If you are pricing a FortiGate, a Sophos Firewall or a SonicWall and wondering whether a small office or hotel needs one, here is how a managed MikroTik firewall compares - and when the appliance is still the better choice.
Fortinet, Sophos and SonicWall publish their firewalls the same way: a hardware appliance, plus a yearly security-services subscription that keeps features such as their threat intelligence, web filtering and sandboxing current. You (or your IT provider) then administer it through the vendor's console. That model suits organisations with an IT team and requirements that name a specific vendor.
iberry offers the other model: a managed service. The firewall runs on standard MikroTik RouterOS hardware, and iberry configures, monitors and changes it for you, for a one-time setup price and a yearly maintenance fee. There is no per-user licence and no separate subscription per feature.
Appliance: hardware plus a security-services subscription, renewed every year, sized by the vendor's model and tier. iberry: one-time plan (₹30,000 / ₹50,000 / ₹99,000 in India) plus ₹15,000 yearly maintenance.
Appliance: your team or your IT provider, through the vendor's console. iberry: we do, remotely; you ask for changes.
Both. iberry builds guest/staff/camera separation, WireGuard and IPsec VPN, and automatic multi-line failover on every site.
Appliance: the vendor's subscription filtering service. iberry: category and site blocking at the router plus DNS Hosted Security (₹9,000 a year).
Sandboxing, vendor threat-intelligence feeds and signature-based intrusion prevention are what the appliance subscriptions are built around. iberry does not sell those. If you need them, the appliance is the right choice.
Appliance features follow that vendor's hardware and licences. iberry's configuration runs on widely available MikroTik hardware, so replacing a device is a hardware purchase, not a new licence.
Choose a Fortinet, Sophos or SonicWall appliance if a customer, auditor or head office requires that vendor, if you need sandboxing or vendor threat feeds, or if your own IT team wants to administer the firewall day to day. We would rather tell you that than sell you the wrong thing.
Choose the managed approach if you are a small office, shop, clinic, school or hotel with no full-time IT staff, if the goal is solid separation, filtering, VPN and uptime at a predictable yearly cost, and if you would rather someone else keep the rules right.
A common reason to look for an alternative is the remote-access VPN. iberry sets up WireGuard for staff laptops and phones - clients exist for Windows, macOS, iOS, Android and Linux - and site-to-site tunnels between offices, with IPsec where the other end needs it. See corporate VPN.
For firewalling, network separation, VPN, failover and filtering, yes - when it is configured and maintained properly, which is what iberry's managed service is for. For sandboxing, vendor threat-intelligence feeds or a vendor named in a contract, a Fortinet appliance remains the better fit.
We can replace it with a managed MikroTik firewall and move your rules, VPNs and networks across, or leave it in place if it is the right tool and you have someone to run it. We assess first and recommend one.
In India, ₹30,000, ₹50,000 or ₹99,000 one-time depending on the site, plus ₹15,000 a year maintenance, and optionally ₹9,000 a year for DNS Hosted Security. Outside India, quoted per project.
Open-source firewalls such as pfSense and OPNsense are free to download, but someone still has to build, update and watch them. The cost of a firewall for a small business is mostly the looking after, which is the part iberry provides.
Send us the quote or the model you were offered and what you need it to do. We will tell you honestly whether the managed approach fits. Published firewall plans in India are ₹30,000, ₹50,000 and ₹99,000 one-time, each with ₹15,000 yearly maintenance; DNS Hosted Security is ₹9,000 a year. Outside India every project is quoted on its own, because the hardware is usually bought locally.
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