Netgate pfSense Reviews

I primarily use it for hybrid home/business power usage at a very small scale. It is both home and business because of working from home. pfSense is serving us as the main routing firewall and network configuration tool. It is the front-end brain for everything in our mixed environment.

pfSense allows me to manage both home needs and business needs and keep them relatively separate or at least appropriately separate. A key feature was to be able to use a small-scale device. I am using Netgate SG-1100, which is built to run pfSense on an RM platform. It has low power consumption, and it is economical. I did not need massive amounts of compute power, but I did need the feature set that typically, you can only get in enterprise-grade product lines such as Cisco.

pfSense is extremely flexible. The areas where I find it very flexible are the sheer number of configuration tools that are available and the extra packages that can be used to augment the core functionality. Even within the core functionality, it is capable of adapting to a massive number of different scenarios and network environments and needs. You can adapt to the needs of your network environment to the outside with ISP and internal needs. You can accomplish what you want to achieve internally with the product. It seems to have pretty much everything under the sun laid out.

It is pretty easy to add features to pfSense and configure them. If I am adding something for the first time, the web GUI is the most helpful tool because the layout is pretty logical in terms of how the forms are organized and fields are named and described. There are help callouts, and, of course, documentation. I have always found the official documentation to be helpful, but it is not uncommon to do some forum searching and read the discussions. Other people might be following a workflow that does not fit quite cleanly in there, but they made it match. Typically, it is pretty easy. Some of the things that I have done with pfSense are not inherently easy processes, but I feel that pfSense has made them much easier than they would be on different platforms.

I was able to realize its benefits immediately. I am an IT professional, but my use of pfSense is not as an IT professional. It is more like a solo entrepreneur for my wife and her business. When I look at the network administration that I am doing here, it says a homeowner and a business co-owner. IT and networking are not the kinds of things I want to dominate my time. It should not be dominating my time spent. From that standpoint, I was able to get the baseline configuration set up so quickly when I first set it up about seven years ago. I definitely felt a big value-add with the configuration backup and restore process. The first time I broke something on pfSense, I was able to revert my last configuration very quickly. That was a big win.

In terms of pfSense helping to prevent data loss, auto configuration backup is probably the number one feature. When I think about data loss in pfSense, I would mostly be concerned with losing the configuration itself. Having my own backups but also having Netgate backups available for me to pull down helps. I just have to make sure I keep the encryption password, and we are good to go. That is a big win.

I use pfSense Plus. I am pretty sure that auto configuration backup is a Plus feature. I am on my second generation of official Netgear appliance, so my experience with the Community Edition is limited. I am not sure if this feature is available to others, but for minimizing downtime, having the auto configuration backup is a big one. There is a restore option for quick reverts if a change did not go quite well. They are incremental, so reverting to whatever snapshot or revision version I need to revert to is very easy.

pfSense does not give a single pane of glass management, but I also would not expect that because it is doing so much and is capable of doing so much. In my environment, it is managing so many different aspects of the whole Netgate, but there is not a single pane. I use the logs a lot, but I have to look through individual logs. I am not aware of any log aggregation and analysis components that are already baked into pfSense. As I understand it, I need to ship my pfSense logs into another system to do a higher-level analysis and insight querying. An area that I am interested in working on is effective outbound traffic filtering. It is on our priority list because it is a tricky one. You do not want to let any outbound traffic go, but you also need to be careful how you are filtering outbound traffic so that you do not break things you are relying on for your functionality. A lot of people use a web proxy, but that only catches web traffic. With smart home devices and business stuff going on, you have to pay attention to it. I am very interested in being able to analyze the traffic logs that are being captured by pfSense with an IO, the outbound traffic, and the existing and potential firewall rules that I have in place for those. My current efforts have been focused on doing so with a different product because I do not believe that pfSense delivers that. I honestly did not expect that it would.

iperf helps with performance. We are able to do iperf bandwidth tests as both client and server to various endpoints and turn on a quick listener and see what is going on with who can get where fast. The diagnostic menu list is probably the longest one in there. That is a good sign because it just means that they have got a lot of tools available for me to use if something is not quite working right. If I want to improve performance, I have to take a measurement and take a look at what is going on currently and compare that to what I would expect to see. There is a wide variety of toolsets. I am not asking for this because it is not the kind of system that I would want to run, but there is no troubleshooting or performance improvement wizard that kind of walks you in a logical step. I know that there is one initial configuration wizard that is meant to get people going quickly for the first time and in a fairly simple setup, but even that was not a great value to me because I want to get quickly into more advanced configurations. It has what I expect for performance tuning.

Being able to configure VLANs on such a small device is one of the key unique features that made it attractive to me.

pfSense is very flexible, but my only drawback in terms of flexibility is that it is web GUI-driven. I know that there are some shell interfaces, but it is not a very heavily developed API when it comes to automation or configuration-as-code management. I would love to see that developed in the future so that I am able to manage my network configuration in YAML and TOML text format, have those changes applied in a source code environment, and have those changes read into an API that could then drive the configuration rather than have always having to use the web GUI just to make some layout changes. Web GUI has its advantages, but there are times when being pinned into that workflow is less efficient.

They should support the idea of configuration management as code from source code and provide a more robust API for managing the pfSense configuration. I know that with the web GUI, everything is dumped into an XML file. That is how it is backed up, and that is how it is imported. It is machine-readable and all that, but it is not necessarily a modern data format that would be used with API typically. They are maybe thinking of moving to REST API and SQLite backend. I do not know what they have in mind. I do not really care how they do it, but I would love to have the ability to interact with my configuration and make incremental changes via source code and utilize the API to implement those changes and roll them back with configuration as code as a strategy for managing my pfSense.

It has been about seven years.

The device is rock solid. I have not had any hardware concerns or issues. I do not have to reboot it. If I am having some kind of network issue, I do not have to restart my pfSense. Why I wanted the free BSP base is that I know that the core layer is rock solid. It is possible that something could happen where I would need to restart, but it almost never does.

It may have been with the older device for which I have worked with them twice. I opened a ticket to get the download link for recovery firmware on the SG-1000, and they gave it to me. That was very easy. That was fine. They responded quickly, no big deal. I appreciate it. I did not really need support. It was something that I could not get directly from the website myself.

I am not sure, but when I bought SG-1000, I might have had to send it back. They sent a replacement. It was less than a year since I had it. I still had a full warranty on the hardware. At some point, everything froze, and all functionality completely stopped. I tried the power cycle, and it would not even boot anymore. They did the serial console connection, and it literally was not even booting. They opened up a case and verified the same symptoms that I described. They replaced the board and sent it back to me, and it worked. It was solid from that point for five years that I continued to use it. After that, I upgraded it. Every once in a while you get bad hardware, but I was glad I could just send it back. The biggest fear I have, and probably the only reason I still have the old one lying around is that if something were to happen to this hardware and I had to send it back for support, I need to be able to keep my network running in the meantime. Even as a home and home business user, you start to creep into that space where you start to think that this is critical. How do you get by without the Internet? I know that I could get Internet back up, and I could plug in any off-the-shelf routers lying around and get basic Internet service back up, but the question is how much work would I have to put in to restore other services that pfSense is performing. I recognize that I did not invest in a high availability solution for my home and home business, so that is just a risk that I have to take.

