Netgate pfSense Reviews

• Battery backup
• True processor power at low energy cost
• Expansion possibilities
• Low noise emission

We like it mostly for being able to use BSD compiled software inside it. It is flexible, fast, powerful and full of features, such as an easy proxy filter, and clustering along with an easy and well developed web based interface.

Kernel support for laptop features, USB/Firewire ethernet cards, and specially built in WLAN cards. If the WLAN functions work properly, pfSense makes a perfect "repeater" or controlled and robust accessed point with built in QoS and firewall. Wider support for 3G and 4G USB cards as backup networks would be nice too. It was impossible to get some USB stuff to work.

We've used it for two years, with an HP Elitebooks 8350 for battery backup.

No issues encountered.

I got terrible kernel crashes on HP laptops while trying to setup WLAN, but it worked better on Fujitsu ones.

It has worked as expected so far.

I have never needed it.

I have never used it.

We have mostly used Cisco products. Their products feels like we are back in the stoneage when compared to pfSense. We switched as we needed more power (as traffic, bandwidth and user accounts grew). pfSense was one good clear substitute, and Cisco is too expensive if you want real throughput power, and it was too hard to administrate when we compared it with pfSense. also, anyone can learn pfSense pretty fast because of the intuitive web interface), and there is never trouble with invalid licenses. The features like IPS (snort/suricata) are well developed and can be used for free or at a small cost for extra security. The most valuable of all though, is that we could recycle old hardware to make our perfect firewalls, reducing the hardware cost.

It was easy.

We implemented these ourselves.

It's hard to say. The setup goes pretty fast and, once you know the hardware to be used, it will work, so there was no significant amount of time there. The laptops used in this project were already recycled and had enough power for us to make a cluster and be happy with them, so it pretty much only cost us the price of some 3G modems and some USB network interfaces. Maybe not more than 200 Euros per machine.

We evaluated IPCop and m0n0wall. We took a vote on our team and pfSense won the deal.

If you are unsure, do a labtest before you implement it. If you are still stuck on the traditional "stoneage" products, you may get amazing results.

We are an MSP. We have some customers who have on-prem networks, and they want to have their networks protected by a firewall. They are quite small customers with 10 to 50 users. We use pfSense in order to protect our customers' network, to make some network automation, and especially to make VPNs to some remote branches to enable remote users to get access to the enterprise network.

It is deployed on a private cloud and on-prem.

My technicians find the pfSense's web interface very useful. It is very easy to use. 

pfSense is very reliable and stable. We like the OpenVPN clients that can be deployed using pfSense very much.

I'd like to find something in pfSense that is more specific to URL filtering. We have customers who would like to filter their web traffic. They would like to be able to say to their employees, "You can surf the web, but you cannot get access to Facebook or other social media," or "You can surf the web, but you're not allowed to gamble or watch porn on the web." My technicians say that doing this kind of stuff with pfSense nowadays is not easy. They can implement some filters using IP addresses but not by using the names of the domains and categories. So, we are not able to exclude some categories from the allowed traffic, such as porn, gambling, etc. To do that, we have to use another product and another web filter that uses DNS. I know that there are some third-party products that could work with pfSense, but I'd like the native pfSense solution to do that.

I have been using this solution for five years.

I would rate pfSense a nine out of 10. It is a very good product.

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.

We primarily use the solution for security. It's a firewall.

The solution is an excellent open-source product. It has a big community around it as well. Out of those few points, you'll come up to a situation whereby you can avoid the vendor lock-in. Since there is a big community, you can count on reliability. There are lots of installations and lots of people who understand how everything works. 

The solution offers excellent flexibility. You can either install pfSense just on a machine, on your local PC, or you can buy an appliance. You can even buy your own hardware and install it on your own. Of course, if you choose that route, you need to have a technical expert on your team. For us, as a software company, that's not a problem.

There are plugins you can add to the product if you want even more useability. You can even add more security functionality.

The initial setup is straightforward.

We did have a strange issue with an update at one point, however, that was resolved quickly.

If you want to take advantage of all of the solution's options, you need to have a bit of a technical background. It's not for a layperson.

You do get a good solution for free. However, the trade-off is you need to be technical to really take advantage of it.

The installation could potentially be faster.

I haven't been using the solution for very long at this point. It may be somewhere around three to five months. It hasn't been long.

The solution is very stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's excellent.

The scalability is excellent. We don't have any issues as far as that is concerned.

Prior to pfSense, we used Cisco.

The implementation is not complex. It's very straightforward to initiate. A company should have no problems with the process.

As an open-source solution, it is free to use as you see fit.

I didn't evaluate the solution against other more expensive commercial tools.

We are just customers and end-users.

The solution is an open-source platform. We are a software company and we like open-source. Lots of people say open-source means that you need to install it on your own. They will see that as a limitation, however, we see that as the other way around. 

