Netgate pfSense Reviews

I use it as a firewall and also as a router because you can address what you want to do with it. It can do network advanced translation (NAT).

It is sitting on my own server. It is on a remote server on a private network.

It is very simple to use. I'm working faster now. I don't have to configure a switch and sync some VLANs on the switch. I can concentrate more on my work because I know that pfSense is guarding my network. It improves my workflow a lot. 

The plugins or add-ons are most valuable. Sometimes, they are free of charge, and sometimes, you have to pay for them, but you can purchase or download very valuable plugins or add-ons to perform internal testing of your network and simulate a denial-of-service attack or whichever attack you want to simulate. You can also remote and monitor your network and see where the gap is. Did you forget a printer port? Most attacks at the moment are happening through printers, and they can tell you immediately that you forgot to close the port of the printer. There are more than one million printers that are in danger, and everybody knows that hackers are using them to enter the network. So, you can download plugins to protect your network.

It is not only a firewall; it can also do some routing or network advanced translation (NAT), which makes it very powerful.

It is very simple to use. As long as you understand the basics or fundamentals of networking, you can manage everything very quickly with it.

The web is evolving every day. So, the product should be constantly improved with more regular updates. Things are constantly changing. There are obsolete protocols, and then there are new protocols. For my own use, it is not an issue, but for somebody who is more at the forefront of internet browsing, it could be a problem.

There could be a way to remote to it through a mobile app. You can always browse through your browser on your mobile phone or tablet, but it would be good to have a dedicated app. I understand that iOS and Android developers are expensive, but there should be a mobile app.

I have been using this solution since May.

It is very stable as long as you don't change the winning theme. When it is working, leave it working. My rule number one is one computer, one function. So, pfSense does that one function, and I don't try to use it for anything else. I could do some File Transfer Protocol or things like that, but it is not made for them. I don't restart it and move it. I only do the security updates and change the username and password very often.

I don't require much scalability. It is fine for a small-scale company with about 30 devices, such as printers, computers, etc. I'm only working with a few people, and I don't have any traffic problems, but a company with 50 or 60 users could have problems with it. Currently, there are four to five users, and I'm providing multimedia services to four to five people. 

It is being used extensively. Sometimes, its usage is 50 times a day, and sometimes, there is no usage. I don't work on it on a daily basis. It also depends on the project I'm working on. We have plans to increase its usage.

Their support is good.

I didn't use any other solution previously. I didn't have a need for it. Only in May, I had the need to deploy my own service.

It is easy to set up if you understand the protocols. If you understand the theory of what is a firewall and what is a router, its initial setup is straightforward.

Its deployment took one week. The strategy was simple. It involved blocking certain traffic, allowing certain traffic, and making ACL or a list of undesired operations such as cookies so that if it is impossible to sniff, and there is complete security. If someone is trying to enter, I immediately get a message on my phone, whether I am in the county or abroad. I immediately get a message saying that somebody is trying to enter, and I am able to counterattack immediately. That's a big advantage of it.

I did it on my own with the advice of some of my friends who have much deeper knowledge than me. It is also very well-documented on the web, and there is a big community.

I am also taking care of its maintenance. I don't have any maintenance except that sometimes, the server on which this solution is implemented has issues. Its maintenance mainly involves regularly checking the systems.

There is a big return on investment because FortiGate is 60 to 70 times more expensive, which could be a big problem for me. It is more expensive than my car. I have a small budget and a small car.

It is about €1,000. It is a one-time payment. I do not have a monthly or yearly subscription. I don't subscribe to any subscription because I hate cloud services.

There are no additional costs.

I would advise others to try it and see if it is good for them. It is a very good product for me, but that might not be the case for other users. There are so many solutions, but I'm really happy with it. For my scale, it is good. If you are Amazon or a company with one million connections every minute, don't ever use this. It is not made for that. It is perfect for small-scale networks.

I would rate it a nine out of 10. It needs more regular updates, so I can't rate it a 10, but it is very easy to use, stable, and solid. 

Our main business is for WiFi networks. Customers also ask us for simple firewalls, and we use pfSense to add a firewall to provide the complete solution. We are working with the latest version of pfSense.

