Netgate pfSense Reviews

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.

• 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

None

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.

8/10.

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.

• We only use our pfSense as a stateful packet inspection firewall. 

• We have around 10 VLAN interfaces with many allow/block policies, VIPs, and NATs. 
• Running on VMware as a virtual machine.

The main improvement was we were able to replace our old hardware-based firewall with a virtual machine having HA.

The ability to perform packet captures on the command line and via the GUI is useful for diagnosing problems.

• I would like to see multiple DNS servers running on individual interfaces. 

• It would be useful to manage firewall policies on a source interface and destination interface basis.

Our primary use case for this solution is Endpoint Advanced. I have set it up for the firewall and the open VPN connections.

It would be great to add more to security.

I know that pfSense has a lot of features, but I don't know how to configure and enable them. That is why I am looking into my support options. I am looking for better security and performance.

I have been using this solution for almost two years.

pfSense is scalable. Currently, we have almost 30 people using it in our company.

I'm currently struggling with deploying pfSense more extensively. Right now, we are not getting much support on their end. 

My opinion about pfSense's pricing is good. They are open source. 

We use this solution as our firewall, proxy, IDS, IPS, and VPN.

This solution has increased the level of security, given us more control, provided a deep insight into network traffic, and is a great VPN solution.

The most valuable features are the Proxy IPS and VPN.

We would like to see ready-made profiles to cover most users' needs. 

• Load balancer
• Multi-WAN

Network security and speed have both improved.

I've been using it since 2010. I have used both the free version (5/10) and as a gold member (9/10).

No issues encountered.

When they make an update available, the problem is that pfSense service packages are not updated, it's just the OS. The pfSense OS is stable, but if the service packages are not updated to their new version when the OS is updated, we can't use those features.

No issues encountered.

5/10.

5/10.

We used -

• Debian IPtables
• Squid
• I7 Patch

• Firewall rules 
• Modules, e.g. Squid

It was very useful for our DHCP network (guests) and web browsing filtering.

I think the product has improved greatly, so I actually don't know.

I've used it for one year.

No, it's very easy to deploy.

Absolutely not, as the product is stable like a rock.

No need to scale in.

We've used the community version.

We have WatchGuard Firewall and pfSense firewall.  They are used together and not as a substitution.

We just had some small problems with setting up the modules.  However, there was lots of documentation available online so there were no problems at all.

We implemented it in-house.

Well it was great as I didn't need to buy a new firewal..

Close to zero, because we've used an internal server for it.

No other options were evaluated.

It's a good product, and it really could be a valid firewall solution.