Netgate pfSense Reviews

I have used it in town halls with a number of employees ranging between 40 and 60. I have also used it in educational institutions.

The use and results may vary according to the objectives of the institutions. 

In the case of city councils, I have taken the maximum advantage, taking into account that they were small institutions for which the tools provided by pfSense were sufficient according to the requirements of those institutions. 

However, in educational institutions, it was more difficult. Sometimes, the tools have fallen short.

• The part of the firewall and aliases
• The content filter in non-transparent mode and transparent mode with Squid and SquidGuard
• The possibility of adding packages to perform network analysis
• Creation of certificates
• The facility to administer services

The product is good in many of its departments, but this should make HTTPS filtering more efficient since Squid falls short when using man in the middle. It works, but it is not 100% efficient. It requires more attention to provide a better alternative for open source to small government or educational institutions with reduced budgets in terms of technology.

• Port routing policies
• Load balancing
• Clustering

We've been able to get call center traffic optimisation over multiple WAN and Point2Point Connections with a failover policy. The call center has different types of traffic (VoIP, Internet, Stream etc.) and every kind of traffic has its own policy. For example VoIP needs to be have high availability & a priority to maintain a non-stop custom service, while that of internet traffic can be lowered in priority and even cut when some WANs are unavailable to prioritize VoIP. I think that having this kind of complex configuration & tunning with a robust open solution, is a good value.

• v0.x for three years
• v1.x for two years
• v2.x for three years

There have been no deployment issues since v0.x.

Yes, sometimes there are issues if there are some complex configurations. When working with load balancing ADSL modems, I've noticed that pfSense "fools" the modem and it becomes unresponsive until it is restarted. This issue doesn't affect pfSense, but it is the root cause of a hung ADSL modem.

No issues encountered.

I've never used them.

I've never used them.

No previous solution was used.

The initial setup is easy. This is because the pfSense setup is like a Windows installation (wizards, choose option, click next etc.) unlike some others.

We implemented it in-house.

This solution can be used for a firewall, VPN, and VLAN.

The main features of this solution are customization and ease to use.

The configuration of the solution is a bit difficult.

I have been using the solution for one year.

The solution is stable.

I have found this solution to be scalable.

The technical support was good in my experience.

The installation is easy and can take approximately one day.

We did the implementation of the solution and we have five technicians available for implementation and maintenance.

My advice to those wanting to implement this solution is that if you are new to configuring this solution I would seek assistance. You most likely will have problems if you have not done it before.

I rate pfSense an eight out of ten.

I use pfSense firewall, especially as an IPSec VPN Server. There are several VPN connections with equipment of various manufacturers at the other end.

I use ServerU as hardware instead of an ordinary PC, as most other people usually do.

The gain in performance and security from configuring the VPN connections was significant, since pfSense has replaced a server with a custom Linux open source version, which was running on outdated hardware.

Security and stability. The pfSense server acts as "IPSec VPN Server" for a small financial institution, but regardless of the company size, interruptions would cause significant financial impact.

pfSense serves us very well. My only observation is about the quality of the IPSec logs, which are difficult to interpret and are poor in filters. I have more than 10 IPSec VPN connections, and when there is a need for troubleshooting, the logs are of little help.

With regard to this configuration, I consider it a stable solution.

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

The reporting and monitoring applications improve our organization.

Load balancing of multiple networks

3 Year

Compatibility Issues

None

None

None

Excellent

Yes

Simplest

Extraordinary

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

• Firewall
• DHCP
• VPN

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

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

I've used it for over three years.

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

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

8/10.

9/10,

It was done by external technical support.

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

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

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

pfSense is very valuable as previously I had to use Microsoft's TMG solution. After some research, when I got stuck configuring a physical machine with many VMs, I noticed that pfSense, as a firewall, uses less resources. I started to test it on a simple PC, and I have now seen how I can benefit from open source software. So therefore, the most valuable feature is that it uses less resources than a physical machine.

It is free of charge. I am living in country where this is not so important yet, as no one controls the licenses of software. However, our company tries to look forward and prevent issues that may happen in the future. So it being free, and easy to configure, are the benefits for us.

I think that areas for improvement are not closely related with the work of pfSense but with its components, meaning the packages. I am faced with little problems when I install none-recommended (beta) versions. But, I also understand that these versions are mostly for developers, who are trying to contribute their best efforts for open source.

I have been using pfSense as a firewall solution for approximately eight months.

When I started to test it in a real environment, it was on a physical machine and I was faced with problems. It was that the freeBSD wouldn't detect my USB keyboard, but after waiting a while, it eventually worked. In a virtual environment, I had no problems.

Just once. One of our customers had an issue with their electrical stability. The electrical supply was jumping, and playing about, and when it was happening pfSense stopped.

It depends actually, and to be honest, I have never used all the available features of this product, but I believe that there should not be any issues with the scalability.

I have never used the customer service for pfSense. I have read the manuals, but have never contacted customer service.

I have never used it.

I previously used Microsoft's TMG solution. I switched because after some research when I got stuck configuring a physical machine with many VMs, I decided to use pfSense.