I would rate their support a ten out of ten. There is nothing difficult about it.

Prior to my first pfSense appliance, back in 2017, I was running DD-WRT, which is not a commercial alternative. It is an open-source project that does not even have a paid or commercially supported version. It is meant to be flashed onto OEM hardware as a replacement for their firmware. pfSense can be used like that, but Netgate is doing something different with the commercial support and building the appliances and all that. In terms of the baseline functionality, DD-WRT is very similar.

In terms of comparison, pfSense is much more robust. It is a comprehensive solution for networking needs that bridges the gap between a shelf router and building a full enterprise stack, which would be overkill. Most small businesses and home users would not want to do that, make that kind of investment, and keep that kind of compute running all the time. pfSense lands right in that sweet spot. I know that OPNsense and a few other software products are out there. There are some Linux-based ones. I am definitely a fan of pfSense being built on free BSD. That gives me greater peace of mind with the networking stack and everything. I am a Linux guy too, but when it comes to core services, I prefer free BSD. If I have to, I might just go with the vanilla, free BSD system and build it out with automation from scratch, but pfSense does all that for me. I do not have to do all that initial work. They have got the configuration and tuning done already.

If you have general networking knowledge and understand the terminology, it is very easy. It depends on how detailed or how extensive is your configuration and what is the target use case. Are you using a VPN? One of the features I use is OpenVPN.

I go through the box. I have a single WAN connection. I have half a dozen VLANs configured. I have a VPN remote access interface configured. I have got DHCP servers. I also have IPv6 configured. I have extra configurations for each interface that need to be considered, including the VLAN interfaces. There are also firewall rules.

You can start with the baseline, and you can get the thing up and connected to the Internet easily within five to ten minutes. Once you start doing your internal configurations and firewall rules, it scales pretty quickly. With a couple of VLANs, like I have, you spend another half hour to get the VLAN to spec out. With OpenVPN, you have to work on certification generation and certificate matching and exporting. Configuring the client's side tends to be time-consuming. If you have four clients, it could take another hour to three, and then there are firewall rules. It depends on how you write them. If you write your rules well, you do not need to have so many of them. It also depends on how you configure your space. I have a lot of interfaces and a lot of rules. With a good, clear plan and no guessing and backpedaling, you could probably redeploy what I did in three to four hours, but it would actually take longer because of mistakes, troubleshooting, and all that.

In terms of maintenance, I certainly keep up with updates from upstream and make sure that I am aware of any software updates that I need to install. I like to stay updated with patches and all that. That was the main reason I finally upgraded from SG-1000. It was no longer getting the updates. There is always a bit of extra maintenance. It is not because pfSense demands maintenance. It is because the environment demands continual maintenance and monitoring. Paying attention to logs is a healthy practice.

I always make updates via pfSense whenever I am making updates in the environment for adding new DHCP reservations for various hosts in the environment and other things like that. I moved my local DNS services from pfSense because I had to go into the web GUI and clumsily add in new host entries. It was getting burdensome. I just wanted to be able to do this in a text file like I could on a Linux server. You just add your entry to the host file and you are done. I moved to DNS services on the Pi-hole software. Pi-hole is a partial competitor because it does not do everything pfSense does, but it can do some of the things. It focuses on ad blocking and filtering as well as providing local DNS resolution. A nice thing with Pi-hole is that you can literally open up a text file and add your entries there, and they just start working. You do not have to move from a terminal-based workflow to get that change made. Clicking through a web browser is not my favorite. It is a disruption to a workflow. So, maintenance is directed by requirements in the environment.

I buy the appliance and accept whatever comes with it, but I am not bought into paid support. When it comes to the pricing of the appliances, they are pretty competitive. The price is pretty competitive.

I just bought a Netgate SG-1100. Within the past year, I upgraded my Netgate SG-1000 from 2017 to Netgate SG-1100. I looked at some of the higher-spec products, but they started to get pricier. For example, Netgate 2100 was a consideration. The difference between the 1100 and 2100 is double. I looked at the specs of 2100 and what it could deliver. I did not need all the extra specs. I do not need to perform at that level although it might be nice to have some extra ports on my box. I then looked at 1100. I could get by with those specs. It was an improvement over the tiny SG-1000 that I was running, so it was a win, but the question always is whether there is something competitive and similar that I can build for less money and whether it would deliver the same value. You can get these Small Form Factor PCs. You can get ARM systems and x86 systems and similar form factors. You can get them with multiple NICs already installed. This is more or less your hardware with no support. You get a warranty on the hardware, but they are not selling you the software. You put whatever you want on it and build your system. You can install pfSense CE on that or build your own router on a device like that. Why I chose to buy it from Netgate was the peace of mind of the full stack support because it is probably the most critical portion of my entire home network. I decided to invest a little bit more and trust somebody else a little bit more to have my back. Peace of mind comes from having bought the official appliance. It has a very reasonable and competitive price model.

In terms of the total cost of ownership, you have the hardware price. You are combining the price of any hardware support contracts that you may or may not be paying for and somehow estimating the administrative time that is required to actually manage the system itself and billing somehow for that appropriately. That is a tough one because that is where there is a gray area of home business usage. Aside from that gray area, the investment rolls off very quickly. I can recoup this investment within a year.

I would rate pfSense a nine out of ten. It is delivering on my needs. There is little room for improvement. They can just close the gap. You always want to keep closing that gap when it comes to usability, inconvenience, and meeting the workflow, but it is definitely delivering to my expectations very well.

I use pfSense at home, and my friends and family use it in their homes. I'm also the IT solutions administrator for a council of governance organizations, and I use it for them. I use pfSense Plus at home and the community edition at some of my friends and family's houses.

I pfSense Plus at home and use the community edition at my friends and family's houses. I have used the community edition multiple times in labs, but I use pfSense Plus for all of my enterprise applications.

I started seeing the benefits when I began playing with it at home 10 years ago. It was an immediate success when I put it in enterprise locations because it was much cheaper than WatchGuard. I was familiar with pfSense, so I quickly trained my staff on it. They know how to operate everything well in pfSense.

With pfSense, you can do a failover. I have used that before, and I see it as a benefit, but there are some drawbacks. You have to use multiple external IP addresses to set it up, but it works well. However, I don't use the failover anymore because of the price. You can have two of these things on the shelf, and in the event of a failure, you can get another one up within five minutes by throwing it on there, configuring it, and plugging it in. That's my failover plan for all my main locations.

PfSense's visibility enables me to make data-driven decisions. I love the way they do geoblocking. You can see where you're improving. The logging ability is diagnostic. You can see all kinds of data. For example, when I make a new rule, Immediately know what's going through that rule. That visibility is very helpful in knowing immediately if my rules are being applied correctly. 

The most valuable feature of pfSense is that it's a stateful firewall. I also like the way the rules are implemented on the firewall. It makes things much easier to see at a glance. 

PfSense is the most flexible device I've ever used. It's open-source software. I've used all the big names, including Palo Alto, WatchGuard, and Sophos. In terms of dependability, this is the best of them. 

