Untangle NG Firewall Reviews

I just get on and monitor the interfaces, the networking, and the basics of it for this product.

It has a nice amount of built-in apps, which can make it easy for teams that want to use OpenVPN or VPN software that's already integrated in there. This stands out compared to the best features with Untangle NG Firewall.

We have OpenVPN. We activated the app that runs on Untangle NG Firewall, and we use that to do VPN tasks regarding the VPN capabilities with the Next-Generation Firewall.

The remote access securing capabilities are pretty good. It's pretty easy to use. You can multi-factor it, connect it into Active Directory, and basically set it up any way you want.

The ease of use and the built-in and integrated features, including the apps that include OpenVPN, IPsec, and WireGuard VPN, are all built straight into Untangle NG Firewall. The reports are the same; they're all built-in. You can easily scroll through the list of reports and pick and choose which one you want. The dashboard is nice. It has all the information you need right there without having to dig in and customize it. You still have all the other features that you would want from a router with filtering, firewall rules, interface rules, and all that kind of stuff.

We do an outside-sourced threat prevention regarding the Threat Prevention features.

I haven't run into areas that could be improved or cons versus pros for Untangle NG Firewall. I haven't done anything too advanced when it comes to the filtering, so I'm not sure what can be improved or added.

I haven't dug into the advanced features, but I think some of the advanced capabilities are probably where it lacks a little bit, with the filtering and firewall rules. These areas could be improved to make it a nine out of 10 or a 10 out of 10 for overall rating.

It's a stable firewall based on my thoughts on the stability so far. I haven't had to mess with it too much; it's pretty stable.

I've used them maybe once for support. They got back to me pretty quickly, the response time was fast, and they're knowledgeable. I probably have too little experience, but when I did use them, they worked.

Neutral

It's pretty easy. It's not too difficult compared to other firewalls when assessing the ease of use or the ease of configuring the product.

Based on my experience, the pricing for Untangle NG Firewall is pretty comparable. I haven't bought a new one in a while, so I'm not sure if they've changed prices since then, but compared to high-end Cisco prices, it's pretty good. It's less expensive, especially because it has a lot of the pieces integrated into the firewall, so you get savings on that front.

I consider Cisco, Fortinet, and SonicWall when considering other firewalls.

They all can do very similar tasks, but Untangle NG Firewall is built more for a streamlined user experience, for someone that doesn't want to do anything too advanced. You have the apps built-in, and you have some reports right there built-in, already set up for you when discussing the main differences between Cisco and Untangle NG Firewall.

The packet inspection is pretty good. I've dove into that a little bit, and you're able to dig down and see all the resources of what's using the packets. You can use it to trace down bandwidth when evaluating the impact of high-performance packet inspection on network performance metrics.

The real-time alerts are pretty good. I've seen a couple of reports come through. They give you the information you need regarding how important they are for maintaining productivity in your company.

It could be a benefit. It's a lot easier and ready to go with that ease of use. For most people, that's a huge benefit.

You could dig deep and do more if you wanted to, regarding customization.

I rate Untangle NG Firewall eight out of 10 based on my experience with this product.

I haven't run into any additional features I'd want included with the next releases.

My usual use cases for Untangle NG Firewall are just like a firewall and router. The main purpose is for firewall functionality. It has a captive portal, web filter, virus blocker, spam blocker, bandwidth control, threat prevention, and ad blocker. I also have some settings for wan failover and load balancer, OpenVPN.

The most useful features of Untangle NG Firewall are the firewall and bandwidth control capabilities.

The threat prevention features of Untangle NG Firewall have helped my network security management, and I find them very good.

VPN capabilities of Untangle NG Firewall are very good and easy to set up and use. OpenVPN is very good, and I have a lot of installed clients.

I would appreciate improvements to the ad blocker and SSL Inspector of Untangle NG Firewall.

I have been working with Untangle NG Firewall for about 15 years.

I would rate the stability and reliability of Untangle NG Firewall as a ten.

I find it stable and reliable because I do not have any issues and it has very high uptime.

I would rate the scalability of Untangle NG Firewall as an eight from one to ten, based on all my experiences.

