Netgate pfSense Reviews

I use pfSense to provide IT services for small businesses. They typically have a broadband or fiber connection through a router to the ISP, so they're looking for some additional security. We can get a Netgate appliance with pfSense for a few hundred dollars.

We saw the benefits immediately. I live in Edmonton, and one of my clients is a machine shop in Montreal. We configured the firewall and sent it to the shop with instructions on how to set it up. They set it up, and once it was running, I could remote in and start providing IT services to my client two time zones away.

It can help you prevent data exfiltration from the outside, but you'll always have a problem with employees who want to do bad things. It isn't a completely zero-trust approach. It has logs that will tell you if something seems odd. That requires the owner or IT professional to stay on top of it.   

The stability of the Netgate hardware and pfSense software helps to prevent downtime. At the machine shop in Montreal, we had an older Netgate model running for almost seven years, which we replaced last Christmas. It wasn't failing, but we upgraded it to ensure uptime. We spent about $200 on that device or about a few months of coffee for the office. You can deploy pfSense on your own device, but it gives the client comfort to see an actual device instead of something I cobbled together. 

I don't know if there's a particular dashboard other than the volume of data you are passing through the firewall that we check to ensure it is as expected. All of the businesses we handle are small, so we don't need some of the advanced features, such as VLANs, and I'm not going into them to fiddle with them constantly. If the power is somewhat dodgy, as it is in Montreal, they come back online in the proper configuration.  

One of the main benefits of our use case is pfSense's inclusion of OpenVPN. We can set up a server-client configuration so employees can access the office outside business hours. This enables us to provide secure remote access to their workstations and other devices inside their worksite. OpenVPN is included, so I don't need to purchase an expensive VPN solution with its own client. 

I also value the community on the pfSense website and other forums. If you're trying to set something up, there's invariably someone else who has done it before. It's open source, so the community is massive.

PfSense is quite flexible. You can tune it to meet your needs. If my client has something provisioned to their clients, we can run that through the firewall. We can also set it up so that everything is locked down and all traffic moves through the VPN. Like any other firewall, you can set up rules. I haven't encountered anything that I wanted to do that I couldn't. 

Setting up the VPN is always tricky, but adding features isn't hard overall. OpenVPN is easier to use than any other open-source VPN solution. It does all of the DHCP and DNS forwarding and other firewall tasks out of the box.  

In most of our use cases, the pfSense interface acts like a single pane of glass for me to log in, monitor, and configure. You can use the command line interface, but I use the web interface. I would only use the CLI to review logs because everything is on a text interface rather than a browser window, so it's easier. However, for a business user, the web interface is easier if they don't have any complex needs. 

Our customer's IT operations are optimized to go through the pfSense firewall and OpenVPN. It enables us to get work done without constant callouts from the clients. When we upgrade to a new unit, we give them configuration files to install on their workstations. 

They could improve the VPN wizard to make the configuration easier. I don't know what happened last time, but it was a little fiddly. Adding users isn't difficult, but it's a step that's in a different panel from the configuration of the VPN client itself. You need to create the user on the firewall and then associate that with the VPN. They should make it easier to link the firewall configuration with the VPN client.

I have used pfSense for between five to seven years.

PfSense has always been stable, even in an inhospitable environment. A machine shop is bad for devices because of all the dirt and oil, and I had one that continued running for five years without any complaints.  

I always pick a Netgate device that has sufficient hardware for each of my clients, but if I had to expand suddenly, I know Netgate has a range of devices that would work. However, I do think they focus on small and medium-sized enterprises.

I deploy pfSense on Netgate appliances. It's easy for a typical network engineer with no experience with pfSense. If you know about networking, it's an easy device to set up. Coming from a Cisco background, I found it dead simple to install. I have deployed boxes in under an hour. One person is enough to do it. The maintenance and updates are easy. I've never had an issue with updating and fixing bugs. You can do it all remotely. 

I rate Netgate pfSense nine out of 10. Having a basic understanding of networking concepts, like firewalls, routing, and VPN will help you navigate the pfSense interface. 

We primarily use the solution as a firewall and for managing traffic.

The interface and the integrated services are very useful.

pfSense offers very good flexibility. There are good plugins you can integrate into the software. We can use it for a firewall and to monitor internal traffic. We can do many things. 

It's not very difficult to integrate and configure features. At the install level, using the wizard is very simple. As a firewall, it's easy. You can watch usage and target effectively. If I have difficulties or questions or I need to understand how something works, there are videos and tutorials. 

We noticed the benefits of using pfSense pretty immediately. We could see it on the graphs that help us analyze the traffic.