It's simple to add and configure features and easier than some of the big competitors like WatchGuard. The front dashboard on pfSense is very customizable. You can get it at first glance. Everything you need to do is in that single box. It shows you if your LAN and interfaces are up. You can see what kind of traffic is going across each interface because they give you a traffic graph that you can do for each interface. 

You can see if your gateway is up and precisely how much data passes through each interface. I like how you can get direct visibility over your IP address updates. If you're not running a static IP address, there's another cool thing on the front page where it shows when the dynamic DNS updates. The way you can customize that dashboard is cool. I haven't seen that with other firewalls, and pfSense gives you good visibility at first glance.

I don't think pfSense's web filtering solution is the best, so I don't use it for that purpose. They could add a little better web filtering solution to pfSense. They have solutions in place, like SquidGuard, but they aren't very good. 

Another feature about pfSense I would improve is adding a single pane of glass management for multiple units I manage across the municipal district. I would love to manage all those devices through one single pane of glass, but that's not a deal breaker for me.

We have used pfSense for around 10 years.

I rate pfSense 10 out of 10 for stability. I've never had a Netgate system fail on me.

The scalability of pfSense is great. It costs very little to expand to multiple systems across multiple locations. It'd be better if they had a mass edit platform where you're running multiple systems. I've heard quite a few people in the community talking about that. I heard someone in France was developing a dashboard that gives you visibility across multiple boxes, but the cost of deployment is very cheap. It's easy to put boxes out there and write rules for them. 

I rate Netgate support 10 out of 10. Most of the tech people I have contacted seem to know exactly what they're doing. They've got, like, 10 people named Chris working support. Every Chris that I've ever spoken to has been spot on. Every once in a while, if I call after hours or something, I might get someone who isn't as adept at it, but they quickly escalate it to someone who can fix the issue. 

Positive

I have used Palo Alto, WatchGuard, and Sophos, and all the major competitors, but I would compare pfSense to WatchGuard, the one I have the most experience with. In my type of environment, pfSense wins hands down over WatchGuard because it's a stateful firewall. One thing I've hated about WatchGuard is that it's not a stateful firewall. It's rules in and rules out. You end up getting thousands of rules over a four or five-year period. PfSense enables you to put notes on your rules. 

If you have a question about a rule, you can read the note you made when you made that rule. Having the ability to document your rules in the dashboard has been a game-changer for me. After you have used a stateful firewall, it's hard to go back because it's much harder to make rules on both sides. 

Deploying pfSense is as easy as any other system. It helps that pfSense has a massive user community and some great YouTubers, so you can go to YouTube University and become a professional with pfSense quickly. You can learn to do some complicated edits and set up complex VPNs. It takes only 20 minutes from start to finish. For maintenance, you only need to update it when the updates come out and change the configuration of your rules as needed. 

PfSense offers huge savings. The price is the lowest in the business. The only thing you can use in place of pfSense is a fork like OPNsense. I'm more familiar with pfSense, so I never got on the OPNsense bandwagon. 

I rate Netgate pfSense 10 out of 10.

We use it as a firewall. I've got a few deployed at different customer sites. All of them use OpenVPN for VPN software.

We really started out with general-purpose firewalls, and I used a different firewall. I've used SonicWall in the past and one of the other firewalls had a yearly subscription fee if you want to protect from different sorts of security threats. pfSense uses open software, so you don't have to pay a security fee for that.

The dashboard is pretty good. It lets you control different things. It also has widgets, and you're able to control which sockets are open or not, and you're able to have some open software that allows you to do geofencing. You can restrict the ability to access certain countries.

It's been flexible enough for everything that we've needed to do with it. I have a small operation, so we don't have some of the requirements that a larger one would have. 

Since it's open software, there are typically open modules that you can add. The firewall software also has a menu option that allows you to download different new features. For instance, there's a piece of software called Notes that allows you to make some notes, so you can go into your firewall and look up configuration notes that were written there in the past. There's backup software, so there's another piece of software that allows you to back up the configuration to a file or a PC connected to the firewall. If you have a sufficiently bad power outage, you can lose your configuration. However, it has some features that allow you to track suspicious access to a device. You get a record of intrusion. You still need to interpret it yourself. However, you are alerted to potential hacks.

We began to see the value immediately. It made a big made a big difference not to have to pay that annual fee. There was some learning curve involved. I like to learn new things. 

We do not have a single pane of glass management. It would be nice to have. There are some firewalls that let you have cloud-based management like software as a service. pfSense doesn't allow you to have a central place where you can check everything. I have to remote into local networks and then pull up an individual dashboard.

I've been using the solution for three and a half years.

The stability is good. I haven't had any issues with the firewall crashing spontaneously. What I have seen is, if you have a power glitch, it will go up and down. We have battery backup so that those power glitches don't happen. However, if it does, that can damage the memory storage device inside the firewall and then you have to reload it. 

The quality has been very good. If I had paid support, it would be faster. When you get a new firewall, you get 30 days of telephone support for the device while you are initially configuring it. After that, you have email support. You can pay for support every year. However, I work for a lot of non-profits that do not have big budgets. 

Positive

We've had SonicWall or WatchGuard in the past, among others. They had less flexibility and you did have to pay an annual fee.

The initial setup was maybe 50% more difficult than I thought it would be. That said, it wasn't too bad. There are good instructional videos on the internet and the help documentation that Netgate provides is good too. They also have good technical support. The free level of technical support is an email ticket system. If you have a problem, you can raise a ticket, and then it gets solved, maybe not right away, but eventually. It might take a day or two to get solved.

The first time it was deployed, it probably took a day - maybe 12 hours. After that, it takes anywhere from a couple of hours to up to five hours to fully load a firewall with all the different pieces of software I need. 

I handled the deployment myself. 

There is a bit of maintenance needed. I will either go remote to the different firewalls or on-site and update the software. I can download the latest version from Netgate and basically reload it. 

I use the community version of the solution. It is free to use.

I don't consider the cost of how many hours it would take to learn it versus the cost of the annual subscription; however, once I get sufficiently comfortable on many firewalls, that'll average out to zero in terms of cost.

I'm a registered reseller.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. It's a good firewall that operates without you having to pay attention to the costs. 

It's really important to back up your configuration. Sometimes, you do have to reload it. It's more important to document the procedure that you take to load and configure the firewall. If you're used to WatchGuard or SonicWall, then there's more of a cut-and-dried procedure to that. With pfSense, you really have a lot of latitude and a lot of flexibility in how you want to configure it. If you just do the minimal configuration, you probably aren't getting the advantage of all the features you would want to have. That's why it pays to document that.

We primarily use the solution as a replacement for commercial firewalls. We use it as an Internet Gateway Firewall product and use the VPN features.

pfSense helped solve the limitations of proprietary software. I find it frustrating when the hardware capabilities of a particular piece of equipment are doled out piecemeal for a fee. For example, when certain features are locked until you pay for them. The proprietary nature and the extra computing power that's used to basically enforce the copyright on some of the competitive products I resent. I like that this has a community option. I'm an open-source advocate. I started using Linux in 1999, and I prefer that developer model.

There are many capabilities within pfSense, that I've never used, and that's true of a lot of products. It's very flexible, and they have plug-ins.  You can add features to pfSense. It is moderately difficult. That said, the web interface is great.

I like that I can use it with OpenVPN. It's not licensed and is not run by some corporation that watches you.