I do not often communicate with technical support of Untangle.

I use official documentation, guides, or manuals for Untangle NG Firewall.

I think the quality of the documentation I used is good, but I believe the forum could be better.

I have been working with Untangle NG Firewall for more than 15 years, and I used FortiGate for a little while.

From my experience during initial setup of Untangle NG Firewall its a straight forward.

It is not very expensive, so it is affordable for my budget.

The impact of high-performance packet inspection on network performance metrics is very good.

My network has good performance with very low CPU and memory usage.

Real-time alerts from Untangle NG Firewall are important for me because every alert I have is sent to my email.

The impact of these real-time alerts on my productivity is significant, as I may not be present, but I receive notifications about any problems in my WANs or network and sent to my emails, or something the firewall blocks.

I would rate Untangle NG Firewall as an eight overall, considering all the features and capabilities.

I use it at all of our client locations as a gateway security appliance. It's great and very secure. It has intrusion prevention, threat detection, anti-spam, anti-malware, and bandwidth monitoring. It's pretty thorough.

The all-in-one gateway security functions and the ability to install it on generic equipment stand out. The centralized management console is great. I can template my installations and configurations. 

My ability to monetize it as a gateway security appliance to offer enhanced service offerings allows me to increase our price point. I provide it as a managed device to many of our clients. I take on the initial costs and charge them a monthly fee. They have threat detection.

The user interface, training, and general product innovation need improvement. Enhancements could also be made to their reporting and accessibility. Sometimes, it's a little tough to find out how to get a hold of support.

I have used the solution for five years.

Since it can be put on any box, the scalability is fantastic. If you're running out of resources, you can just use some new equipment or a bigger piece of hardware.

I would rate customer service as seven to eight out of ten. They're pretty good and responsive, knowing their product well. They're able to remotely manage the devices if necessary for support. When I open a ticket, everything gets resolved.

Positive

I tend to rip out Meraki and replace it with this. I don't like the fact that Meraki's licensing is very negative. If you forget to renew your license, you just get a reduction in services, whereas Meraki bricks the appliance. Untangle is more affordable.

The initial setup is easy. Very easy.

One person can deploy it easily.

I see a great return. My ability to monetize it as a gateway security appliance to offer enhanced service offerings allows me to increase our price point.

The setup cost is about $2000 to $3000 per year.

Untangle is more affordable. Additionally, you can install it on various equipment, unlike Meraki, as you are not stuck buying Meraki hardware. You can buy the software and run it on independent hardware. I rate the overall solution as eight out of ten.

The solution's most valuable feature is the content filtering.

I would recommend getting 2FA with an SSL VPN type of setup without having to go through a lot of hoops. The solution's licensing count could be improved. With SonicWall, I can have as many devices connected as I want. Untangle charges too much money for the users to actually use it.

I have been using Untangle NG Firewall for seven to eight years.

The solution provides really good technical support.

Positive

SonicWall provides Unified Threat Management, a new patent technology for scanning threats on a separate chip. SonicWall has a lot of really cool features, including SSL VPN. SonicWall changes your pricing structure or pricing model to meet your needs.

The solution's initial setup is pretty easy. On a scale from one to ten, where one is difficult and ten is easy, I rate the solution's initial setup a nine out of ten.

The solution's deployment takes a few minutes to half an hour. It is usually done by me, one of my staff members, or senior technicians. We talk to the end user to make sure that's what they want.

Untangle NG Firewall did its job of protecting the client and stopping threats.

On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing an eight out of ten.

The solution is deployed in manufacturing and law offices. I'm switching to SonicWall because it has an SSL VPN instead of Untangle NG Firewall's WireGuard VPN. The solution does not really need a lot of maintenance. You get alerts from the portal. It's a single pane of glass to update, which is very simple.

The solution's routing and bandwidth management features were helpful to us. We did not face any challenges while integrating the solution into our clients' existing infrastructures. You just have to create the VLANs in the network. It's pretty easy to deploy. I would recommend the solution to other users depending on the use case. Not every environment gets the same thing, but Untangle NG Firewall is definitely a good product.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

It's a good out-of-the-box solution. It doesn't require much configuration. So, it's good for the end user. It's very user-friendly.

