Forcepoint NGFW vs. pfSense

Forcepoint NGFW

pfSense

Overview
Product	Rating	Most Used By	Product Summary	Starting Price
Forcepoint NGFW	Score 10.0 out of 10	N/A	Forcepoint Next-Generation Firewall delivers network security at scale. They can be deployed from anywhere through the Secure Management Console (SMC) and unify policy management, incident response and reporting.	$900 one-time fee (approx)
pfSense	Score 9.9 out of 10	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

Pricing

Forcepoint NGFW

pfSense

Editions & Modules

Forcepoint NGFW N60: $900
one-time fee (approx)
Forcepoint NGFW N120: $1314
one-time fee (approx)
Forcepoint NGFW N350: $7850
one-time fee (approx)
Forcepoint NGFW N1200: $13600
one-time fee (approx)
Forcepoint NGFW N2200: $36000
one-time fee (approx)
Forcepoint NGFW N3400 & N3500: varies
one-time fee

SG-1100: $179
per appliance
SG-2100: $229
per appliance
SG-3100: $399
per appliance
SG-5100: $699
per appliance
XG-7100-DT: $899
per appliance
XG-7100-1U: $999
per appliance
XG-1537: $1,949
per appliance
XG-1541: $2,649
per appliance

Offerings

Pricing Offerings
Forcepoint NGFW	pfSense
Free Trial
Yes	No
Free/Freemium Version
No	No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No	No

Entry-level Setup Fee

No setup fee

Additional Details

Firewalls are bought predominately through partners and third-party VARs. Pricing for purchase and lease and support options vary by reseller.

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More Pricing Information

Community Pulse
	Forcepoint NGFW	pfSense
Considered Both Products	Forcepoint NGFW NE Nick Erwin Network Admin Chose Forcepoint NGFW There are similar hardware and license costs between the two products. The Forcepoint NGFW product is by far easier to use and manage. Incentivized Helpful?	pfSense 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. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose pfSense Fortigate offers an extensive set of features including the Unified Threat Management and a lot of FortiGuard services . pfSense is extremely modular, probably because of its open source "flavour"m but relies on community support. Fortinet ROI depends on the reduced … Incentivized Helpful? AB Ansley Barnes Lead Network Engineer Chose pfSense PfSense beats all other solutions at its price point, hands-down. You can get more features with far less performance, or same performance for much higher cost. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose pfSense pfSense does almost all what the other brands do and the CE Edition is free even if complete. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose pfSense Meraki has a unified management login for all devices, which is nice. It also has decent content filtering, both areas where pfSense is weaker. Where pfSense far ouclasses Meraki is in the ease of use and the other width of features. These include features such as better VPN … Incentivized Helpful? 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 … Incentivized Helpful? 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. Incentivized Helpful? 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, … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose pfSense pfSense offers more options and scales very easily. Incentivized Helpful? 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 … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose pfSense pfSense is a lot cheaper and has higher firewall throughput per dollar than "enterprise" network appliances. It's also significantly easier to configure and learn. It may not have some of the "enterprise" features or the support level that someone like Cisco has, but for small … Incentivized Helpful? 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 … Incentivized Helpful? 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 … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose pfSense Pfsense seemed to always be cheaper and just as good as its competitors. Incentivized Helpful? 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. Incentivized Helpful? 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 … Incentivized Helpful? 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. Incentivized Helpful? 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 … Incentivized Helpful? 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 … Incentivized Helpful? 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 … Incentivized Helpful? 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. Incentivized Helpful? Jim Nitterauer Senior Systems Administrator Chose pfSense Neither of the Cisco devices are designed to compete. pfSense does tons more. Incentivized Helpful? Richard Kiernan CTO and co founder Chose pfSense pfSense was chosen due to its excellent community support and forums Incentivized Helpful? LG 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 … Incentivized Helpful? JR Jerry Riggin President Chose pfSense Cisco is too complex to configure unless you are a security guru. Seme with Fortinet Incentivized Helpful?