We're able to leverage the single pane of glass interface. We can monitor everything from it from traffic to the state of the machine to memory usage and CPU. It provides good visibility so that we can make data-driven decisions. The visibility we get helps with availability.

Performance has been optimized under pfSense. We can filter traffic and limit internet use as needed. With it, we can control throughput.

The first time we deployed it, it was kind of tricky. There were many configurations. You need to first configure the alias, then you have all the IPs ordered correctly, and you can start to manage the VLANs. It would be ideal if we could implement in an easier and efficient way. 

One time, we tried to configure a wireless AP to the firewall and that was tricky. Understanding the interface was hard. It could be easier. 

The displays of all the plugins could have a better layout. You have to search through all of them to find what you need. They need a search button.

I've used the solution for one year.

We haven't had any issues with stability.

We haven't tried to scale the solution. 

We haven't contacted technical support.

Previously, we used a simple firewall called Linksys, among others. It was not very useful for analyzing traffic. pfSense is more granular in terms of firewall rules. 

The initial setup was straightforward, and there are a lot of tutorials online. You can just follow instructions. It's not too hard. The setup was fast. It took maybe half an hour.

There might be a bit of maintenance needed. We check from the main page to check it for CPU or disk failures. there might be some updates. That's it. Sometimes I go on Reddit and check to see if I should do the update or not. I remember once I read that someone suggested that we do not update and to wait for an update in a few weeks.

We managed the initial setup ourselves. 

The total cost of ownership is good. We don't have too many pfSense subscriptions across our network. However, it's pretty cheap compared to other firewall subscriptions. Plus, the pricing is inclusive. 

The pricing is good for us. It's not too expensive considering all of the features on offer. It's about $1700 a year. It could always be cheaper, however, for the most part, it's good. 

We use the Plus version of the solution. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

I'd advise users to always follow tutorials which can be found online. Be prepared. That said, the interface is not overly difficult.

I use Netgate pfSense personally at home and the data center, our headquarters, so it is for enterprise and personal use.

The most valuable feature of the solution is that it is an open-source tool and is available at a very low cost.

In terms of flexibility, the tool is great, especially the fact that it is open source. On Netgate pfSense Community Edition, people can write stuff into it and get plugins for it. Netgate pfSense Plus version does a review process with the help of Netgate, so you don't have to have many plugins for it. The tool is very open to modification if you need to do that.

The benefits related to the product can be experienced immediately after the product is deployed, especially in terms of the speed improvement and features that we don't have with the current solution or the current technologies that we don't have with our current solution.

To deal with data loss while using Netgate pfSense, you can always export the logs or dump them into a log server, specifically a Syslog server. I don't really view the boxes in the data warehouse other than the logs. There are features in the tool that we can send out to the syslog server, which is what we do in our company.

In my enterprise, we are getting ready to push out two hundred devices, and I don't see a single pane of glass management. I don't necessarily consider Netgate pfSense to be an enterprise product because it doesn't offer a single pane of glass management. With Netgate pfSense, you have to touch all devices to make a change. My company has been messing around with Netgate pfSense for some scripting on it, but it is still not what I am used to using in the enterprise. One window for controlling all devices doesn't exist in the tool.

Netgate pfSense provides features that help minimize downtime since it offers high availability on the boxes. You can use multiple WAN interfaces, so multiple ISPs can be plugged into your device to help manage if the service from one ISP goes down.

Netgate pfSense provides visibility that enables our company to make data-driven decisions since it offers graphs, traffic graphs, and firewall graphs. I can see if there is a client on the network that is just flooding everything. Yeah. The tool has graphs, charts, and log files.

The visibility of Netgate pfSense helps optimize performance. If I see there is a network that is a guest network that is just maxing out at 100 percent, I can attempt to give them some more bandwidth. I can modify the quality of service to give them better or more bandwidth.

With the inclusion of firewall, VPN, and router functionalities, if I assess the total cost of ownership of Netgate pfSense, I would say that I get what I pay for when it comes to Netgate. I get more than I am paying for, meaning the return on investment is great. I feel reluctant to talk about the good return on investment experienced by my company from the use of the tool because I don't want Netgate to charge more money, and as a non-profit company, it can hurt us. The total cost of ownership is fine since our company does not have to spend a lot of money on it. I know that if there was a Linux conference three or four weeks ago, and they were giving me some grief points on how it dies after buying boxes from Netgate in a year, it dies, but I have not experienced that. My total cost of ownership is great. Other people would buy the box, which would die in a year, so they would just lose money.

Netgate pfSense needs to have a single dashboard for managing all devices.