One of the advantages of pfSense is that it is very easy to work with. It is a very good open-source solution, and it works really well.

pfSense provides a complete package. For some features, it could be the first solution in the world. It is a very good alternative in the market for a firewall solution. You don't need to go to Cisco or other brands with expensive firewalls. pfSense also allows us to offer some support services.

There is more demand for UTMs than a simple firewall. pfSense should support real-time features for handling the latest viruses and threats. It should support real-time checks and real-time status of threats. Some other vendors, such as Fortinet, already offer this type of capability. Such capability will be good for bringing pfSense at the same level as other solutions. 

I have been using pfSense for about four or five months.

It is stable.

It is easily scalable. It is more of a hardware thing than a software thing.

It is easy to deploy. Our real deployments are for WiFi networks, and then we add one or two firewalls to protect the network. For a small network, it can take one week. For a more complex network, it could be two or three months. We have a few upcoming projects which would require severe thousand firewalls, and it would take us more than a year.

It is open source.

I would recommend pfSense, but it depends on the requirements. There could be other vendors who offer more services than pfSense. For example, Fortinet is a very good brand, and it offers services in a different way. Fortinet also offers more services, but it is very expensive. If you don't need some specific services, pfSense is an excellent solution.

I would rate pfSense a nine out of ten.

I use the product for many enterprise clients, including building construction, government, and education.

The documentation is very good.

The pricing is okay. It's not too expensive.

The integration capabilities are great. The product can integrate well with Check Point and Fortinet. They make it a very easy process.

It's very good at defending our company.

It would be ideal if the solution could integrate with Snort and OpenVPN.

The technical support needs to be improved.

I've been using the solution for ten years at this point.

The technical support is not great. It's very slow. Sometimes it will take four days in order to connect with them, which is actually a decent timeframe for them. 

Their documentation, however, is pretty good.

The initial setup is not complex. It's pretty straightforward. The onboarding process is pretty good. They make everything very, very easy. People shouldn't have any issues with implementation.

We've found the pricing to be very fair. It's actually pretty low. The licensing is very inexpensive.

We looked at Fortinet and CheckPoint in relation to how they work with Linux.

In the case of Fortinet, the content filter is a URL content filter. It's very different and it's complex to use.

We're a pfSense partner.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten. It's been very good to work with.

I would recommend the solution. pfSense is superior in terms of defending against attacks.

The solution pretty much is our only firewall security at the moment. It handles the integration with our active directory and makes sure that all communications are channeled through a secure network.

The solution is very robust.

The solution can be complex. It needs a bigger team with more coding skills than what we have at our disposal. With our skillsets, we're facing a lot of limitations. We're a team of four who handles 12 independent companies under a larger umbrella. Our workload is already quite high. We need solutions that lessen it, not enhance it.

The solution requires a lot of administration.

The solution would work better for us if the user interface had some kind of unifying feature that didn't just do firewalls. Sophos, for example, offers so much more. You get one license and you're good to go. Everything's handled from the anti-virus to the network and the traffic and monitoring. Sophos is really user friendly and easy to master. It's easy to get rules put in. pfSense offers none of these things beyond just the firewall capabilities. 

We've been using pfSense as of early last year, around about February 2019. It's been just over a year.

We have about 350 people at our organization that this solution covers.

Although the solution offers a lot of documentation, has a large knowledge base, and has a support forum, when it comes to actually contacting technical support directly, we didn't have access to that level of attention. Everything, therefore, was really on the team. We had to figure out how to troubleshoot on our own and tried to use documentation to guide us.

We originally used this solution way back in 2011. We used it for about 18 months. Then we then migrated on to a system called Kerio Control. We realized that we needed something a little bit more robust than Kerio Control. So we then moved back to pfSense as of last year.

The deployment didn't take too long. I have experience in pfSense, as does my junior. We were able to deploy it within a couple of hours - at least for what we wanted it to do off the bat.

Basically, you need to get all the rules together. We were able to do that within a couple of hours. Obviously, I must say, if we wanted to do a lot more, it would take us quite some time. Unfortunately, we're quite a small team, so we've got quite a lot on our plate and we just honestly did not have the time to get really granular. 

That's the reason why we're moving to something a little bit more user friendly for our size.

We're just users of the product. We're not consultants or resellers.

It's your basic firewall setup. However, when we looked at Sophos, we found that Sophos offered a lot more as it's a fully unified solution and had a firewall, as well as anti-virus and network monitoring capabilities.

