Netgate pfSense Reviews

We use Netgate pfSense as the next-gen firewall because it has a lot of additional capabilities.

The solution's most valuable features are its ease of use and versatility. You can do anything you want with it. We implemented the solution for better security at better prices.

Netgate pfSense is extremely robust and stable compared to other firewalls.

You can use Netgate pfSense as a very basic firewall or with next-generation capabilities and full monitoring. With the command line and the openness of the platform, you can do a lot of things with the tool.

It is extremely easy to add features to the solution and to configure them. We have extensive monitoring capabilities that we have configured into Netgate pfSense so that we can probably monitor any firewall available. We have also utilized the solution's DNS black holes features.

When configured properly, the solution's data loss prevention capability is absolutely top-notch. We use the solution to monitor and detect users' odd or anomalous behaviors on the network, which are usually malware-related. We also use the tool to protect against various blacklists.

We use Netgate on Amazon and have one of their firewalls. Using pfSense Plus on Amazon EC2 has helped simplify our EC2 network. It has definitely helped us with Amazon and tightening things down there.

With the inclusion of firewall, VPN, and router functionalities, Netgate pfSense's total cost of ownership has been very good. For your infrastructure, you're typically looking at five to seven years. Netgate pfSense is definitely punching above its weight in that sense because it comes at a lower cost.

Based on our experience, it lives that long and longer than what you would expect. The solution's ROI and longevity do shine in that sense.

The solution's internal logging could be improved. However, it does have some external logging capabilities. It would be more problematic if you didn't have a very robust environment. We developed our own internal API about five to six years ago, but I hear all the time on newsgroups that one of the solution's biggest problems is API.

I have been using Netgate pfSense for over 15 years.

I rate the solution a nine out of ten for stability.

Netgate pfSense is a highly scalable solution. I would say there are at least three of us who are fairly proficient with the solution, almost at an expert level. We have a few others who utilize it, but they're limited in what they can do. Most of our clients for Netgate pfSense are small and medium-sized businesses, but we also have some larger businesses.

I rate the solution’s scalability ten out of ten.

The times I've worked with the solution's technical support, they've been excellent.

I rate the solution’s technical support a ten out of ten.

Positive

We are in the managed IT space and constantly deal with numerous, big name firewall vendors. Aside from the cost alone, Netgate pfSense provides a lot of benefits. Even if Netgate were the same price as the rest of the other vendors, I would still prefer to use Netgate just because of its ease of use.

The solution's initial setup is very straightforward. There's even a built-in wizard that will take you from out of the box to basic firewall setup in about 9 steps.

The solution's deployment time depends on the complexity of the environment that you're going into. On average, the deployment takes probably less than a day. We have a team involved in the solution's deployment.

We have seen a return on investment with Netgate pfSense. We've won some bids for firewall replacement jobs based on the cost alone.

I think Netgate pfSense is very fairly priced. I think it's a great way to get people locked in by being a little bit cheaper than many other solutions. Once they see it, they wonder why they would use anything else.

One of the features of pfSense Plus is backup capabilities, which didn't really help us because we had our own backup solution built in for several years. We also keep additional firewalls available if something like a storm comes through so that we can restore the configuration in five to ten minutes without too much trouble.

pfSense Plus doesn't provide a lot of features and benefits, but we use it because we want to see them continuing to develop the solution.

Netgate pfSense gives us a single pane of glass management, but we don't live in the firewall itself. We monitor it from our single pane of glass, which we're pulling about 20 other security stack solutions into as well. We're pulling in a lot of other enterprise-level solutions, including EDR, vulnerability scans, domain filtering, etc.

Since we have a few hundred clients, we have both cloud and on-premises deployments of Netgate pfSense.

Any product requires some care and feeding. It goes back to our monitoring aspect. As a general rule, you have some firmware updates about every six months. You definitely have a few things to maintain here and there in Netgate pfSense, but it's minimal compared to other solutions.

The solution's cost alone is well worth it. I would recommend it for its adaptability to any complex environment with added security features. You can start off by just doing a standard firewall and then grow from there and really expand on its security features. I really can't think of any reasons why you wouldn't use it. Netgate pfSense is pretty much all we use, and we use a lot of different vendors when we go to different places.