As an enterprise customer, I expect Netgate's sales personnel to inform me of the new devices that are coming out. For example, there was a time when I was getting ready to buy a device, and then I thought that I needed to hold on, and so the order failed. I thought I needed to wait a few days before ordering a new device. I was getting ready to order another device, which was Netgate 1541, but after two days, Netgate 8300 was released, and it was far better than what I was getting ready to buy. I was really disappointed that the salesperson from Netgate didn't ask me to hold off on my decision to buy Netgate 1541. You don't have to tell me that something brand new is coming out if you don't want to spill the beans or anything like that, but it would have been nice if Netgate had asked me to hold off on my decision to buy Netgate 1541. I was getting ready to buy a product that would have been, immediately two days later, an old technology. I just expect more from a salesperson. When going through Netgate's website, while trying to buy Netgate 1541, I saw there was a list of features at the bottom of the product page, so I had to select the features I wanted, but I couldn't have all the features at the same time, and the website would prevent me from adding extra features, which actually was the cause for the order to fail. I had added features that you can't have at the same time, but nowhere on the website did it say anything like that, and that led to a delay in my time frame. I was trying to get something to solve a problem at a certain time, and then it wasn't until a day later, a day and a half later, that Netgate called and said that I couldn't have all of the tool's features, which was something that messed up my installation time. Issues with the product are associated with feature requests. It is not necessarily the box itself but more of the company that needs to consider improving its approach. For the box itself, everything in a single frame should be released.

I have been using Netgate pfSense for five to seven years. I am a customer of the product.

I haven't had any device crashes yet. The stability is great. I have not had a device crash. When there was a device crash, it was for the one at my home when we had five power outages, and it burned my hard drives, but that was not because of Netgate's box.

It is easy to scale up. I will be visiting a site soon that has Netgate 1100, and I am going to put in a Netgate 4200 over there. I don't think I am going to have any issues. I will be able to copy things off the config of Netgate 1100 and dump it on Netgate 4200 with a few modifications. The tool's scalability is great. If I need to add a drive or replace one of the hard drives in the tool, then that is something that can be done easily.

Based on the customer support for our account to figure out why an order didn't get through or why we can't get this part, we have contacted Netgate's team, but not for actual support. The tool's community is fantastic, and it is one of the driving pieces that I sell to my decision-makers, considering that the community supports the solution. With community support, I am not just calling out to five or ten people. Instead, it is possible to reach out to the world to respond to an issue that might have been of a lot of concern.

I have never contacted the tool's technical support team for any technical support, but it was just a question with my order.

I have experience with Juniper, NetScreen, OPNsense, Cisco, and Meraki. If I consider the box itself, Netgate pfSense is better than the other tools I have used. 

From an enterprise perspective, I can't say Netgate pfSense is better than all the tools I have used because it doesn't have that enterprise management capability. As soon as they get that enterprise management capability, Netgate pfSense is the best out there in the market.

The ease or difficulty in the tool's initial deployment phase that one may experience depends on the box. If I speak about Netgate 1100, I believe that using a switched network interface or ports can be a little more challenging than trying to work on VLANs. The other boxes that aren't switched, like Netgate 4100 and the models above it, work perfectly fine and function as I would typically expect, so the installation is not hard at all, but you do have to know networking. I always hire people, and they are used to having stuff done for them when it comes to tools like Meraki. You just plug it in, and it works. The people I hire have no idea how to do any type of networking or act as IT or MSP professionals, and they can only work in the framework for which they have been trained. You do need to understand fundamental networking technology to make the tool work. For me, the installation is easy. If you don't understand fundamental networking technology, it can be hard to install the tool.

One person can manage the product's deployment phase.

There is a requirement to maintain the product since we have to touch each and every box to do software updates. The tool does require maintenance on our part.

I use the Netgate pfSense Community Edition and the paid version called Netgate pfSense Plus.

Netgate pfSense Community Edition is great and free. For Netgate pfSense Plus, we have to buy Netgate's boxes, and the pricing is great. As a non-profit organization, I would like to have a discount from Netgate, but if you are ready to buy a hundred boxes, it would be nice to have a discount. I understand that Netgate pfSense does not charge a lot more for the box than what we are paying for them. The pricing is fine.

In terms of how difficult it is to add features to Netgate pfSense and configure them, if I talk about writing from scratch, it is something that I don't do. If someone has a plugin, pulling that in is ridiculously simple. If I say that I want a Tailscale plugin, then I can put it in, and it is already in the system, and as long as I know how to do networking, you can figure out how to use a plugin since it is not hard at all in regards to Netgate pfSense Community Edition and Netgate pfSense Plus.

