Smoothwall SWG vs. UniFi Cloud Gateways

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.

Incentivized

The Ubiquiti Wireless WAN solution can be used in both small and large corporate environments. However, as it has a rather high cost, its cost-benefit is greater in medium and large corporations, as small corporations may not take advantage of as many resources as the integration between Wi-Fi devices. In medium and large corporations, resources like this represent a very great facility in network management and in the availability of the connection in a transparent way at different points of the company, together with the security of isolated networks logically being made available by the same Wi-Fi device.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Automatically load balances based on band. Makes it simple to spread out users.
• Updates can be set to automatic or manual. Automatic uses rolling updates, happens every time we update the controller.
• Continually add new features and improvements with their FREE software upgrades

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Supply can be a problem, especially for new products. We have had to sometimes wait for months for supply to come in.
• No phone support. Only email/chat. can be frustrating sometimes just texting someone, but have not had to contact them very often.

Incentivized

The combination of performance, range, low-power use, and manageability made it ideal for us.

We have not needed to contact support, except to replace one device that was damaged in shipping. The company immediately issued an RMA without delay, and we had our replacement product within a week

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.

Incentivized

Prior to this, we used Cisco Meraki wireless access points, which did not allow for centralized control, therefore several access points shared the same SSID. Because the client's movement from one device to another was not as seamless and reliable as it is with the current Ubiquiti solution, this shift cost both time and stability during configuration.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Huge cost savings. Buy it once and you are done, no annual renewals.
• Extremely reliable and scalable. We went from 0 to 900 Chromebooks in 2 years.
• Very little maintenance, set it and forget it. Allows us to focus on other tasks.

Incentivized