I'd recommend the solution to other organizations and users. It's open-source, it's flexible, and has a strong community. You can use it in many different ways, either in a small installation, laptop, PC, or on a machine, or you can buy an appliance or you can even buy your own hardware and configure it in a different way. The software as such is free and you have a lot of options as to how you want to use it.

I'd rate the solution at a ten out of ten. It's been very good for us

We use the solution for blocking websites, banking, and malware.

I have found the most valuable features to be antivirus and malware protection.

I have been using the solution for approximately four months.

This solution is good for small businesses but it is not as stable as other competitors such as Fortinet.

We currently have approximately 45 people using the solution.

The support is good when comparing to other solutions.

We have used FortiGate in the past and they tend to be more stable, but lacking in other areas.

The installation was not too complicated. We did have some issues with the port forwarding,  some of the server application were not getting through the firewall but we managed to get it to work.

The whole network deployment took approximately three days.

We are using the open-source version which is free. We are testing the solution to see if we are going to go to the enterprise version which requires a license and is not free.

For those who want to implement this solution I would advise it is great for a small enterprise, it is best to get started without having any harm getting to their networks.

I rate pfSense an eight out of ten.

I primarily install and test the solution. I'm not an expert in the solution; I mainly put them in place.

The pricing is good.

I have a good understanding of the underlying firewall which I find to be easy to use and comprehend. Some of the terminologies were more familiar to me than they were when I first encountered Cisco.

The initial setup is pretty easy.

The solution has been stable. 

From what I can tell, the solution can scale. 

I can't speak to if there are missing features. I'm not that familiar with it. 

The critical issue there for us was the lack of FIPs compliance, however, I don't know if that's something that they would consider adjusting for.

The product is stable. There are no issues with bugs and glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

While it's my understanding that scaling wouldn't be a problem, I myself have never actually tried to do so. Therefore, I can't speak from personal experience. 

I've never dealt with technical support before. I can't speak to how helpful or responsive they are in terms of answering support-related queries. 

I also have an understanding Cisco, which is a bit harder to understand. This product is more straightforward. 

In terms of the initial setup, pfSense seems pretty easy. I'd say it's been a few years since we played with it and I don't really remember too much about it other than using it and thinking it was okay. It's just not listed as FIPS compliant for where we're at now in government, which is an issue. 

The solution doesn't come at a high cost. That makes it a very attractive option.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. I've been pretty satisfied with the product overall.

We are a customer and an end-user. We don't have any business relationship with the solution.

It has a very nice web interface, and it is very simple to use. The way policies are working is also good.

I have been using WireGuard VPN because it is a lot faster and more secure than an open VPN. However, in the latest version of pfSense, they have removed this feature, which is one of the main features that I need. They should include this feature.

I have been using this solution for probably ten years. As the head of IT, I have used pfSense for the French infrastructure for around ten years.

It is working fine for me. I never had any problem with this firewall.

I never had to contact their support because everything has been working fine.

I have a lot of experience with pfSense but not much with OPNsense. Both OPNsense and pfSense are very easy, but pfSense is a bit more friendly. pfSense is simple to use with a nice web interface. OPNsense is more tricky.

OPNsense has the remote access functionality, which is the main functionality that I need. OPNsense is very easy to set up and very easy to manage. It is also very fast.

Its initial setup is very easy. 

In France, we have less than five engineers. That's why we try to do everything by ourselves. We chose pfSense because it is user-friendly.

Its price is pretty fair.

If you don't need WireGuard VPN, pfSense is better because it is easier to use than OPNsense. It is a very good platform. Its web administration interface has been working fine.

I would rate pfSense an eight out of ten. A couple of months ago, I would have rated it a ten out of ten because of the WireGuard VPN feature.

I was working for a firm that has 70 employees. They are mostly working from home, so I needed a very well-structured VPN for remote working. We put it on Supermicro, and it worked fine, and it was above their needs.

I like the connectivity to the open VPN. It's very smooth. All the encryption in the open VPN is very good. The structure of the pfSense software works out very well. The PF work cuts and the snorts and whatever we put on the console for spyware and attack prevention seem to work very nicely. 

They can improve the dynamic of the input of IPs from outside. Determining the IPs that are outside would be another way to identifying potential threats. We can treat it or identify and then block it or determine the rules to work with that IPs from the outside and inside the network. 

I have been using pfSense for the past three years. 

Back in the day, I was using Fortinet, and it was very tricky to get it working without spending more money. pfSense is exactly what we paid for, and it's still working very well. We've been working with it for two or three years, and it's a very good solution, and I didn't have to spend any more money on it.

Cisco VSL and Fortinet are tricky when it comes to improving the firewall rules or creating rules above older rules. In pfSense, it's very logical. It's simple.

The initial setup is very linear and very smooth.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give pfSense a nine.