Overall, I rate the solution ten out of ten.

I prefer this product because it is open source. Another thing is that it is Unix-based, so it is not affected by viruses or attacks. Support is also available.

With the right hardware, its VPN capabilities and performance are amazing.

From my usage, controlling the bandwidth for each user is valuable. Also, the availability of working as a backup or aggregating downloads is useful. All these capabilities are key.

Its interface is simple and easy.

Maybe they can add two-factor authentication.

I have been working with this solution for almost four to five years.

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

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

We have 60 to 65 users.

I have not taken any technical support from Netgate. I was able to get all the information from the web or Netgate forums. I did not use their technical support because it is an open-source and free edition.

Neutral

I used OPNsense.Using the module for controlling the bandwidth for the users in OPNsense required payment. There was also a subscription, and I dislike subscribing to any service.

It was not complex. It was straightforward. They had a wizard with ten steps. I just had to fill in the information.

It took me about 45 minutes to be completely up and running with my configuration.

There were no third parties involved. It was implemented on-site.

I am using the free version. 

I would recommend pfSense to others. It is free. Overall, I would rate it a nine out of ten. 

My use case involved having a firewall from a different vendor, which was taken over and used as a bot in a network. This incident made me reconsider my firewall provider. 

I integrated pfSense, and I have not encountered any issues since. Initially, I used it as freeware as a virtual box, and it performed well. 

About two and a half years ago, I transitioned to physical boxes. We have more than one. My use case was to connect two offices and create an extended LAN using pfSense for point-to-point connections between the data centers.

I have never had an issue with pfSense, except when attempting to configure it. When left as is, it functions well.

Support is very good.

It is rather flexible.  

Having enterprise support was immensely helpful since I have run into problems using a plugin. Without it, I might have needed to purchase a new box.

I do use pfSense Plus. We had downtime before pfSense. We've never gone down using the solution. We haven't had any performance issues.

I like the plugin systems, even though I feel like I'm playing roulette. I'm not sure if it does what I want it to do or if it will break the original capability of pfSense. Plus, having all of these dependencies may be a liability. While I appreciate their availability and wish to develop my own plugins, time constraints hinder that. 

Since the language used in the documentation is difficult for a non-English speaker, I find it hard to understand. It assumes they understand the words that are used and sometimes I feel I need to get out a dictionary to get handle on what they are talking about. They need to simplify the language a little bit. 

Using a plugin for reverse proxy allows multiple URLs to listen on port 80, rather than a single IP address for multiple servers, however, this requires changing the default port of pfSense. When I changed the default port, I experienced difficulty accessing the device. I thought my password was incorrect, when in fact, the port change was the issue. I had to connect to the physical device using a special cable. While I found this surprising, I am too paranoid to use SSH due to its perceived vulnerability.

We're a security company. We provide solutions to prevent hacking. pfSense is really good at preventing outside access; however, as an attacker, there are endless opportunities to attack. There's no way for me to know who or what pfSense is blocking or preventing. pfSense doesn't tell you any information.

I've been using the solution for two to three years. 

I receive popup notifications indicating that we have run out of memory due to some unknown reason, despite using only 20% of the device's memory. I am unsure of the cause. There is nobody that can give me a good answer to this issue. Occasionally, I receive emails from sales about updates, however, sometimes, the device does not detect these updates.

We have not reached the point where it becomes stressed. Our device isn't that big in terms of size since we don't have a lot of big users. No one has complained of buffering or response times. Our internet is likely slower than our pfSense. 

I was really happy having enterprise support when issues arose. Without this support, I probably would have bought a new box.

We have premium support. It helps me as I didn't feel comfortable with all of the responsibility. It's helped us with tech IDs and getting into the system when there have been issues. 

Positive

Management provides a budget for purchases. Initially, I bought a product based on appealing flyers and sales promises. However, after purchase, I realized it was not as secure as anticipated. I liked that pfSense started off as partially open-source. We trusted the technology.

We don't do cloud services. We have an on-premies setup and wanted to use pfSense in our on-premises cloud. It works really well and we are very comfortable with it. We do a lot of research with nasty malware and have not seen anything able to hack it yet. We've done so many deployments that we're very comfortable with the setup and capabilities.