This solution really gives us a greater extensive array of modules or features than we would not necessarily see in managing the system as administrators. The solution is quite extensive in that there was a lot of material that we had to read about. It just was not user-friendly for the team. We needed a solution that can handle itself without our intervention.

I'd rate the solution five out of ten.

We use pfSense as our firewall. 

We install it for clients that don't have a network available or the network is not ready for phone deployments. We're a phone company. We use pfSense to connect to the router and normally we connect clients to client VPNs, and then from there, we can have access to the internal network so that we can see all of the files.

We generally use it because it's cheap. When we need something more robust we use Barracuda and Sony Wireless Routers. For certain clients, we use pfSense because it's compatible with the VoIP platform.

I would like to see SD1 integration into the software. That would be fantastic.

The solution is pretty stable, that's why we use it. There aren't any problems.

The scalability is fine. If you need to have a bigger client or something like that, it's simple. You do a backup and then you restore into a new appliance and go from there. 

We provide technical support for our clients so we don't use a third party company for the support, we do the support in-house.

We also use MikroTik, Barracuda, and StoneWall.

The initial setup is fairly simple, not complex. We can get the deployment done in around half an hour. 

We deploy pfSense for our clients. We have one technician maintaining the whole thing.

Our return on investment is fast. We see a return on investment from day one, it's a fairly cheap router.

Any network engineer will understand how this solution works. It's not so complex to understand and be familiar with. It will require a certain level of networking knowledge to use it but we're at an enterprise level and we're a small-medium business and it works.

I would rate it a nine out of ten. 

I stood up pfSense in a Large Telecom providers Lab environment for their next generation products. I was able to achieve 10G throughput (about 9.1 true throughput as tested over 4 days solid), and only hit a max of 20% CPU utilization on a DL380 G7. This server also had Suricata (in IPS mode and a heavy ruleset), as well as pfBlocker running.

I use pfSense because it gives me the flexibility to greatly expand basic firewall features. It's open source (and free - as in beer and speech), but also has commercial support. This can be run on any commodity hardware on the market (I've ran it on AMD and Intel - even Atom, processors) and throughput is excellent, even with lower speed CPUs and less RAM.

The GUI. There are TONS of plugins for pfSense, as such, if a user wants to add quite a bit of functionality, the GUI will feel a little congested.

A little... BUT, this was contributed to a failing Arista switch that would do a coredump and reboot. The pfSense installation at high speeds failed over perfectly though.

No - in our high-speed tests (10G), we were not able to push the CPU over 20% utilization.

I didn't really need any technical support. But was in contact with the Developers of pfSense as we were starting to work with them for an NFV setup.

Fortinet, SourceFire, etc.... the cost... oh the cost! Why pay these guys when I can use pfSense for free AND only pay for support when and if I need it?

Very straight forward. If anyone has ever installed any kind of OS or set up a firewall, it will be a piece of cake.

Open Source - just download! If you need support, it's available.

Fortinet, SourceFire.

It's an amazing product. There really are few issues with pfSense.

I use the product to test firewalls and VPN solutions.

We could use the solution to connect with the firewalls remotely for security.

The VPN features are the most valuable. The product’s documentation is good.

The solution’s interface must be improved.

I have been using the solution for one year. I am using the latest version of the solution.

I rate the solution’s stability a ten out of ten.

I rate the tool’s scalability a ten out of ten.

The initial installation is easy.

The product is cheap.

Initially, the product was difficult. It gets easier with use. It was a good investment. I would recommend the solution to others. Overall, I rate the product an eight out of ten.

We are using pfSense as a personal firewall for our systems and network protection.

The solution is very easy to use and configure.

I have been using pfSense for approximately five years.

The solution is stable.

I am only using the solution for personal use and have not tried to scale it.

I have not been in contact with the technical support because everything has been easy with the solution and there is clear documentation available.

I have used other firewalls, such as Cisco and Netgate.

The initial setup is very simple and the configuration is user-friendly. It took me one day for the whole process.

I did the implementation of pfSense myself. The solution does not require much maintenance, we require sometimes to reboot the system.

I am using the community version of the solution and it is priced well. There is a cost of learning how to use the solution, if it was free it would be better.

A good firewall has to be easy to install, configure, use, and fit the use case. This solution for my usage is very good.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate pfSense a nine out of ten.