Juniper SRX vs. pfSense

Juniper SRX

Juniper SRX

34 Reviews and Ratings

pfSense

pfSense

72 Reviews and Ratings

Overview
Product	Rating	Most Used By	Product Summary	Starting Price
Juniper SRX	Score 9.0 out of 10	N/A	Juniper SRX is a firewall offering. It provides a variety of modular features, scaled for enterprise-level use, based on a 3-in-1 OS that enables routing, switching, and security in each product.	N/A
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

Juniper SRX

pfSense

Editions & Modules

No answers on this topic

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
Juniper SRX	pfSense
Free Trial
No	No
Free/Freemium Version
No	No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No	No

Entry-level Setup Fee

No setup fee

No setup fee

Additional Details

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More Pricing Information

Community Pulse
	Juniper SRX	pfSense
Considered Both Products	Juniper SRX Verified User Anonymous Chose Juniper SRX Juniper SRX stands tall compared to all these products for Large Service Provider Networks, where traffic volume is larger. Also, cost comparison with SRX's few other products can also be another contributing factor while selecting this. As well as Juniper Routers, Switches, … Incentivized Helpful? Amr Momtaz Cloud Migration Architect Chose Juniper SRX The juniper is very versatile router/firewall box. it is an excellent router/edge device with zone based firewall. Incentivized Helpful? Eric Stephenson Staff System Engineer Chose Juniper SRX The comparison between the different firewalls is really down to preference and price at this point. The SRX is a solid device, and we have not seen a hardware failure to date. The Juniper support I have had is stellar and has helped me out with larger more complex scenario … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Juniper SRX Equipment prices ran about the same. Performance and management were also more or less equal. The biggest deciding factors for going with Juniper were (1) fewer security incidents related to SRX firewalls and (2) technical support costs were significantly less. Incentivized Helpful? Randy Carpenter Vice President Chose Juniper SRX Juniper SRX is significantly better in every category. Cisco ASA was terrible. The config is unintuitive and not easy to manage. Cisco left the ASA abandoned from any kind of meaningful software updates for around a decade. Incentivized Helpful? Robert Beck Network Engineer Chose Juniper SRX I love the Cisco ASA but I've become used to the SRX. I am a CLI kind of guy so the SRX works for me. Others may be more GUI based so the ASA may be more comfortable to you. If that's the case then the ASA's ASDM is a solid platform to manage your FW. Junos hasn't gotten this … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Juniper SRX The SRX Stacks up well to the ASA and Sonic wall but I feel the features provided by Fortigate/Palo Alto and Checkpoint far exceed that of the competitors. 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

Juniper SRX

pfSense

Firewall

Comparison of Firewall features of Product A and Product B
	Juniper SRX 8.7 Ratings 1% above category average	pfSense 7.6 Ratings 13% below category average
Identification Technologies	9.00 Ratings	5.00 Ratings
Visualization Tools	7.00 Ratings	7.00 Ratings
Content Inspection	8.00 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	7.00 Ratings	9.50 Ratings
Reporting and Logging	8.00 Ratings	8.00 Ratings
VPN	10.00 Ratings	10.00 Ratings
High Availability	10.00 Ratings	10.00 Ratings
Stateful Inspection	10.00 Ratings	7.00 Ratings
Proxy Server	9.00 Ratings	6.10 Ratings

Best Alternatives
	Juniper SRX	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
	Juniper SRX	pfSense
Likelihood to Recommend	8.0 (0 ratings)	9.6 (0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew	8.0 (0 ratings)	- (0 ratings)
Usability	- (0 ratings)	10.0 (0 ratings)
Support Rating	6.4 (0 ratings)	- (0 ratings)

User Testimonials
	Juniper SRX	pfSense
Likelihood to Recommend	Juniper vSRX is an excellent edge gateway device. The combination of Tunneling protocols supported and the advanced routing & security features makes it perfect for this kind of deployment. It is available in physical, virtual appliances as well as support on multiple clouds so you can have the same box be your edge gateway in multiple environments for consistency. It can also work as a Internet Gateway, DMZ Firewall/Router and it would function just fine. While it can also work as a DC firewall (North-South), the poor GUI will make it harder in the day to day administration for the multiple policies in a DC. Incentivized Amr Momtaz Cloud Migration Architect 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	The Juniper SRX platform is easy to set up (out of the box). The support team responds to tickets quickly and with good solutions. Incentivized Bear Golightly IT Operations Manager / IT Service Manager 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	Some of the more complex setups (clustered HA, etc.) can be a little difficult to configure. The lowest-end model that supports true multi-site HA is relatively expensive. It would be nice to have that option in lower models. Some configuration options (particularly the way address book entries are done) can get tedious and make for very long configs. Incentivized Randy Carpenter Vice President 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	No answers on this topic	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	This is the one area where I have a beef with Juniper. When I called into Cisco TAC, 90% of the time, the first person I spoke with was able to resolve my issue. With Juniper TAC, 90% of the time, the first person I speak with is not able to resolve my issue, seems to almost be reading from a script, and must escalate my ticket. All of which takes time. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous 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	Equipment prices ran about the same. Performance and management were also more or less equal. The biggest deciding factors for going with Juniper were (1) fewer security incidents related to SRX firewalls and (2) technical support costs were significantly less. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous 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	It is a workhorse for our field operations. It provides the last touch for an ISP to the customer. The customer has no view of the device, but with the repeatability of the device, they do not need to. The ability to roll out a dynamic routing protocol attached to a security zone allows elasticity to the environment that supports growth. VLAN support on the inside interfaces allow this to be the only device in some smaller deployments we install these in. Incentivized Eric Stephenson Staff System Engineer 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
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