Netgate pfSense Reviews

While it is difficult for me to point to any one specific advantage of the solution in respect of the firewall, I do know that it has many benefits. For one, it is open source. 

The stability could be improved. Whenever there is an update, in spite of developments I may have made, I am required to make certain changes to the coding. 

I have been using pfSense for perhaps two or three years. 

The stability could be better. 

The solution seems to be scalable. 

The solution is easy to set up.

I develop the solution on behalf of my company. 

With my scant knowledge of networking and the firewall I would rate pfSense as an eight out of ten. 

This product supports multiple ISP's, so it's good for implementation.

It's made us more productive.

FTP was not allowed, and it didn't indicate during set up whether FTP was to be allowed or disabled.

I've used it for about one year.

The stability is good.

The stability is good.

The technical support is good.

It's free.

All the other features are good, and with it being free, it is very attractive to the users.

• Captive Portal 
• DHCP

pfSense made my life easier for controlling users and their bandwidth. My internet is not misused anymore.

RadiusServer needs some work done.

I've been using it for five years.

I've never had any problems.

Yes I did.

Since it's open source, the only support is available in public forums.

I used different routers, but because I wasn’t happy, I was trying different solutions and I found this one which was the most effective of all those I tried.

It was very straightforward.

I did it on my own.

It was free.

I looked at many hardware solutions.

Go ahead and just implement it.

• MAC Filtered DHCP and DNS
• Captive Portal
• VPN
• Proxy Server
• Proxy Filter

It has provided us with secure internet browsing and a strong monitoring ability.

Proxy filters are not supported for the blocking of HTTPS sites.

I've used it for two to three years.

No issues encountered yet.

No issues encountered yet.

No issues encountered yet.

Customer Service:

I have not gotten any support from the customer service center because I can get all the solutions on their web blogs.

Technical Support:

I think it is perfect.

I was using another product, but it didn't have a bandwidth controller and monitoring tool like this product does. I switched because I can find everything in one window.

Its installation setup & procedure is so simple that a layman could install it.

I installed it by myself and used Google for assistance.

It's positive.

I just downloaded the program from the website free of chard. The best thing is, this product can be installed on any machine.

No other options were evaluated.

It is recommended, as it is a stable product.

Performance, cost effective, scalable, customizable

After switching from Cisco, Juniper, Astaro and Microsoft network response improved and more control of packet (for me, pfpacket technology is better than packet filter.)

Graphic report implementation tool (now possible with extra software)

5+ years.

No, perfect scalability from 20 to 500 users

Cisco, Microsoft and when TMG progressively died it was necessary to switch to unix technology, many corporations require low budget and high performance.

The initial approach is very complex because of the multiple functions, but after a short learning curve it is able to handle the standard functions.

In my case, I buy network appliance from Lanner Inc. ltd (watchguard supplier) and deploy the image depending on the desired size and functionality required by the customer.

Identify the most suitable hardware for the required size.

Yes, Astaro and PaloAlto plus Juniper, but the renewal planes (AV, UTM, etc.) are very expensive.

We use pfSense to protect our customers using IPS and IDS.

We are a government agency and we manage the government network. 

We complete the setup and we are protecting our customers.

The most valuable feature is that it's robust.

In terms of resources, utilization assets, CPU utilization, and a lot of memory, it's very good. 

The concurrent users are perfect for us.

The router monitoring needs improvement when compared with Sonicwall.

I would like an API that can sync to SolarWinds because we use SolarWinds for our monitoring platform. It would be great to be able to do all of the monitoring from SolarWinds instead of logging into the application to monitor it. It would be a nice feature to have.

I have been using pfSense for less than two years.

In the last two weeks, we moved a few resources to the pfSense and it's been stable. 

When compared to SonicWall there were some issues but it could be that SonicWall was doing too much. It was doing almost everything. It was doing IDS, IPS, and contextual training. It may be that it was overwhelmed.

We were using the software base, and then we bought the hardware device. We moved 12 users onto it and we are monitoring it.

Based on the documentation it would not require much to scale up or upgrade. There is no doubt that it is scalable.

Most of the support is online.

We do a lot of reading, and if there is any support or suggestions we quickly do it. 

We have not contacted them directly.  

They have a lot of resources available on the internet that will guide you in finding your way around.

We use a few different firewalls. We use SonicWall and Huawei firewall along with pfSense.

The initial setup was straightforward. It was easy.

We did not use an integrator. I completed it with one of my colleagues.

Looking at what it does, I think that it is fairly priced.

When we compare to SonicWall, we feel that we are getting the best with pfSense.

Depending on what they want their firewall to do for them. If it is for intrusion detection, and intrusion prevention I would recommend this solution. 

In summary, this product is good but I would like to see resources utilization (cpu, hard disk) directly on SolarWinds. A one stop shop for monitoring on SolarWinds. It would be great!

I would rate pfSense a six out of ten.

On-premises

• Firewall
• State Table
• Network Address Translation (NAT)
• High Availability
• Multi-WAN
• Server Load Balancing
• Virtual Private Network (VPN)
• PPPoE Server
• Reporting and Monitoring Applications
• Dynamic DNS
• Captive Portal
• DHCP Server and Relay

The reporting and monitoring applications improve our organization.

Load balancing of multiple networks

3 Year

Compatibility Issues

None

None

Customer Service:

None

Technical Support:

Excellent

Yes

Simplest

Extraordinary

pfSense software has the flexibility to integrate into wide area on a worldwide range of hardware. Among all monitoring and firewalls application. I haven't see powerful tools like PfSense.

• Firewall
• DHCP
• VPN

The organization relies on pfSense for DHCP, and remote users may access it on a local network via VPN.

I was satisfied with the overall features of the product, considering the limited capacity of our hardware at the time. It's probable that an improvement can be made to the user friendliness of the interface.

I've used it for over three years.

I believe that the issue of stability that we encountered was linked to our hardware limitation. For example, we would need to soft reboot the system manually after a power failure to get the DHCP functioning again.

This is linked to our hardware limitation as well, however it has been working fine for company with 30-40 users.

Customer Service:

8/10.

Technical Support:

9/10,

It was done by external technical support.

It was implemented by a vendor who were 10/10.

I don't know the setup costs but the day-to-day maintenance is done by myself, and I occasionally need to engage the vendor for technical issues.

pfSense is good for a company that is looking for a solution with a reasonable cost for implementation.