I have not used Netgate pfSense on Amazon EC2 virtual machines.

One needs to realize the difference in the switched version, and to do so it is important to understand Netgate 1100 and Netgate 2100 and the individually addressable ones since it is the area that threw me when I first got Netgate 1100, I was like, what in the world am I working on currently. Managing the VLANs on the tool threw me a ton, and it took me about an hour to figure out what was going on with the solution.

As the tool really needs centralized management, I rate it an eight to nine out of ten.

I am in IT. I use pfSense for my personal use. I use it to practice networking and understand how networks work. I apply all the networking-related things that I have learned to pfSense at home.

I also use it to isolate my IoT network from my regular network and from the devices I use for the cameras.

The main reason for implementing pfSense is that I like playing games. With pfSense, I can place quality control over the traffic traversing over the WAN connection or the Internet. I am able to prioritize and limit some devices to allow me to have a better connection to the Internet than some devices in our house.

pfSense is a flexible solution. It has features for setting devices into groups. I was able to group up the devices in our house to be able to set some restrictions on some devices and have full restrictions on other devices. It allowed me to control my kids' devices to limit access to the Internet to a certain time. It automatically stops on the Internet for those devices when that time comes.

pfSense gives a single pane of glass management in regard to the network. I was able to control everything in my network, which is good.

I use pfSense Plus. I got third-party hardware, not with pfSense, but I purchased the license to have a pfSense Plus version. That hardware went down a few days after I bought the license. I created a ticket, and the engineer allowed me to move it to another device because I had just recently purchased it. Thanks to them, I was able to have less downtime because I did not have extra money to purchase another license. I was able to bring it up as fast as possible. The backup and recovery of the configuration is very pretty easy. I just reuploaded the file and updated two lines of code, and that was it. Everything worked.

Everything works well. My streaming is working fine. My kids do not complain about any lags. I can play my games without having any issues. I do not experience any lags. When my wife is working, she does not have any problems downloading or uploading files back to her work. We are pretty happy with the performance.

For me, the firewall is most valuable because I can play around with the firewall. That is the best asset for me. I can limit what I want to limit, and I can open what I want to be open.

I like the versatility of pfSense. Compared to other products I have used for home and small businesses, this is the easiest to understand. It has enterprise features compared to, for example, Ubiquiti UniFi. Their router is limited to some features, whereas with pfSense I can do, for example, routing and dual WAN. I also have several VPN options. 

It has a lot of features, but I wish there were even more features. Some of the features I am looking for are still not there in pfSense, like, for example, content control. Because I have kids, I want to control the content or what they watch. There is a feature in pfSense called pfBlocker, but it is limited. If I set that up, it is blocked by an IP address. Sometimes my devices are borrowed by my kids. They are able to get a full connection to the Internet, but their devices are limited. If content blocking is added to pfSense, it would be great. If I can block content by a user, that will be a preferred solution.

The frequency of feature releases can be better. We have been waiting for some of the features for a while, but they have not been released. I know they prioritize what is used in the enterprise area, and then they provide some features for regular consumers like me. If they can balance that 50:50 and focus equally on the enterprise and consumer suggestions, it will be great.

The interface and support are perfect for me. I saw a post on their blog that they will be moving to the Linux operating system. Hopefully, they would have better wireless because the wireless for pfSense is horrible or horrendous. If they move to Linux, hopefully, they will improve it.

I have been using pfSense since 2020. It has been four years now.

It is very stable. I would rate it a nine out of ten for stability.

It is scalable. I would rate it a nine out of ten for scalability.

We are a family of five. Five of us are connecting to the pfSense Internet.

They are great. They are perfect for me.

Positive

I have used TP-Link and Ubiquiti EdgeRouter. In regards to features, the two are on par. They are way behind pfSense. pfSense is way ahead of these two in terms of what it could offer. In terms of security, TP-Link is very bad, EdgeRouter is in the middle, and pfSense is way ahead. In terms of performance, TP-Link is worse, and EdgeRouter and pfSense are neck to neck. I prefer pfSense over others.

I installed it on third-party hardware. The longest period of initial configuration was when I deployed it for the first time. After that, it is very fast because I can back up my config and restore it if I break something.

It took an hour or two for all the installation and configuration.

In terms of maintenance, it requires regular updates. That is the only maintenance that it needs. I also need to monitor if any known or zero-day bugs are found in pfSense. I am watching that because pfSense is the device facing the Internet, so I need to be always alert about any zero-day bugs. I also need to be mindful of the configuration to not accidentally expose any ports. These are the three things required in terms of maintenance.

In four years of using it, that payment of 189 dollars per year has already paid off. Over these years, I only experienced it going down two or three times, which is less than 1% downtime per year.