It has an advanced file system so that you can configure it with multiple drives and have redundancy within the router itself. I've never used it as a file server. I've never used it as a data store. It's really more about security and not reliability.

It's keeping the bad guys out and allowing connectivity when you need it.

The configuration could be a little more intuitive. It's a little trickier to set up - things like the OpenVPN - than it should be. However, once you get this configured, it seems solid as a rock, and it just works. 

The solution needs better error messages in the VPN. It's kind of a bear to configure. That could be streamlined or smoothed out. That said, I do not do this 40 hours a week like some people. I wear a lot of different hats. Still, when it comes to configuring, it always seems to be a little more involved. 

I've been using the solution for three or four years. 

The solution has been very solid.The BSD file system is a little more fragile than a Linux file system. I've had situations where a power failure causes a hard drive not to get corrupted but to need to run maintenance on it when it reboots. However, that's not a pfSense issue. Overall, it's been great.

I'm not a power user. For me, the capabilities are fine. It runs pretty fast even on modest hardware. 

Technical support was good. It was way better than the twenty-four hours that the contract said. They usually get back to me in a matter of a few minutes. 

They are very good at answering and solving specific problems. If something doesn't work, you can give them access. They can figure it out and make it work. 

I was less satisfied when I tried to ask a question like, "Is this the best way to have this configured?" It's a slippery slope of going beyond the typical tech support and actually getting consulting on it. I understand that maybe that's not their problem. However, it did seem like there's this hard wall where they will answer specific questions, but they are not going to give you general consulting advice about how to use the product. That is a little frustrating. 

Positive

I've used SonicWall and I've used various commercial firewalls, for example, Cisco. However, I haven't evaluated other things in the same category based on open source. There are a lot of them; I haven't looked at anything else, to be honest.

It's easy to get it going as a firewall. It's moderately difficult to get the VPN features running. I was able to deploy it within a couple of days. 

Maintenance is needed for upgrades or renewal of certificates.

I managed the setup myself with the help of the pfSense support staff. 

I use the community version, although there is a paid version as well. I've also downloaded it, registered myself, and paid for it to get support. I'm not sure of the exact features that differ between free and paid. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

The only shortcomings are somewhat obscure configuration issues. However, the scope of what they're trying to do is very good. While there could be more polish on some configurations, it's very capable and very flexible. 

If I had to do it over again, I would probably have actually gotten the hardware from NetGate. You're paying for the support, and bundling the hardware and support together might be better. I sense that you'd kick yourself up a notch in terms of the priority that they give you. Not that there's ever been a problem. Getting the hardware directly from pfSense might cut out the middleman and reduce the possibility of issues when something goes south. Other than that, I'm a pretty fairly satisfied customer.

We use pfSense internally to protect our management networks and provide VPN access to our internal staff. We also use it for customers needing a more sophisticated firewall than your home or small business WiFi router firewall package.

We deployed it at work when I got hired because we needed to replace the existing hardware solution. I've used pfSense for over 10 years, so I drew upon the experience from the experimentation I do in my home lab.

We're an ISP that provides managed services. We deploy pfSense as part of a larger solution, usually a contract for managed services. We provide their Internet circuit and a managed firewall so that they don't have to do that themselves. They pay part of the hardware cost—maybe 50%—upfront, and then the rest of it is applied against a contract, after which they will then own the hardware.

We use pfSense as a hybrid within our data centers, with some virtualized instances running pfSense community edition and some as Netgate hardware running pfSense Plus (the higher-end ones because we need a firewall that can handle 10 gigs of throughput). We've got multiple different models of the official hardware deployed for ourselves and some managed customers. They range from small businesses to a professional sports venue.

We use pfSense for work because I was already aware of its flexibility for our needs. The solution provides a great base level of network protection. PfSense is not a next-generation firewall, so it doesn't do in-line virus scanning or offer out-of-the-box IPS/IDS, but that can be covered by a manged antivirus suite and following good security practices. In terms of how secure pfSense is and how secure it keeps your network, it does that very well.

The biggest benefit of pfSense is its ease of setup, especially for VPN — both the end-user VPN and site-to-site VPN. It's easy to add features to pfSense via the package management system. We can just turn things on. They have made it much easier to deploy things like free radius, where we want to have enterprise authentication for WiFi. It's by far the most flexible firewall I have ever worked with. There are also packages for ACME for Let's Encypt SSL certificates, and HA proxy.

The pfSense Plus package has given us peace of mind, but we haven't had to open many trouble tickets with NetGate. Aside from the maintenance and support contract, the only feature we use from pfSense Plus is the wizard for building site-to-site VPNs from our locations to AWS VPCs. Building site-to-site IPSEC tunnels to AWS is a fairly complicated task, so having that wizard made it easier.

I would like a management console to manage and monitor multiple pfSense installs. We have several pfSense hardware devices installed and as far as I know, there is no single, unified pane of glass that I can use to manage all of them at once. That's the one thing I wish I had, just having a good single unified configuration interface for each install. 

I have used pfSense at my current company for at least four years now, but I've used it personally for over 10 years. 

I have to really dig deep to come up with any shortcomings. If you are using VLAN tagging, and making adjustments, restart the DHCP and DNS services manually, just in case.

As far as I know, there isn't a single console from which I can manage multiple installs. That is the only thing impacting their scalability. They max out at 10 gigabits per second, but anything above 10 gigs is such a niche market. To be honest, I doubt that's their target.

I rate Netgate support 10 out of 10. They turn around tickets quickly and their staff is fairly well educated. When I provide detailed information about the problem, they've been able to reply quickly with a solution or go research the problem and get back to us quickly with a fix. It's been pretty top-notch.

Positive

I've used OPNSense, a fork of the pfSense project, as well as Cisco ASA, PIX, Palo Alto, Ubiquiti's Unified Gateway, SonicWall, and FortiGate. Some bigger Ubiquiti firewall products are comparable to pfSense, and Cisco ASA has name recognition. SonicWall and FortiGate offer some enhanced features, like better threat management you get as part of a subscription, some block lists, and some more next-generation firewall features.

Overall, our chosen solution is pfSense, as it balances features and cost. It isn't the best at everything, but it's more than enough for almost everything you can throw at it, and it isn't ridiculously expensive like some solutions. It is massively flexible. Although it is missing some of the more esoteric features, you don't need those features 99% of the time. If you have the budget for it and need to do something more advanced than just the basic firewall, it remains the go-to solution we use every time. It's why I keep a couple in stock on the shelf so that I don't have to order them if we need one for an immediate customer install.

It's incredibly easy to deploy pfSense and takes no more than 30 minutes in a typical small office setup. A typical out-of-the-box setup for a small business can be running in five minutes flat. We usually have a two-person team with someone from our network engineering team responsible for the configuration and a field tech installing equipment on-site.

Regarding maintenance, you need to go back in occasionally and install the most current version of the software. We check for updates every couple of months, and that's it. That's it for maintenance. Once it's installed, we fire it and forget. It's there, and it works.

In-house

Priceless

I would say pfSense is competitively priced. It isn't the cheapest hardware, but I've never had a problem with it. It is far cheaper than big brand names like FortiGate and Cisco while delivering a feature set that's nearly the same across the entire list. The only places it falls short are esoteric features that almost nobody needs.