There is room for improvement in the logs. Like with Cisco, I can do almost everything and know almost anything about what's running. 

 Untangle works very much out of the box. It's very user-friendly, but it's not engineer-friendly.  So, it's good for a home user.

For something fairly easy, but at the same time, with good technology to have at home, because at home, I'm not a millionaire or anything like that. So it's not like I'm worried to get hacked. I didn't want something like a Cisco firewall; it would be a bit overkill to have at home. So that's why I went for Untangle. 

But it lacks a few features. It's just a tick-box kind of thing. So they have apps and turn on and off the apps. The VPN's configuration is all very ticked. They have a few custom configurations, but it's not that much. 

It's very good for a home user, but for engineers, people who want a bit more, it doesn't have that facility. So, it lacks a lot of granularity, like in-depth configuration. But that's okay. That's why I chose it, so that's why I like it because of that as well.

I pay for the home license because I like to have all the features. If I could have some more granulated configuration on the threat, for instance, and that's in intrusion. And that sort of if I could have a bit more in-depth configuration on it, that would be good. 

I have been working with this solution for two years. 

I have some performance issues from time to time, like every two or three months, I need to reboot it. 

Therefore, that's where I would like to have some more detailed logs because I can't understand why it's rebooting; the logs are just a bit all over the place. It has a lot of logs, but it's a bit. It needs, like, a full-on course to understand the logs.

Overall, I would rate the stability a ten out of ten because I haven't had any major issues except the major reboot.

Unfortunately, I don't have tech support because the whole license doesn't include tech support.

However, it's been quite straightforward and easy to configure and everything. So, I never even needed to go to tech support. So that's how good the solution is.

I've used many different solutions. I used to use Cisco ASA 5506, but then I switched to OPNsense, pfSense, and Untangle.

I decided to switch to Untangle because I wasn't happy with the intrusion protection and threat detection in pfSense. It kind of works in a different way, so it's either blocking everything, and then it's weird the way it works, basically. 

Untangled is more in line with what I know because I'm more used to Cisco firewall. 

I like OPNsense as well. OpenSense as well. I'm inclined to go back OPNsense for a while. I also tried another one, which I can't remember now the name, but I couldn't even install that one.

The initial setup is very easy. 

For the home use, it's cheap.

Overall, I would rate the solution a ten out of ten. It's very good.

The product’s most valuable features are endpoint protection management, load balancing, and connectivity with Active Directory. We do not create user accounts separately for VPN purposes; it is synced automatically.

Whenever there are a large number of endpoint VPN clients, connectivity becomes slow. This particular area needs improvement.

We have been using Untangle NG Firewall for four to five years.

The product is stable. I rate its stability a nine out of ten.

We have 90-200 Untangle NG Firewall users in our organization. We encounter scalability issues in our environment. I rate its scalability a seven out of ten.

The technical support team has limited resources for fixing issues. There are a few videos and documentation online as well. It is a big issue.

Neutral

We have used Sophos before.

The initial setup is easy. I rate the process an eight out of ten. It takes two hours to complete.

We take help from third-party consultants or internet service providers for deployment.

I am evaluating Cisco and some other firewall products. Cisco is a very reliable and scalable product for any network. FortiGate also has good firewall platforms.

I rate Untangle NG Firewall a seven out of ten.

We use the solution for VPN.

The free version offers us some protection. The paid version does what a firewall is supposed to do. It protects us from the outside. It gives us VPN functionality and WAN Failover. My clients are happy with the PCs they got. The product is easy to implement. It works well.

The product should improve reporting.

I have been using the solution for 15 years.

The solution is stable. It runs well. If you don't know Linux, it's a bit difficult to recover the files if the system goes down. In most cases, I do a backup, rebuild it and load the backup.

About 15 clients are using the solution in our organization.

The initial setup was easy.

We are using both the open-source and the paid version of the product. The solution is fairly priced. The appliance is worth the money because it is scalable.