It is cheap. If you are a technical person, it is a pretty cheap solution because first of all, the Community Edition (CE) is free. I am in Australia, and my pfSense license is about 200 dollars. It is not bad because it is per year and not per month. It is cheap compared to other solutions.

I am not using the hardware. I am using the software. It is very cheap. It does not cost me a lot. The only cost is just the one-year payment. If I need extra hardware, I need to purchase that from the third party whose hardware I am using.

I would recommend pfSense to others. I already recommended it to my boss, and he is using it now. He is loving it as well. It is easy to use, and there are a lot of resources available. If you have any problem, someone would have already encountered that problem and found a fix, so it is easy to fix based on that. It is very reliable. The downtime experience is very low. It is almost zero.

I would rate pfSense a ten out of ten.

We use the solution as a gateway appliance for our own corporate network as well as that for many of our clients. It has become our go-to gateway appliance for clients when they're looking to to have a new network stack installed.

Many of our clients are smaller. However, the big features for them are usually the built-in OpenVPN server for client-based VPN access. The site-to-site links and IPsec site-to-site connectivity are great.

The flexibility is one of the reasons it's become our go-to unit. We don't, unfortunately, get to use so much of its flexibility on a regular basis. That said, I love the fact that it can basically do whatever we need it to do all in one piece of gear.

It's relatively easy to add additional features. They have an application store that already has tools that you can add to pfSense as you need them. At this point, there are 30 or 40 or more of them.

In the long term, when you buy a piece of hardware, you basically get updates for that device for the life of that device. You're not paying for additional licenses throughout the life of that device. You just pay for it once. We do Meraki devices as well, and, every year or few years you need a license. You have to renew. 

There are some features in pfSense that help you to prevent data loss. Even just on the firewall side, you can limit what people are able to reach out to. The outbound filtering has a massive effect on that. They also have some other web filtering tools built-in; however, we don't typically use those. We have other tools for that.

pfSense offers a single pane of glass type of management per client site.

The solution does provide features that help minimize downtime. We don't use these features. However, we know they are available. We have the ability to offer that service. You can hook up two of the gateways in tandem. That way, if one of them ever does fail, it automatically fails over to the other functioning unit. 

pfSense provides visibility that enables users to make data-driven decisions. You can look at the amount of bandwidth used by the device as a whole or as a client. If there's a problem or if Netgate isn't performing per the client's wishes, we can easily make an assessment.

The visibility in pfSense helps optimize performance. There are a lot of different visualization aspects, including some bandwidth charts as well as some other built-in ways of looking at the way the data or information is flowing through the system, which definitely allows for that.

Something that we would really love to see is a real single pane of glass management for multiple clients. Having a reseller portal of some kind that allows us to easily remotely access all the different pfSense gateways that we have out there (like Meraki does with their equipment) would be ideal. Right now, we have to manage client by client and just maintain access per site, basically.

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

They are super stable units. I have not had a single complaint about them.

They are definitely scalable. You can add your own additional storage to them. You can add additional memory to them if need be. They're very scalable, considering what you see in the rest of the gateway appliance market. Those are usually just static boxes where you get what you get, and that's it.

I have contacted support once. I have a Netgate pfSense box that I run as well. I got a little impatient when a firmware update was happening and thought the device locked up and rebooted and ended up having to push the default firmware back. I got help over email, and they were great. They gave me a copy of the factory firmware and I was able to recover the unit.

Positive

We've previously used Meraki. We use their gateways as well. We also used to use some Unify gateways but it was too limited. 

pfSense is great - and more flexible. It's better than both. It just lacks a centralized management portal. 

Initially getting into it, it took took a second or two just to get our team trained up on it. Since it's so flexible, there are some initial configuration assumptions that aren't made. You can do with the device as you wish. There's a lot of network equipment out there that has done a little bit too much hand-holding in terms of the initial configuration, however, those are also devices that are much less configurable. Going in, you want to understand networking a little bit more to make some of those decisions when you're setting up a pfSense box. 

How long it takes to implement depends on what you call fully deploy. We're still in the process of doing that. We have, especially on the Unify or Ubiquiti side, every time we have a client where one of those devices fails, we're putting in a pfSense box at this point. We deployed it on our own corporate network rather quickly. I had it done in a couple of hours, basically. 

There is some maintenance needed. The firmware updates, and we want to make sure that we're watching for when the new firmware is released, especially if it's being released to cover some known vulnerabilities.

We did the implementation all by ourselves in-house.