The support plan is reasonable. The pfSense Plus license with the warranty is either 400 or 800, depending on the level you want. For a commercial customer, that's more than reasonable and a lot cheaper than many solutions. We haven't had any sort of issues with the firewall hardware itself, so it's doing extraordinarily well on the total cost of ownership.

We did side by side comparisons of the feature sets and prices, and drew upon our experience with multiple vendors, including the equipment we had at the time.

I rate Netgate's pfSense 10 out of 10. I recommend turning on the built-in automatic configuration backup so that if you mess something up, you can easily restore the configuration from a backup and get it back up quickly. I also suggest downloading the community edition on a spare computer to play with and break because it's free. 

We use pfSense as the main firewalls coming into most of the companies we support. I work for an MSP. We've used different things. Our higher-end customers even run pfSense high availability clusters, and those work like a champ.

It has made deploying firewalls a faster process due to ease of configuration.

One of the features we use the most is the OpenVPN and IPsec VPN tunneling built within it. We have places that are headquarters and multiple locations where we create tunnels. We support police departments and stuff like that. Part of our use case is one of our police departments that does their own dispatching, so they have software that they run in-house. So we set their points out where the points themselves dial back in through OpenVPN using client certificates to create that always-on tunnel. Prior to us taking that over, they were using FortiGates, and the FortiGate FortiVPN was constantly dropping, and they were constantly having to re-authenticate. They would have to put 2FA back in. Since we've put in pfSense, we have the cradlepoints in cars establish the VPN connection, and we hardly ever hear from them since there seem to be no issues.

pfSense's flexibility is great. If you don't have the money to buy the NetGate hardware, anything works with it. You can toss it on any low-end piece of hardware or virtualize it if you choose to virtualize it. It is super flexible.

It's easy to add features to pfSense or configure them, especially if you're familiar with pfSense. They have a complete repository of apps that you can choose from and different types of monitoring packages you can put on it. They're all very, very straightforward and very easy to set up. I even run a pfSense for my home firewall. I've got AT&T fiber coming into my house. I bridge the public IP through, patch the modem into my pfSense, and have no issues whatsoever. I even run multiple VLANs off of it.  I replaced a FortiGate with this setup.

The benefits are witnessed immediately after you deploy it. Immediately after you deploy it you're no longer having to read articles to figure out what flaw has been found in this version of FortOS or what flaw has been found in this version of SonicWall that's being run. You just you don't seem to have that in the pfSense platform.

pfSense provides with a customizable dashboard landing page.  You can add widgets to show you any piece of information you want to see. I can add in a widget where, from the dashboard, it'll show me, what OpenVPN clients I have connected. It'll show me traffic graphs from LAN, optional ports, uptime, what version of BSD I'm on, what version of pfSense I'm on, whether there's an update available for PFSense, IP information, et cetera. It gives me all this within the main loading dashboard screen.

To manage multiple devices, you would have to subscribe to a third-party service to have the ability to do that.

This is truly set it and forget it. We didn't quite run into that as much with FortiGate. Even with the third-party add-ons, we don't seem to run into issues with the pfSense product where we have to be so hands-on.

There are two versions of pfSense, the community edition, which is free, and the paid version, Plus. We run both. We're getting more away from the community edition since we're starting to just purchase NetGate appliances. We're buying it strictly through NetGate. At this point, we're even starting to add on the tech support, which is top-notch.

pfSense can help to minimize downtime. You can set them up in a high-availability cluster, and that pretty much minimizes all downtime. Your secondary appliance picks up if your primary appliance goes down. It makes it really easy to apply updates or reboot the one firewall. It switches over so seamlessly. Your users never know the difference. When the primary firewall comes back up, it'll take over the primary function again, and then you can reboot your secondary firewall.

The visibility in pfSense enables us to make data-driven decisions. You can use traffic graphs and the historical data of those traffic graphs, especially if you're monitoring your WAN connection, to know whether you're oversaturating your line and whether you need to update your bandwidth coming into your building or not. That way, if you're seeing slowdowns on the internet, you can go back to your traffic graphs and figure out if you are seeing the slowdown from your provider or just oversaturating the line. If that's the case, I just need to call and order some more bandwidth.

As far as optimizing the performance goes, I like the fact that you can take interfaces within pfSense and put bandwidth limits on them. If I have a guest network, I can put a throttle limit on it to make sure that somebody doesn't hook to my guest and eat up so much bandwidth that my primary network can't function.

They're very affordable for what they offer. However, they should become more MSP-centric. They could design a centralized dashboard that I, as an MSP provider, can create sites and load my pfSense in there. That way, I can schedule updates to run after hours and things along those lines. They need to design for MSPs that are using their products and make centralized management easier.

I've been using pfSense for 20 years.

pfSense doesn't ever crash. If I had any gripe about these things, it's the fact that sometimes the update process will break the appliance. I'm not sure what causes it. I've had a few appliances where they've been running fine, and I go to apply an update, and then they just don't boot back normally. At that point, I reach out to support. They give me the reload file that I need. I reload the appliance. I dump the config back on it, and then it's good to go.

As long as you're buying an appliance that will support the bandwidth that you need to push through it, scalability is fine.We've got some of them running 10 to 12 VLANs. We've got one particular one that has no less than five different OpenVPN setups depending upon the department you're in.

Their paid support is top-notch.

With the community edition, and this probably is one of my gripes to pfSense, and this is more on the NetGate side, is that they don't make their images readily available to you. So you have to open a support ticket. You have to give them the hardware ID. You have to give them the serial number of the appliance, and then they will send you the file that you need to reload the operating system. Even so, we're talking about less than an hour of waiting time, and somebody will respond to the ticket and give you a link where you can download the software to reload it.

Positive

We've used SonicWall. We've used FortiGate. We always seem to go back to the Netgate and the PS pfSense just due to the fact being open source, they seem to have fewer security flaws in them than running something that is a closed proprietary system. With FortiGate, you constantly need to update, since they're constantly finding flaws in the FortiOS, and we just don't seem to have that from pfSense and the NetGate supply of products.

There was more hands-on work with FortiGate. If you're doing any type of web filtering, they would come out with an update where a website that did work would start getting miscategorized. And then all of a sudden, it would stop working. And you would have to go in and make a white list and an exception for it.

We buy the appliances and then install the appliances on our customer sites.

The initial deployment is easy. How long it takes depends on how simple or how complicated it is. As far as just a simple firewall goes, I can have one of them up and running in 15 to 20 minutes.

Even if you are not too knowledgeable, it would be very easy. When you first boot into it and go to the web interface, it has a wizard that walks you through setting the IP address on your LAN and configuring whether you're using DHCP or static on the LAN. That wizard that walks you right through what to do right out of the box.

Just one person is generally needed for deployment. 

After the deployment, it's pretty much set it and forget it. I will go in and I will check quarterly if an update needs to be applied, however, they don't come up with updates that often. Maybe once a quarter, once every six months, an update has to be applied to the appliance. Other than that, I am only logging into these appliances if I need to make rule changes or if I need to bring up an additional VLAN in the network.

The licensing model is good. It's probably a little expensive for the hardware that you get. However, a part of that price is the support. And their support is top-notch. Even if you're only using the community support, and you're not paying for the extra support, they probably pad the hardware prices a little bit to help offset their support people. 

