Cisco Firepower 1000 Series vs. pfSense

Cisco Firepower 1000 Series is best and required for every organization. It will give you more control [over] incoming and outgoing traffic and more visibility on user traffic. Sandbox is one of the best features [that] provides you [with] deep-level packet scans and gives you multilayered security. It can stop any malware attack on your organization. The support of Cisco is very fast and lots of documentation are available on the Cisco website.

Incentivized

pfSense is incredibly budget friendly and capable for organizations of all sizes. My specific scenario, working for a non-profit organization, requires budget consciences decisions without compromising security and function. pfSense has helped tremendously in accomplishing this. It specifically tackles advanced routing, static routing, remote access, intrusion prevention, in a single platform, mostly available for free.

Incentivized

• My organization is all Cisco and wants to stay in the Cisco life cycle, Firepower 1000 series is great for small to medium-size office.
• Very robust enterprise-grade security solution with updated threat features to handle any current and upcoming threats. The solution is backed by Cisco to ensure constant security updates. Integrated AnyConnect remote client VPN is a big plus to allow for secure remote workers access. Easier to set up a site to site VPN due to the large user base and case studies published on integrating to other manufacturer solutions.

Incentivized

• Easy to use. Good user interface design! Easy to understand and easy to set up.
• Lower hardware requirement. 3 years ago, we used an old PC to run it. Now, we have changed to a router device with Celeron CPU and 8GB RAM. It runs smoothly with a 1000G commercial broadband.

Incentivized

• ACLS in gui are PIA cant see object details
• Objects in ACLs dont show IP addresses
• Have to renames every object to name+ip to make acl GUI useable
• Speed to data can use improvement.
• Health warnings should allow you to resolve you have to dig n search in some cases.

• There is no API for making changes. This can be a hindrance in environments where auto-deploying something needs firewall rules or HAProxy configs updated. Since all settings are stored in an XML file and then configs are generated from that, even manually updating config files cannot be done.
• Beware that some network cards can have issues. pfSense is based on FreeBSD, so it's best to look on their compatibility list before deploying.

Incentivized

It is quite good, robust and reliable but not always so easy to manage and configure. The tools could be improved and the price is not low for an entry level firewall

Incentivized

Firepowers are secure, reliable, central management and configuration is easy and they fit in well with our existing Cisco infrastructure. Good feature set and support. Good management and control with chassis manager and central control with additional Firepower Management Centre.

Incentivized

pfSense can be a very elementary firewall but can also be as comples as you want, according your needs. I'd always reccomend a HA solution when used in a company and, for bigger companies, commercial license is recommended. It's also very adptable to everyone's needs.

Incentivized

At the beginining there were some bugs

Incentivized

Great performance even on the lower end model of the series. You can push a lot of traffic through these devices without much performance impact. If you decide you want to inspect encrypted traffic however, you may take a big hit on the cpu and memory of the box, but they still manage to keep up even with all the bells and whistles turned on.

Incentivized

I have lots of Cisco TAC cases opened for a Cisco Firewall and they are on the same quality for all platforms. There is no difference in the support quallity between lets say Cisco Firepower 1000 Series and 4000 series. Every TAC case differs case by case, and engineer by engineer. If you get a good one, the support process is realy nice.

Incentivized

pfSense+ basic provides "As Available" email support. pfSense+ Pro offers 24 hr turn around email support. pfSense+ Enterprise offers 24/7 phone support.

Incentivized

Utilize the new FMC cloud which is available in Cisco Defense Orchestrator.

Incentivized

We use both devices for different purposes. Both have their benefits, which we try to bring to best use in our environment. This makes it hard to compare them. All I can say for sure is, that they work quite well as a team, each leveling out the others flaws.

Incentivized

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.

• This product has kept hackers, malware, and viruses at bay for large hospitals and small alike. Very valuable data can reside behind this so long as it is set up correctly.
• The value is great with SnortV3. Very versatile if you need a hybrid scenario with Multi-Cloud support.

Incentivized

• pfSense has only had positive impacts on our company. We are not a huge company so not having to buy licenses to get all these features have been excellent.
• I was not around when our current sysadmin decided to use pfSense, but I am assuming from day one it was probably a 100% return on investment since it does everything we need it to and it was open source software.

Incentivized