You just power it on and follow the Wizard. If somebody has never done any firewalls, they should do what the tech says.

I'm the only person that is allowed to touch it and I'm the only one with access. We have four sites and no issues. We've abused one of the plugins, the pfBlocker, that has a subscription URL that can get malicious actors and help us block their IP. We can update the firewall rules almost in real-time. That's the basic maintenance we do. It's mostly automated.

There are occasional updates, and we get notices. Sometimes, the devices do not see the update, and I get paranoid that it's a phishing attempt. I'm not sure of this is a bug or not. 

If instructed by my boss, I can complete tasks within four hours, adhering to pfSense's SLA. I don't mind being challenged. 

Monetary concerns are not my focus; I cannot justify saving on the firewall for personal expenses. 

I would recommend the solution to other users, including potential government clients. I've invited others to try and hack it, to showcase how robust it is, and no one can. It's impressing people. They're saying, "I need to get one of those."

I would rate the overall product seven out of ten. I'm stressed out by the documentation. I do have an interest in doing a pfSense certification course. The documentation is holding me back from giving me a ten. 

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.

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 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 pfSense as a small business firewall and as a VPN gateway. 

PfSense provides us with a cost-effective but reliable network appliance. We have a standard networking device that lower-end help desk people can use effectively. It's less complicated. We moved from another platform that although the hardware was reliable, the software wasn't particularly reliable, and it was difficult to use.

It helps our operations because it's a standard platform anyone on our help desk can use. Every site will be pretty much the same. Once cloud management comes out, it'll be even better. 

PfSense is fairly simple to configure and has a good administration interface. It's built on pfSense, so I know it'll be reliable. It is quite flexible, and adding and configuring features is pretty easy. There's a lot of support for add-ons, and we can do a lot of stuff with it, so it suits our needs perfectly.

It secures against data loss pretty well. Plus only has a few additional features over the Community Edition. We mainly use Plus because it comes with the Netgate hardware.

The only feature I want to add is cloud management. I'll be an early adopter of that one. We're ready for that feature, and it's one of the few missing things, so that'll be excellent when it comes.

Another thing that's primarily an issue for us is that Netgate may soon stop production of the 1100. That's what we use for our telephony gateway. It doesn't need to be high performance, but it does need to be low cost. If they stop it and make the 2100 the lowest, that will be problematic for us. We will need to start using something else because it will become too expensive for our purposes. 

Effectively, we are using it as just a VPN gateway, and 1100s are great for that. What's annoying is that we cannot buy the 1100s directly because we're not a partner, and it isn't approved for connection to Australia, so we need to buy it through a company that went out and got it approved. We lose a bit of margin doing it that way. We can buy 2100s and above directly, but we must go through a reseller to get 1100s.  

I have used pfSense for two years.

I rate pfSense nine out of 10 for stability.

Netgate pfSense is scalable.

I rate Netgate support seven out of 10.

Neutral

We have used some other hardware, but the software was a dog. It's pretty difficult. We've also used some UniFi solutions, which are good, but they haven't sorted out the VPN component, so we'll continue using Netgate. Once they work out the kinks in their software, they'll possibly have a compelling solution. 

However, if Netgate stops selling the 1100, that could be quite problematic for us, and we'll probably go with Ubiquiti because it's too expensive to use 2100s for VPN appliances. 

PfSense is straightforward to deploy once you know what to do. It's a one-person job and takes a couple of hours. After deployment, it requires upgrades, but that's it.

The total cost of ownership is good because you buy it upfront and don't need to pay a subscription fee. We've spent a bit more, but we pass that along to the customer. In the end, everyone wins because they get a reliable solution, and we get something much easier to manage. 

I rate pfSense five out of five for pricing. It's fairly priced. We wouldn't buy it if it weren't. There are cheaper firewall options, but they aren't as reliable and easy to manage. Of course, there are also more expensive ones.

No ongoing subscription fee is nice because many of them are small businesses that don't want to pay for an ongoing subscription. It's always being updated, so that's good from a security perspective.

I rate Netgate pfSense seven out of 10. I would recommend it to others.