If someone wants to recover their firewall in case of failure, it would be good if they knew how to use Linux. We do not need to know Linux to install the product. Most people have a bit of Linux knowledge. I will recommend the solution to others. The product works as well as any other solution. Overall, I rate the tool an eight out of ten.

We use Untangle for most of our clients, which include law offices and some unions. Our clients are usually small offices with about 12 users. We do hardware-as-a-service and charge $32 a unit, including replacements.

NG Firewalls allow us to permit or deny applications we don't want to run. We also use content filtering, SSL inspection, and all the other things we run on the firewall to keep our clients protected and ensure they're not going where they shouldn't. It's a great firewall that works as intended. 

We have a minor issue when assigning IP addresses in the ARP tables. You should be able to go into the ARP tables, look at the IP address and say, "Nope, they need to be on this side on this IP address." The ability to set a DHP reservation from the ARP tables would be great. It's no big deal, but it would be nice to have. 

I've been working with Untangle NG Firewall for about three years.

Untangle is highly stable. We have several appliances out there, and I've only had to replace one because of a surge issue that was unrelated to Untangle. It was a problem with the electrical company, and we didn't have it on an APC backup system.

The scalability is great. You purchase the license you need for the number of users. When you're onboarding a new client, you need to know what they need in their office. They have multiple sizes. It isn't a one-size-fits-all solution. 

The setup is easy. Untangle ships you the firewall, and you add it to the dashboard. It backs up the config every night. You can do a zero deployment with it. It's endless. It's one of the easiest firewalls to deal with.

Our business philosophy is to give clients what they need, and they can grow into it. They have a firewall for every size of the business, whether it's 1 to 5 employees, 12 to 24 employees, or more. It's endless. You quote the right firewall for the right situation.

I rate Untangle nine out of 10 for affordability. The pricing model is based on the number of users. The license tiers are 12, 24, 50, and unlimited. 

I rate Untangle NG Firewall 10 out of 10. Give Untangle a shot if you're tired of overpriced firewalls like SonicWall. I used to sell nothing but SonicWall. The price point is high. Untangle can scale for nearly any business, and it gets the job done.

We are a reseller of their product. We use their appliances and their firewall software. Normally, we've got most of our clients from referrals that had been hacked before, and we told them to migrate to stop that from happening again. That's the main reason for the firewall and for the software that goes along with it.

We are using its most recent version. We always keep it up to date.

The web blocking for my clients and the application control are valuable.

Their tech support has been wonderful when we needed it. That's one reason we stuck with them for so long.

On their low-end appliance, they could have more memory and the largest storage space. The low-end appliance comes with a too-small hard drive, and it could use a little extra room. It only comes with about 4 gigs or 8 gigs of memory, and the hardware space is only 40 gigs, which is really small.

All my other complaints about it have all been fixed with the latest addition. There is not much more that I can see that they need to do at the moment.

I have probably been using this solution for 10 years.

So far, it has been excellent. Untangle can be run on our own computer. You can build a dedicated computer and learn, and that's how we used to do it until they came out with their appliances.

We have about 14 or 15 clients who use this solution. We usually work with small businesses with about 3 and 50 machines, and it has scaled perfectly. We don't usually go over 50. If a company has more than 50 employees, they are ready to hire someone full-time. In fact, we've interviewed for companies to hire an IT person because the others have no idea what to look for. We only had one client with 130 machines, and there was no problem with scalability.

Their technical support has been excellent. When I first got the solution, I didn't know much about it, and they walked me through everything. I've had a couple of difficulties or problems, and they were able to resolve them with me. So, they tend to support that. I don't think they have what I see as a technical support department because every time I've called them, I've gotten one of two or three people, and all of them were good.

Usually, our clients switch from SonicWall. The reason for switching is that 
they are going to have to buy a new appliance because it's so old. It is not going to be supported anymore. There is also the cost difference with Untangle. Untangle is a much better buy for the money than SonicWall. SonicWall is a lot more complicated to use for somebody not familiar with its interface than Untangle. The same is true for WatchGuard. WatchGuard is easier than SonicWall, but it still has a learning curve. Untangle also has a learning curve, but it is the easiest one for somebody who doesn't know.

