IT Central Station, the leading product review site for enterprise technology, announced the top firewalls of 2016. Fortinet FortiGate was top ranked based on peer reviews and crowdsourced buyer intent data from the IT Central Station community. Fortinet was followed by Cisco, pfSense, Sophos, and Palo Alto Networks as the overall best firewalls of the year.

Since the needs and requirements of firewall buyers can vary by company size, IT Central Station also provides rankings by company size, factoring in only the reviews and buyer intent behavior of relevant users. In both the small business category (fewer than 100 employees), and medium enterprise category (100-1,000 employees) Fortinet was the top ranked firewall of 2016. In the large enterprise category, the top ranked firewall of the year was Cisco ASA. The firewall with the highest average rating overall with a minimum of ten reviews was pfSense with an average rating of 8.6 out of 10. Among enterprise users, the highest rated firewall was Cisco Meraki MX.

The IT Central Station ranking is a composite score that includes average rating, number of reviews, and a buyer intent index including number of views, comparisons and follows by IT Central Station visitors. IT Central Station ranking factors and calculations are fully transparent and can be found below the rankings on ITCentralStation.com.

During the past year over two million professionals, including those from 96% of the Fortune 100, have used IT Central Station’s crowdsourced reviews in their technology buying process. All reviews are validated as authentic through IT Central Station's triple authentication process. IT Central Station’s reviews are known for their depth and quality, with an average of 420 words per review.

The full set of firewall rankings and reviews can be found at https://www.itcentralstation.com/categories/firewalls.