesses |  Sophos UTM Score 8.5 out of 10 | pfSense Score 8.5 out of 10 |
| Medium-sized Companies |  Quantum Firewalls and Security Gateways Score 9.1 out of 10 | Quantum Firewalls and Security Gateways Score 9.1 out of 10 |
| Enterprises |  Palo Alto Networks Virtualized Next-Generation Firewalls - VM Series Score 9.1 out of 10 | Palo Alto Networks Virtualized Next-Generation Firewalls - VM Series Score 9.1 out of 10 |
| All Alternatives | View all alternatives | View all alternatives |
| pfSense | SonicWall TZ | |
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| Likelihood to Recommend | 9.3 (0 ratings) | 9.2 (0 ratings) |
| Usability | 9.7 (0 ratings) | 8.3 (0 ratings) |
| Support Rating | 10.0 (0 ratings) | 8.9 (0 ratings) |
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| Pros |
Allan Leung IT & T Manager |
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Aaron Smith Information Technology Manager |
Jhoneis Milano Project management |
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Jerry Riggin President |
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| Alternatives Considered |
Pablo Mojica Systems Administrator |
Derek Schroeder Service Manager |
| Return on Investment |
 Charles R. Coggins III Technical Support Specialist |
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| ScreenShots | SonicWall TZ Screenshots  |