Features

Forcepoint NGFW

pfSense

Firewall

Comparison of Firewall features of Product A and Product B
	Forcepoint NGFW 8.1 Ratings 6% below category average	pfSense 7.6 Ratings 13% below category average
Identification Technologies	5.00 Ratings	5.00 Ratings
Visualization Tools	5.00 Ratings	7.00 Ratings
Content Inspection	10.00 Ratings	4.00 Ratings
Policy-based Controls	10.00 Ratings	10.00 Ratings
Active Directory and LDAP	8.00 Ratings	7.00 Ratings
Firewall Management Console	10.00 Ratings	9.50 Ratings
Reporting and Logging	8.00 Ratings	8.00 Ratings
VPN	9.00 Ratings	10.00 Ratings
High Availability	9.00 Ratings	10.00 Ratings
Stateful Inspection	7.00 Ratings	7.00 Ratings
Proxy Server	00 Ratings	6.10 Ratings

Best Alternatives
	Forcepoint NGFW	pfSense
Small Businesses	pfSense Score 9.9 out of 10	Sophos UTM Score 8.1 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies	Quantum Firewalls and Security Gateways Score 9.6 out of 10	Quantum Firewalls and Security Gateways Score 9.6 out of 10
Enterprises	Palo Alto Networks Virtualized Next-Generation Firewalls - VM Series Score 10.0 out of 10	Palo Alto Networks Virtualized Next-Generation Firewalls - VM Series Score 10.0 out of 10
All Alternatives	View all alternatives	View all alternatives

User Ratings
	Forcepoint NGFW	pfSense
Likelihood to Recommend	9.0 (0 ratings)	9.6 (0 ratings)
Usability	10.0 (0 ratings)	10.0 (0 ratings)
Support Rating	6.0 (0 ratings)	- (0 ratings)

User Testimonials
	Forcepoint NGFW	pfSense
Likelihood to Recommend	If you are looking for a smaller network/security team, the ease and low complexity create an easy to manage environment. One engineer can easily manage 100 nodes/locations. If you are just starting to get security conscious and predict regular adjustments to policy, routing, and access, this is a very good system for making easy to understand and low impact changes on a regular basis without operations interruption. Incentivized NE Nick Erwin Network Admin Read full review	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 Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Pros	Easy to manage and make changes on - ACL's are done with ease. Easy USB initial configuration - The easy initial setup of a new location and firewall saves massive time. Settings are automatically pushed to new nodes upon contact with the controller. Low Complexity - This system does not have a lot of complexity requiring extra hours, training, or personnel to manage. Incentivized NE Nick Erwin Network Admin Read full review	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 Allan Leung IT & T Manager Read full review
Cons	Poor Reporting - It exists but even when calling in to support for assistance, they have no idea how to tackle customizing reports or searching for specific data. Incentivized NE Nick Erwin Network Admin Read full review	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 Aaron Smith Information Technology Manager Read full review
Usability	The Graphical User Interface is very easy to read, understand and work with. The usability of this product is very high. Incentivized NE Nick Erwin Network Admin Read full review	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 Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Support Rating	Support has varied over the history of the company. Terro is a name that comes up often with the best of service from this company. Incentivized NE Nick Erwin Network Admin Read full review	pfSense+ basic provides "As Available" email support. pfSense+ Pro offers 24 hr turn around email support. pfSense+ Enterprise offers 24/7 phone support. Incentivized Jerry Riggin President Read full review
Alternatives Considered	There are similar hardware and license costs between the two products. The Forcepoint NGFW product is by far easier to use and manage. Incentivized NE Nick Erwin Network Admin Read full review	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. Pablo Mojica Systems Administrator Read full review
Return on Investment	Efficiency/Productivity increase. The company moved from Cisco firewall and routing hardware to Forcepoint NGFW. It now takes fewer people and fewer hours to manage the new product. This has allowed the company to put the man-hours to use on other projects and tasks. Long term viability. This has been a concern in the past when the company started as Stonegate, merged to become Stonesoft then got purchased by McAfee, then McAfee got purchased by Intel. However, with Forcepoint the product seems to have found a stable home. Low complexity. The Web GUI based system for management has reduced the cost of personnel and training required. There is no longer a need for the company to have higher trained and higher salary cost employees to manage the system. Mid-level admins at lower salaries are capable of managing the GUI based system with ease. Incentivized NE Nick Erwin Network Admin Read full review	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 Charles R. Coggins III Technical Support Specialist Read full review
ScreenShots