Likelihood to Recommend Smoothwall SWG is very suitable in companies where there is a lot of staff and power to distribute the bandwidth by areas and give priority to the staff that requires better service. It's also well suited for business that require protection of their data and services as it is constantly monitoring the network and does not let them enter dangerous sites.
Read full review Untangle is very strong in the "traditional" sense of security. That means an edge appliance that either works with an existing router or is the router itself (recommended). This approach has also been adapted well to cloud environments in order to protect virtual servers and VDI workstations. As mentioned earlier, many schools are using cloud-based filtering for their 1:1 solutions for their students. This is an area where Untangle is unable to serve. Some have used an instance of Untangle in the cloud with VPN to serve their remote needs, but it is not the same as solutions that are designed for cloud-based filtering of devices without VPN.
Read full review Pros Real-time IP filtering is very favorable. That helps limit and restrict prohibited content. Elaboration of personalized reports of the activities or pages that users visit to make new blocking rules to the pages most visited by users that may damage the functioning of the servers. Read full review Web Filtering is strong, and can also do application fingerprinting to allow Facebook, but not Facebook games. Secondly, a separate partition called a "rack" can be set up to give one subnet or group of users different web filtering policies than another. For example, teachers would get more freedom to browse the web than students at a school. Built-in SD-WAN connectivity as part of your license. IPSEC tunnel creation is also amazingly easy. Will install on any x86 hardware created in the last 5-10 years. Ram and processor requirements per user are very low. Reporting is phenomenal, however you can get death by details very easily. Read full review Cons It is necessary for them to have more material or a community that can help expand knowledge about this software so users can use 100% of their tools. Read full review The full suite can be expensive for business but will be powerful enough. The full suite for home or small office isn't that bad of a price but may be out of reach for most home users but remember the basics are FREE so anyone can get started with it. I would like to see it promoted for mid to large businesses as I think it can handle it. Read full review Likelihood to Renew Service renewal is in Feb 2021. We will be renewing!
Read full review Support Rating I haven't used them much, but they did answer my question quickly.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Smoothwall SWG has many tools similar to
pfSense but in my opinion I like the graphical environment of smoothwall swg more. It is more didactic and simple to use for new users. Also
pfSense lacks the tools for monitoring in real time and the elaboration of reports that helps to perform statistics on sites visited.
Read full review NG Firewall was much more friendly in terms of layout and ease of use, the apps section is familiar to anyone and the config while in a sort of odd order is very clearly laid out. I also appreciate Untangle's endless educational videos and the support can't be beat. Overall it was more of a complete package
Read full review Return on Investment This software helps a lot and is very economical, since it is free and it can be installed in equipment with low performance. That is of importance to companies with little budget or who are just starting out in the market. Read full review The positive is the savings in time the IT department has recouped by not having to continuously clean and maintain end point computers. Not to mention helping end user use their time more wisely by not wasting time on non-work related web activities. The only negative is complaints from end users about the restrictions. Read full review ScreenShots