I love the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) of pfSense. That's one of our selling points to our customers. You can buy this, buy once, or, you can look at going to Meraki or FortiGate or something like that, but, be paying licensing fees every single year to keep that product up and running.

I'm an MSP.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.

If you're going with the NetGate appliance, I'd let new users know that they are already optimized for pfSense. If it's something that you're looking to virtualize or if you're looking to use a community edition on your own hardware, my recommendation would be just to make sure that you use Intel network cards. I have never had a problem out of an Intel NIC for getting the OpenBSD underlying platform to recognize those network cards and load the proper drivers for them. That way, they show up within the pfSense software.

We currently use pfSense firewalls at our branch offices and central server locations. I have implemented TAC enterprise support on three of these firewalls, with the installation of the third scheduled for this weekend. Our network infrastructure relies on VPN tunnels between sites, and I have successfully deployed an always-on OpenVPN solution that significantly outperforms our previous SonicWall VPN system.

Installing packages on pfSense is straightforward, although the quality of package documentation varies. While I understand this isn't Netgate's responsibility, the installation and configuration process for these packages is remarkably user-friendly, relying almost entirely on the GUI. In my experience, I've rarely needed to resort to the command line, but I'm certainly not averse to it when necessary.

I immediately recognized the advantages of pfSense. Its ability to support custom hardware installations allows me to tailor solutions to the specific needs of each branch location. While I've had excellent results with Netgate's pre-built hardware, the option to construct higher-specification systems myself, all while maintaining support, is incredibly valuable. The difference compared to our outdated SonicWall is night and day. I previously built a pfSense firewall on a Dell server for a business handling high traffic volumes, and its performance was exceptional.

pfSense helps me prevent data loss by utilizing firewall aliases and other DNS-based filtration methods to block access to shadow IT and third-party cloud data transfer sites, providing some control over data movement.

While pfSense doesn't offer a centralized overview of multiple firewalls, it provides extensive customization options for each firewall's homepage. This allows for detailed monitoring of VPN tunnels, interfaces, and other components. I appreciate the ability to add, remove, and customize widgets on the homepage for tailored information display.

Helps minimize downtime. I have set up the high availability with one location, which works flawlessly.

Provides visibility that enables us to make data-driven decisions about network capacity, including throughput and the ability to handle traffic.

pfSense has significantly improved our performance by optimizing our always-on VPN. The recent release of the OpenVPN data channel offload feature, which was quickly adopted and supported by Netgate pfSense, has revolutionized our Windows laptop VPN solution. This new feature is nearly ten times faster than the previous OpenVPN without data channel offload, and its thorough documentation encouraged us to implement our always-on VPN ahead of schedule.

pfSense's greatest strength lies in its customizable package installation, detailed logging capabilities, and ability to manage log history, including sending it to Vault Logs via Syslog. OpenVPN support is exceptional. When I inquired about setting up an always-on VPN, the engineer swiftly and fully understood my needs and provided expert guidance. Netgate support's in-depth knowledge of included features is truly impressive.

I would like clear guidance on supported network interface cards, including detailed performance metrics for various models. While I understand the focus on selling appliances, more comprehensive documentation for those building their own systems would be beneficial. Specific throughput numbers and other statistics for Intel, Broadcom, Mellanox, and other cards are needed. Additionally, reinstating the ability to visualize long-term RRD data through built-in graphs would be valuable, as the current live traffic display offers limited insights.

I have been using Netgate pfSense for ten years.

I have not experienced any crashes in the production systems. The only crashes I've encountered have been while running unstable development builds, which is expected. However, excluding power outages, pfSense itself has been one hundred percent reliable in my experience.

If you invest in hardware capable of handling increased bandwidth, performance remains unaffected. We haven't observed any spikes in CPU utilization or memory usage. Even with a jump from a 50 megabit to a 500 megabit internet connection and approximately 65 active VPN clients, our firewall operates smoothly without any strain. Our small businesses handle the load effortlessly.

I have exceptionally high praise for the Netgate technical support team. In the three or four times I've called support, I've always reached an engineer within 20 minutes, which was the longest wait time. Every time, they've quickly addressed the issue once verifying firewall support. Their knowledge and willingness to assist are impressive.

Positive

I have experience with FortiGate, Dell, SonicWall, Cisco, and numerous consumer-level firewalls. While I am not the most seasoned network engineer, I have worked in the field for a considerable time, encountering a variety of solutions. Among these, pfSense stands out as exceptionally customizable and intuitive. Given the inherent complexity of networking, pfSense has made the subject as accessible as possible.

Deploying a pfSense box is straightforward when I'm physically present. Remotely guiding someone unfamiliar with operating system deployment presents more challenges. However, on-site deployment is remarkably easy, even simpler than installing a Linux server. 

Deploying a Netgate pfSense appliance is straightforward, even for network engineers without experience with the platform. The setup wizard is intuitive, requiring minimal networking knowledge. Subsequently, the configuration interface is user-friendly, allowing those with moderate networking experience to navigate and manage settings efficiently. Building a custom solution would depend on hardware expertise and operating system deployment skills, but utilizing Netgate appliances is notably easier.

The Netgate appliance I recently purchased took less than an hour to install, with most of that time spent gathering necessary information from the internet provider.

pfSense pricing is reasonable. Whether purchasing appliances or support, I hope they're charging enough to sustain their exceptional support services. Whether you opt for a bundled appliance and support or standalone support for a custom-built device, the pricing remains impressively fair.

When considering the total cost of ownership, pfSense is a compelling choice for a solution that incorporates firewall, VPN, and router functionality. Initially, I explored purchasing the OpenVPN access server, which would have required a virtual machine due to the lack of a dedicated physical server. However, integrating the VPN endpoint into the firewall aligns better with our design goals. It eliminates the need for a separate VPN appliance, resulting in significant cost savings and improved performance. Testing pfSense with OpenVPN in a virtual environment confirmed that it operates more efficiently on bare metal hardware. Moreover, the licensing cost for the OpenVPN access server would have been comparable to the support fees for pfSense.

The TAC enterprise support is $800 a year per firewall.

I would rate Netgate pfSense ten out of ten. If I could choose a product that was among the least frustrating and nearly flawless I've used, pfSense would likely be at the top of my list.

In addition to initial configuration tasks like routing and applying patches, minimal maintenance is required. Once the interfaces are set up, we configure firewall rules and are ready to go. Patching will be necessary for all platforms, but no specific requirements exist beyond standard practices.

I am using pfSense for its firewall, gateway, and intrusion detection. I used the Community Edition for years and then switched to the pfSense Plus free-from-home edition. There was a bit of turmoil when IXSystems announced that they would no longer offer the free-from-home edition

We immediately realized the power when we deployed it a few years ago. It exceeded our expectations. As time went on, I discovered more features in the different packages they provide and whether they fit my needs. Over time, it's been a learning process, and I've been greatly impressed with almost every aspect of this product. It has all the things I wanted but found lacking in other products.