We are buying the Netgear hardware and we get the license along with it. The total cost of ownership is is extremely low when you compare it to a lot of the other devices or other gateway appliances that are available on the market.

The pricing is great - for the hardware, at least, which is generally what we're paying for. I was very aware of and paid attention to all the noise that went down when they changed their licensing, especially for the community edition. They created a new product called the Plus version of the license. 

For what they charge for it, which is maybe $100 a year, it's still good. If you wanted to build your own router, pfSense is more than worth $100 a year to have all that flexibility and maybe your own piece of custom hardware that you want to run it on. It's definitely a value-driven product.

We're using the Plus version since we buy the Netgate hardware. That comes with pfSense, and we're typically not building our own gateways.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

My advice to new users would be to practice with the product when you get an appliance. It's always easier to start learning with an appliance directly from Netgate. Just set it up and mess around with it maybe on a network that is a test network of some kind. Something that's not in production. It's not a hard device to understand if you understand networking at all. 

I have two installations at schools as firewalls. The biggest drivers for using pfSense were cost-effectiveness and functionality. It offers higher functionality for its cost.

The benefits are fairly obvious at the beginning. There's no specific time frame required. The flexibility and consistency of the product are what draw me to it, regardless of the size or capacity of the operation. It's easy to deploy.

Arguably, the use of products like Suricata for intrusion prevention could help prevent data loss.

It gives a single pane of glass for each individual device, but not across multiple devices. pfSense could catch up with other market providers by offering a view across multiple devices, but the current interface is fine. It is just we have to individually manage each one. 

There are two versions of pfSense, the paid "Plus" version and the free "Community Edition." I use the "Plus" paid version. 

The way pfSense handles system updates is pretty good. The updates are virtually transparent to any downtime. I've had pfSense boxes running for 200 to 300 days with no downtime. From a software standpoint, pfSense is about as bulletproof as it comes.

pfSense provides visibility that enables us to make data-driven decisions. Its reporting is effective. The data is effective in making decisions based on traffic. It is not just one feature, it is how we manage data traffic. It provides adequate information to make decisions based on traffic. 

I have used pfSense in virtualized environments, just not on AWS.

It allows me flexibility in hardware size and capabilities while maintaining the exact same interfaces and controls. 

I also like the fact that based on its operating system, it has applications that can be added, such as IDS/IPS and filtering.

I would like to see a single pane of glass for multiple devices.

From a service provider standpoint, it is a bulletproof operation to deploy. Aside from being able to manage and monitor multiple devices from a single pane of glass, that would be the only thing I would change.

I've used pfSense, probably for the last two or three years off and on.

It's one of the most bulletproof solutions out there. I can't recall a problem where the system locked up or had any issue that required intervention to get it started back up again. 

Aside from possibly a hardware failure, I haven't had any problems. And that's not the software.

Scalability is one of the reasons why it's a good product. You can utilize it in a budget-friendly way as well as a full-on enterprise. pfSense is almost infinitely scalable. Obviously, hardware is the dictating factor.

I have never had a reason to contact customer service and support. 

I've used Unifi products, DrayTek products, and Meraki products.

From a capability standpoint, I would put pfSense at the top of functionality. DrayTek comes close; however, it lacks the add-on applications. So, I would put pfSense at the top. 

I build the machines myself. Their hardware is not overly special, and I think it's overpriced, so, I build my own.

It's easy to deploy them, but then I've worked with them for a while. If I reflect back at the very beginning, there is a bit of a learning curve, but I don't think it's that steep. Overall, it's fairly easy.

It's fairly easy to add and configure features in pfSense, though it depends on the application. So, it is moderately easy. Some are simple, while others require a lot of preplanning and time to configure.

One person can deploy it, but the deployment time varies because it depends on the network design. It can be up and running in ten or fifteen minutes, but configuring it for the network design may take longer.  

Not much maintenance is required from the end user. Netgate pfSense do a very good job of keeping the application and operating system up to date by itself. Occasionally, applications require updates that need manual intervention, but for the most part, updates can almost be automated.

pfSense's pricing or licensing model is very affordable. Netgate hardware is a bit overpriced, but the software itself is arguably underpriced.

I have not come across a more effective product. Unifi products are inexpensive but not feature-rich by any stretch of the imagination. From a pure feature standpoint, hands down, I would argue that Meraki is as capable and comparable in features, but the cost is prohibitive for most small businesses.

From a pure feature-function standpoint, pfSense has the best total cost of ownership, once it's installed, I don't have any problems with it. If taking into account the software licensing, the hardware, and the amount of time it takes to manage, I'm not sure there's a better TCO on the market.

Overall, I would rate it a nine out of ten. 