It is one of the easiest ones to set up for first-time use as compared to SonicWall and WatchGuard, which are two of the other firewalls I deal with the most. If you plug in the client, it just works. You can make your adjustments but it's mostly for novices. For some of our small businesses, you just plug it in, and it starts working and then we make the adjustments. The nice thing is you can adjust everything remotely.

It takes about an hour to get it set up perfectly. It starts working out of the box, but we need to add some rules to it.

Usually, it's about $350 a year for 12 users, and it's about $600 for 50 users. It's very reasonable as compared to the others. One of the reasons is that they're all open-source.

You just buy their appliance and put it in until it dies. Because it's run under open platforms, mine seems to always work on older equipment. I've taken old equipment and put a new hard disk in it. I have taken about nine-year-old computers and put their operating system on them, and ran them like a champ. The only thing that changed was the hard drive because I don't trust a hard drive that's more than three to four years old.

It is very easy, and if you have any questions, their tech support will help you in a heartbeat. They have excellent documentation on the web. You can even get Untangle free for home use.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We are an authorized partner of Untangle, and we primarily work with small businesses that have limited needs. We have deployed Untangle NG Firewall z4 Plus to the majority of our clients. With simple hardware and a monthly service fee, it's very affordable for our clients. 

The software versioning is 16.5. We have deployed them primarily on-premises. We have a couple virtualized and on ESXi servers, and that's pretty much it. They're fully managed from our cloud database directly on untangle.com/cmd.

Its ease of use, variety of available features, and low pricing have enabled us to improve the security for a lot of our very small business clients at a price that they are happy to pay for. The big thing for us is that we're providing a good quality security service to them without spending thousands of dollars per year on hardware and licensing, which we would spend with something like SonicWall, Palo Alto, etc.

It is very easy to use. The user interface is very straightforward. It may not be as fancy as some of the ones I've seen, but it's very straightforward. It's very easy to find what you need, and it's very easy to get things done.

The majority of our clients are very small businesses, and Untangle devices have been fantastic for these small clients. We've basically standardized our stack to just simply use Untangle. We include the hardware and the service option, which makes it very easy and affordable for us to just simply push that into the monthly per-user costing that we provide as a managed services provider. It's really a no-brainer. They're easy to use, and they're easy to set up and configure. Support is generally good about resolving any issues that we have. We haven't had any real complaints.

I've heard other people saying that other firewalls have better detection rates, so better security. If they can improve the security of the device, I'm always for that, but at the moment, we've been happy with the service that we're getting out of them. 

It does have multi-factor authentication in some areas, but I would love to see a more widely implemented version of that on the devices themselves. 

It could use some improvement for Azure Active Directory Connections. It does exist, and it is available, but it needs work to be able to fully authenticate.

I know there are some advanced features that other firewalls have that aren't present in Untangle, but we've never noticed any feature that we need but isn't there. 

I also know a lot of people have complained about the cost per device because they license by device counts. So, once you get over a certain number of devices, it is not really a cost-effective solution.

We have been using this solution for the past three years.

We have had one device go down in three years. I've never been certain if that was an issue with Untangle themselves or with the client location. I know for a fact that the client did unplug the device repeatedly because they did not want to listen to their tech support. They unplugged it repeatedly. They left it disconnected from the internet completely for several months. It was disconnected and turned off, and it came to a point where we were never able to remotely restore that connection. So, we had to go in and physically factory reset the device. That's the only issue that I've had in terms of stability, but I don't know if that's an issue with Untangle or an issue with the client themselves. We dropped that client shortly after.

It is easy to scale. I ordered 10 of them in bulk just a month ago. We have about a hundred clients. 

We pretty much standardized it across our client base. We also provide some email services, Microsoft 365, and tech support to people who literally just work from their laptop from a Starbucks. They are the only clients who aren't using it. Any of our clients that have an office or home office have Untangle Firewall. We serve a lot of residential customers, and we've stuck the unlicensed version of the Untangle Firewall on their network. We manage those, and it's been great for the most part. The only way we would really increase that in our client base is by just increasing our client base.