All of the features work together to prevent data loss or any compromise of your data. It all boils down to the rule set. I have mine configured so that all the data goes out depending on my Netgate device. Some machines go through a particular VPN connection. If that connection goes down, I've got the rule set configured like a dead man's switch. It's cut off from the outside world, and I get an alarm, and it allows no more attempts to let traffic pass through that connection.

It helps to prevent downtime. Whenever there is an issue, it's the first place I look because I can check the statuses of various interfaces to check whether they're up and then zoom further out to see if it's something in my internet provider, like a faulty cable. It enables me to reduce downtime by quickly determining where the problem might be.

PfSense provides the visibility I need to make data-driven decisions. For example, if I have a spike in bandwidth usage, it shows me which devices on my network are suddenly eating more bandwidth. I can see what's causing that. It also greatly reduces the time spent maintaining my network, so there's a productivity boost.

PfSense has a learning curve, but once you've mastered that, it isn't that difficult. It's very flexible, and you can do almost anything necessary to secure a home network. It has packages that expand its capabilities. For example, you can install Snort if you want intrusion detection. If that's unimportant to you, you can use it to check the bandwidth of all the machines in your network.

Adding features is simple. You go into the menu to check which ones are available and click on the ones you want to install. If you've done your research on the packages you want and the settings you'd like to use, it's a matter of walking through the configuration in the menu. When removing the package, it will revert the settings 99 percent of the time. 

I like the interface. You can arrange the windows to see the important information and put them in the order you want. You can see the various interfaces you have at a glance in a single pane of glass. I have certain bits of information I want to see first, and there are secondary or tertiary pieces of information. If you are using VPN connections, you can see their statuses. You can see hacking attempts, which are logged. 

It's powerful. You can get quite granular in setting up a highly topical application of pfSense, but if you want just basic protection, you can do that easily. It depends on your needs and how brave you are. You can go deep into the system and do some cool things with it or set up the bare protection you would get from any firewall.

I'm trying to set up a gaming server for multiplayer games like 7 Days to Die. I spent three or four days trying to publish a private IP address through pfSense to the outside world. Some commercial and consumer-grade routers can do this, specifically gaming routers, but pfSense is not intended for this usage. 

That's a feature I'd like to see added, where you can go into a submenu, turn it on, and specify which machine or IP address you want to publish. It's not a must-have, but it would be nice to have. I spent a long time trying to figure that out. Ultimately, I was successful, but it was not intuitive.  

I have used pfSense since 2016.

I rate Netgate support 10 out of 10. You must have a license for pfSense Plus, and I called them about an unexpected hardware issue that caused me to switch machines. I emailed explaining the situation and got a response the same day. I provided all the information on the new box, and they gave me a license. It was a pleasant, non-stressful experience. 

I have used Smoothwall and a few other things that have been abandoned. I liked the look and performance of Smoothwall's interface. It had many of the same features as pfSense, but its capabilities weren't deep enough. I've also used basic Linux distros set up as firewalls, but pfSense is oriented toward an enterprise-level deployment, and I find myself between hobby and enterprise. I also like the added features pfSense provides. 

I am not using a Netgate appliance. I deployed pfSense on a very small machine that has plenty of RAM for the overhead, logs, and speeds I want for my network. 

When I first installed pfSense, there was a bit of a learning curve. I had to sit down with the documentation and figure out what to do. It wasn't difficult— just time-consuming. That information has carried forward with me. Other people look at me like I'm some kind of expert but I'm really a few pages ahead of them in the manual. 

PfSense isn't something you can turn on and forget about. You need to configure the solution and test it. Then you can turn it on and let it run. From time to time, you have to come back periodically to make sure everything is still fine. The initial deployment takes about 30 minutes. It was a one-person job.

I would like to see the price of pfSense lowered by about $50, or maybe they could create a category for home lab users like me with one device. I'm not running a business or profiting from it. I realize that people need to get paid for the work that they do, so I can't complain. They decided that they needed to change their model after providing the product for free for many years. 

Before they changed and started to charge for pfSense, the total cost of ownership was phenomenal. It still offers tremendous value, but that was an adjustment. You can choose to go back to the community edition or just pony up the money.

I rate Netgate pfSense nine out of 10. I only give it a nine due to that recent issue setting up the game server. I eventually figured it out and published my solution to the forums. Otherwise, it would be a perfect 10. 

I'm an independent IT consultant specializing in pfSense router deployments. I use pfSense not only in my home and my parents' homes but also at ten of my clients' locations.

The pfSense router can be deployed on-premises, in the cloud, or on a hybrid platform, but I only deploy it on-premise.

pfSense's flexibility overall is excellent. I can't think of a feature that it doesn't have.

Once I got the hang of it, pfSense became easy to use to add new features. However, there are occasional complexities, like configuring a RADIUS server, which initially seemed overly complicated. Thankfully, the documentation helped me navigate the process successfully.

I immediately saw the benefits of pfSense based on the cost savings alone. The routers are low-cost, to begin with, and there are no annual licensing fees like those required by Cisco routers and other brands. I have replaced many Cisco routers with pfSense because of the ridiculous licensing fees.

pfSense, as long as it is properly configured, is excellent at helping us prevent data loss.

Netgate hardware devices come pre-installed with pfSense Plus, which means all of our installations benefit from pfSense Plus because they run on Netgate hardware.

pfSense provides visibility that enables us to make data-driven decisions. The package manager lets us add a lot more visibility. I use the softflowd add-on package, and there are a few other add-ons if we need more visibility.

The visibility provided by pfSense helps optimize performance. The data flows across the different subnets, which is helpful if there is a performance issue.

pfSense stands out for its full features and adherence to industry standards. Unlike competitors introducing proprietary variations like UniFi or Omada, pfSense prioritizes compliance. This is crucial in manufacturing environments where diverse systems need to integrate seamlessly. In such multi-brand settings, standard compliance becomes a critical factor for successful system interaction.

pfSense doesn't offer a central management system for multiple sites, which wouldn't be a big deal for most of my customers, who typically manage just one site. However, for larger companies with many sites, logging into each pfSense router individually to manage them could become cumbersome.

Previously, we were able to download an offline installer for our firmware. For example, if our router crashes, we must reinstall the OS. We would have it on a USB stick that is available to reinstall. Now, with the current version of pfSense, they are no longer providing an offline installer. We have to be connected to the internet to download the OS in real time, which, in some cases, is not possible. Some routers need to be air-gapped for compliance controls. They are not supposed to have access to the internet. In other cases, we can't disconnect the company's internet to connect the replacement router because that would take down the company. So we don't have a way to install the OS. I went back and forth with Netgate's support, trying to get that through their heads, and eventually, a manager gave me the offline installer but told me this would be the last one and not to expect this ever again. They have provided offline installers for 15 years, so I don't understand why they would remove them now. They are not considering all of the use cases. If we have a large company and the router goes down, we could be losing thousands of dollars an hour, and we don't want to sit there trying to troubleshoot an internet connection when we could use a USB stick to reinstall it in two seconds and restore the config. This is an essential need for some organizations and an area where Netgate pfSense can improve.

I've been a Netgate pfSense user for nearly 15 years, practically since its launch.

Netgate pfSense has been excellent in terms of stability. I have never had an issue with any of the business-grade routers. Their lowest-end model runs on MMC storage instead of regular hard drive storage, and I have had some of those crash.