I work in cyber security and have two instances of pfSense running in high-availability mode for my home lab and use. 

I saw it was secure immediately after deploying pfSense. I didn't need to start configuring the firewalls to make them secure. They were already configured securely after the deployment. If you want to make them more secure, you can do that.  

It provides visibility into the VLAN configurations. I can see the traffic and configurations of the table sizes, the temperature, memory usage, etc. I probably have about a hundred devices. I can see the IPs and decide what I want to connect to. 

PfSense helps to optimize performance. I've gone through some of the dashboards. I can see from the system. I'm looking at the advanced settings in the general setup. The information provides a default, maximum, or minimum in terms of some of the configuration profiles. I can do a few tweaks to get the maximum performance out of it. It's useful from that perspective. There's a lot of documentation around it and a lot of support forums. They provide a lot of guidance in terms of the configuration. 

Other firewalls I've used are difficult or overly complex to configure and don't provide the same level of control that I feel PfSense does. I wanted to go down a route where I could have full control. I like the ability to set up my firewall and access points, link everything together, and be in control of the routing.

PfSense is highly flexible. I looked at a few of the other products before I chose PfSense. From what I read, it can provide many configurations out of the box. It was easy to configure. The user interface and dashboard are informative and intuitive.

It provides a single pane of glass view from the dashboard. From the dashboard, you've got system information, traffic graphs, and information on the services and the interfaces. I can see the information and the packages from that point of view. It does provide a single pane of glass, but I think I'd like to see a little bit more configuration in terms of what else I can add in.

If you look at the pfBlocker's rules and feeds you can block, it's a little cumbersome to identify the logs and see what isn't allowed through and why.

I have used pfSense for about two years.

I haven't experienced any crashes. 

My appliance has 64 gigs of RAM and 1TB on the main disk. From that side, the performance is fine. I've not had any issues with throughput. I think the hardware and the throughput that I need complement each other. I think it seems to be fine from the scalability side. When I look at the dashboard, the CPU rarely gets above 10 percent, and the temperature stays around 30 degrees Celsius on a fan-less appliance. Memory use is low. It's handling the traffic, and I've got a gig broadband throughput, which is fine. I don't have issues with the VPNs, VLANs or performance problems with the firewall itself. 

I rate Netgate support seven out of 10. I've installed pfSense a couple of times. The most recent was about two weeks ago, and I had an issue with the installation that took me about six hours to resolve. When I raised the ticket with the help desk at Netgate, all I got was a couple of suggestions that I'd already tried, The issue I found was the installation doesn't stop to allow you to configure the interfaces or the VLANs.  I had to try several times to get the details in at the right time for the configuration - otherwise, I had to reboot and then try again. 

When I raised this with support, after I found out what the issue was, all I got from the support team was, "Glad you got it sorted." I was expecting to see a ticket raised or a request for more detail. 

Neutral

Going through the wizard is easy. I've been in IT for more than 30 years, so working through things isn't difficult. There's some complexity here and there around the firewall rules. The rules themselves and the floating rules for the firewall were a bit complicated and difficult to understand. I think some of the documentation wasn't straightforward. Once you've sorted those out, the rest of it is quite simple. The initial deployment and configuration took about four hours, and there were a few tweaks after that. 

In terms of maintenance, the only thing I do occasionally is the backup. In cases of failure, I back up the configuration, which takes the DHCP allocations and the configuration of the packages, but I do that for recovery purposes. The only other thing I do renew the certificate on the firewall via the inbuilt packages. Creating the LetsEncrypt configuration is very easy and the cron job allows the renewal to automate every 90 days. I have to bounce the firewall to pick up the new certificate which I could automate - but I like to be in control of when this is done. It would be useful to have something where I can just restart a service to get that up without having firewall downtime.

I can see why they're doing it, but there are questions about cost versus benefit for users using it at home or for a home lab. It is a useful product for securing whatever you've got behind there. I can see the benefit, but I think between the community edition and pfSense Plus, there could be something in the middle for those who don't use it for corporate reasons. They want to use it for either a home lab or just for home usage.

I'm getting an excellent product for what I'm paying annually, but if the cost increases for home usage I would reconsider. It's definitely worth it for an organization to pay a higher fee for the licenses to protect their assets, but there's also a question regarding home usage. I'm happy as long as the pricing model stays the same, but I think if it increased, I'd have to decide whether to stay with it, go to the community edition, or opt for an alternative solution. I don't run pfSense on Netgate appliances, so I'm not really tied into pfSense.

I looked at OPNsense, but I haven't spent too much time on that one. I've also used the pfSense community edition, which I used for quite some time. However, I think with the changes, support, and upgrades, it's an easy decision to move to pfSense Plus.