I would really like phone support for emergencies. I'm not sure if there is one. I don't think I've ever had to actually utilize it if there was. Having a direct line of contact or support, especially being a partner, would definitely be an improvement, but their tech support has been able to resolve every issue that we've had with them.

Originally, we tested Untangle many years ago, but it wasn't a fantastic solution then. So, we didn't really utilize it and always stuck with pfSense, but over the past three years, we've been using, almost exclusively, Untangle devices for our clients.

Our clients were using a variety of solutions. They have been utilizing SonicWall. We have replaced a couple of WatchGuard firewalls. We've had people with pfSense, and we've had people with Cisco Meraki. We've seen most of the firewalls in the business, and I like Untangle.

It was straightforward. You can basically set up a demo device with the settings that you want, take the config file, and export those configs and policies to any new device you deploy. So, the initial setup is not that complex. It is very simple and straightforward because the user interface is very simple and straight. 

When you get to whatever you like and how you want to configure it, you just save it as a policy set, save the config file, and deploy it within minutes. We order the device, get the serial number, apply the serial number to our portal, and then apply the policies, and we're done.

One person can handle the deployment. As a matter of fact, the end-user can handle the deployment, as long as the tech just tells them where to plug it in. The end-user doesn't need to do anything. As soon as it's connected to the internet, as long as it's plugged into the right place on the network, the deployment takes minutes, and we manage them all from the command center.

I'm not a financial type of person, but I can say that configuring a pfSense firewall is a couple of hours per location, and managing other firewall solutions is definitely more costly and time-consuming from what I've seen previously. We've definitely saved time in deployment, and we have also saved time in management. We save time and money in a variety of ways. So, we have definitely seen an increase in ROI. In addition, the fact that we're able to just simply include it in our monthly costs for what we charge our clients makes it all the better.

Untangle is open-source software. So, you can get it for free. That has been a benefit, especially for the residential users because it is free. The license costs start at $25 a month for some additional features, including higher tiers of security intrusion prevention. The free version comes with intrusion detection, and then the license version has intrusion prevention. It also has some additional things for active directory connectors, etc.

It starts at $25 a month to cover 12 devices. Then it goes up from $25 to $50 a month for 12 to 25 devices. That's where it really doesn't scale out per site. If you have a site that has more than 50 devices on it, then Untangle quickly becomes cost prohibitive in comparison to several other competitors. They have a weird per-device licensing model, whereas most firewall vendors simply tell you that this is how many devices we expect you to cover and this is what your licensing costs. They don't tier it by the device. Firewalls have different costs and different licensing. So, in a way, it is the same, but Untangle is more upfront about it. They tell you that if you have X amount of devices, this is what your licensing cost is, whereas other firewall vendors tell you that if you're covering this amount of devices, you need this type of firewall that they make, and it's going to cost you this amount a month, which is going to be more, but the price comparison is definitely not favorable for Untangle once you go over 50 devices.

There is an additional cost of the hardware, which you can purchase upfront. You can pay for hardware as a service, or you can deploy it to your own hardware at no additional charge. We can deploy this for free, completely and utterly free and clear, just by simply running a VM and installing the free version of the software on it. So, there are literally no costs to it. The additional costs are basically just completely optional, except in the cases of industries where certain of these other security features are a requirement, but the only costs that you have to pay are the licensing costs. You can choose not to buy their hardware at all and just deploy it in a VM.

We evaluated pfSense, WatchGuard, and Sophos, and ultimately went with Untangle.

I would definitely advise going for z4 Plus. The base z4 is good if you're going with the free licensing. It is a little bit lower powered. So, it's only good for the free tier licensing or very small offices with only a couple of devices. z4 Plus has been fantastic. We can turn on every feature that Untangle has, and it runs right along for months at a time.

I would rate it a solid nine out of ten. It has been fantastic for the uses that we put it to, which are primarily small clients. It does its job, and it does it well. I've had almost no issues in the past three years of running them except for one, and I'm pretty sure it was the client that caused the issue.