Netgate pfSense has different tiers, so the higher we scale, the more expensive it gets, but as long as we match it appropriately, it works great.

I have never paid for Netgate support, but when we purchase a new router, they allow us to send a config of the old router and provide one-time support for free. So, I have interacted with them a few times under these terms. The results have been mixed. Sometimes, I can tell I am speaking to a competent person, and others don't understand what I'm saying. In the past 15 years, I have been working with pfSense routers. I have contacted the support team 15 times, and the results have been 50/50.

Neutral

I have used Cisco routers, which were a real hassle to manage. I have also used Linksys and Apple AirPort routers.

The initial deployment for a new user is moderate. It all depends on their experience level. The documentation on their website is suitable for beginners. For a basic deployment, there are many articles from other people and YouTube videos on how to deploy.

Compared to other business routers, pfSense's pricing is reasonable. It also offers a free community version that can't be beaten.

With the inclusion of firewall, VPN, and router functionality, pfSense's total cost of ownership is low compared to other routers like SonicWall, which licenses the VPN feature. 

When I compare pfSense to other routers like TP-Link and Omada, I see that it has all the standard network features, whereas the others are missing a few. The challenge with pfSense is learning to use it because of all the features it includes. I have never felt like I needed to change brands because pfSense was missing a required feature.

I would rate Netgate pfSense eight out of ten. It is a great product.

I recommend new users do a test setup on their home network first to understand how it works before moving it into their business.

We use the solution as the main firewall and a proxy for load balancing our web servers.

The best feature of the tool is its all-in-one capabilities. It is a firewall with built-in IDS and IPS, load balancing, and VPN connections. The VPN integration, particularly with internal AD environments, provides stable connections. Centralized authentication is a notable benefit as well. We primarily use it for these features on our server level and are planning to expand their use in our complex environment to connect employees and services. 

Netgate pfSense is cost-effective because you can start using it for free. You can research how to install and configure everything, then install it virtually on any device or partition some hardware. This allows you to start using a firewall without any initial cost.

For larger companies, if you have one or two people skilled with the tool, they can design the complete network using it. That's all you need. You don't have to invest in expensive subscriptions or big hardware setups.

My only suggestion is that Netgate pfSense implement more graphical monitoring. While there are accounts with add-ons for graphical monitoring of data networking, IPS, IDS, and firewall-level events, having more graphical representations like blocks would make the tool more capable. Although it has commercial support and a good GUI, it can still be challenging for someone without firewalls, command lines, and networking knowledge.

Adding features to the solution through packages is somewhat limited. The marketplace doesn't have as many options as you might expect.

One example is the IPS/IDS system. Netgate pfSense still uses Snort 2.9, even though version 3.0 has been out for about a year. Version 3.0 offers important improvements like multi-core support, significantly speeding up processing. The solution seems slow to update to newer versions of these third-party packages.

The tool should provide beta versions with the latest package updates sooner so users can benefit from new features and improvements.

Another issue is the lack of a package marketplace. Despite being open source and customized by many developers globally, there isn't a wide selection of community-created packages. The reasons for this aren't clear to me - it could be security concerns or other factors.

Based on my experience using Netgate pfSense for about four years, I can't say the improvements in our environment are solely due to the product. It's a combination of Netgate pfSense and another monitoring tool we use.

Monitoring is crucial. The easier the monitoring and user interface, the simpler our team can work on and investigate issues. Accessing data becomes more difficult when you use commands or other complex methods.

With our third-party tools, log viewing is very straightforward. The tool logs everything important. This was helpful when our site was slow, and we needed to determine why. The logs from Negate pfSense and our IT systems help us identify issues.

However, the solution's combination with a third-party monitoring tool provides a graphical interface. This makes it much easier to review logs and pinpoint problems.

If Netgate pfSense had a better graphical interface, it would be one of the best products available. I think the graphical interface should be much better and easier to monitor. For example, I encountered errors when I installed HAProxy, a load balancer available in the solution. It was difficult to determine the errors because the backend wasn't working properly. It took us a long time to identify the exact issue because more detailed error information isn't directly available in the current interface. You must go through different steps to trace and see what errors are coming up.

If the tool could improve in this area and provide more error details directly in the interface, that would be beneficial. As for packages, if they could update to newer versions of third-party packages more quickly, that would be helpful. I understand they might not be able to use the very latest versions immediately, but if they could provide updates within three to six months of a new package release, users could try new features sooner.

One additional feature that would be helpful is SAML authentication. Many companies now use Azure or AWS; in our case, we use Office 365 for email and authentication. If SAML authentication was available in pfSense, we could have integrated it with Office 365, allowing users to log in directly using their existing credentials.

The tool can integrate with Azure AD internally, but SAML or two-factor authentication, such as SMS, would provide better security. Firewalls are usually kept behind the scenes and not exposed, but this feature would be useful in some cases.

We've offered Netgate pfSense to many clients, managing it for them and migrating them from existing firewalls. They're generally happy with the change. However, some clients were looking for these additional authentication features. While we can integrate with Office 365, a direct connection option would be beneficial.

I have been working with the product for four years. 

I use Netgate pfSense Plus. We mainly chose it for early updates and commercial support, as advertised on their site. I've only used the support once, though. We started with the free version, which worked fine without issues. After three to four months, we upgraded to the Netgate pfSense Plus environment. Since then, it's been very stable. We've never had problems that required rolling back changes after updates. The updates are very stable - we don't have issues when we update the firewall. So overall, it's been quite stable for us.

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

My company has five users using the solution in two locations. The solution's documentation shows that it is scalable. 

There is a lot of support material available on the Internet. You need to do some research. In my experience, I've only had to contact Netgate pfSense support once in the last four years, and that was because I messed up the operating system in our virtualized environment. 

We were previously using Cisco ASA 5500. After three years, we needed to upgrade the hardware and the subscription. At that time, we were moving from an on-premise solution to the cloud, so we decided to try Netgate pfSense. Our vendor recommended it. We wanted to get at least six months of experience with it to ensure its features were stable and it could handle higher loads without breaking. That was one of the main reasons we chose the solution.

The solution's deployment is straightforward. The basic setup took us just about two to three hours. However, designing our custom network configuration took a bit longer. Overall, we got the tool up and running in about three to four days in my environment. There were three people involved in the deployment process: myself and two other team members.

Netgate pfSense doesn't require much maintenance on our end. It's pretty smooth. We monitor alerts. When there's a new update, we test it in our staging environment to see if it affects anything. If it's smooth, we upgrade.

The tool has helped us save money. 

The tool is flexible; even the free, open-source version offers many features. From a cost perspective, even the subscription model for commercial support isn't too costly. However, it's important to have someone knowledgeable about Netgate pfSense to take advantage of it. While there are online resources, a professional or someone experienced can get much more out of the solution. I've heard that the IPS/IDS licenses and other features can be costly.

The solution is very cheap. It's so affordable that even students can use it on their laptops. It's a good, cost-effective product.

The solution has a single web interface, which you could consider a container. Within this container, there are multiple interfaces or sections. You must navigate to different settings to manage different aspects of the system.

So, while it's all contained within one web interface, you can't see or manage everything from a single screen.

I recommend the tool to our clients. We help them implement and support it. I rate it an eight out of ten.