I rate pfSense nine out of 10. It's a good product and well-configured. It has a lot of usability, and user configuration is easy. The only thing that's lacking is around the firewall logs, which are a little bit difficult. I'd like it to be easier to access them instead of going into the Status menu and then the System Logs.

Do you have any advice for new users of pfSense? How should they prepare? What should they be ready for, for example?

The first piece of advice to new users relates to the installation. If there are any issues, think about what it's asking you. One of the issues I had was around the interface allocation. It asks you to set up the interfaces, but it doesn't stop the installation from skipping through them. If there are any issues from a configuration or an installation perspective, one thing would be to look at the boot configuration and see what's going on there.  Make sure the connections are correct to the ports and then reboot the firewall. 

Regarding the dashboard, I'm working through those and looking at the information it provides you, then going bit by bit in terms of the configuration. The hardest part that I found was the VPN. Looking at the VPN as an example and then VLANs, working through the firewall rules takes a little time, and it is quite cumbersome. Rather than setting up a lot of VLANs and doing the rules across all the VLANs, the easiest way that I found was to get one working and then copy the rules across the other VLANs.

I use pfSense for my home network firewall.

I've installed pfSense on nearly every environment type, including Virtual Manager and most virtual machine hypervisors like Microsoft Hyper-V, ESXi, and even older versions like VM Player. Currently, it's running as a VM in Virtual Machine Manager on my NAS, showcasing its flexibility.

pfSense is a highly flexible product with a rich feature set. While designed with a graphical user interface in mind, it also offers command-line access for greater control. This versatility allows users to tailor the product to their specific needs.

Adding packages to pfSense is straightforward; navigate to the package manager and click "add." However, incorporating hardware, such as a dongle, is slightly more complex.

I saw the benefits of pfSense immediately. Going from a SOHO router to a pfSense one is night and day. pfSense is an enterprise-grade product that is easy to use and has a simple GUI.

The dashboard is very handy. I use mine almost daily. I can put up the widgets I want to see or remove widgets I don't want to see. It has pertinent information about my services running, any VPN connections I have, and clients connected. It's a nice dashboard.

The failover functionality for connectivity helps minimize downtime. It has also been simplified recently with some excellent added features. If I lose or corrupt my image, I can easily reinstall the operating system and restore my configuration. I'm pleased with these features of pfSense.

pfSense is a straightforward, feature-rich firewall. I am a big fan.

One area where Netgate could improve is communication with its user base. While they make an effort, much of their user base isn't composed of enterprise-level engineers who regularly read release notes and stay abreast of feature changes. A few years ago, they held a commendable meeting with forum moderators to discuss upcoming changes, which was appreciated. However, they could enhance their communication further by providing more precise information about changes and release timelines for new features.

I have been using Netgate pfSense for 13 years.

I have not contacted technical support for any technical issues. I did contact them for a replacement box, and their support was fantastic. I received the replacement box within a couple of days. I do contact their TAC when they release a new version. That process is changing with their new Netgate, the store, and everything. Previously, if we had a Netgate appliance and wanted a new image to install natively, we had to contact TAC with a ticket. The turnaround time was always excellent, just a couple of minutes. They would provide a link where we could download the image. I've been surprised by how fast they respond sometimes. Even when they're in the middle of deploying a new version, I've reached out and received a download link within five minutes. So they're usually on the spot.

Positive

Over the years, I've played with quite a few different firewalls, but I always go back to pfSense. It's a leader in its field, with its direct competition being OPNsense. There was a feud when they forked off. pfSense is the leader in that sense.

Installing pfSense should be relatively straightforward, even for a network engineer unfamiliar with the product. The process is user-friendly and guided, similar to installing an operating system like Windows. With a basic understanding of networking concepts, setting up pfSense can be accomplished within minutes. The main challenge arises when users need more fundamental networking knowledge, such as understanding IP addresses or the difference between DHCP and static configurations. For someone with networking experience, however, the installation process is quick and straightforward.

The pricing is reasonable. It costs money to run a product. It used to be completely free, and I think that's where many people became a bit disappointed when the pricing model was introduced, but I think it's a pretty fair price point. Some users don't understand that they can't offer everything for free. The development work involved costs money.

The inclusion of firewall, VPN, and router functionalities significantly reduces the total cost of ownership. In my previous role, we utilized pfSense in some locations due to its superior cost-effectiveness compared to other enterprise solutions. For smaller companies or those aiming to reduce expenses, it's a highly affordable option, and even their hardware is reasonably priced.

I rate Netgate pfSense ten out of ten.