Netgate pfSense Reviews

It's easy to access and configure in general.  As for features, the firewall and security  options were valuable.  These are valuable because I like simple things that are easy to work with, as too much difficulty or too much constraint is not good, and boring.

It provided us with better security.

I used it for two months.

There were no issues during the time I used it.

There were no issues during the time I used it.

There were no issues during the time I used it.

It was straightforward because it's simple and easy to understand to begin using.

We used a vendor team who had a good amount of knowledge,

• Load balancer
• Multi-WAN

Network security and speed have both improved.

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

No issues encountered.

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

No issues encountered.

5/10.

5/10.

We used -

• Debian IPtables
• Squid
• I7 Patch

• Captive Portal 
• DHCP

pfSense made my life easier for controlling users and their bandwidth. My internet is not misused anymore.

RadiusServer needs some work done.

I've been using it for five years.

I've never had any problems.

Yes I did.

Since it's open source, the only support is available in public forums.

I used different routers, but because I wasn’t happy, I was trying different solutions and I found this one which was the most effective of all those I tried.

It was very straightforward.

I did it on my own.

It was free.

I looked at many hardware solutions.

Go ahead and just implement it.

• 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.

• Load balancing multi-WAN (High latency)
• Queues with CBQ algorithm
• Traffic shaper (limiter)
• Aliases for grouping anything 
• VPN (OpenVPN)
• DHCP server (with ARP reservation)
• DNS forwarder
• Firewall 
• Graphs for monitoring
• NAT

Before using pfSense:

• I always had problems with internet connection for users
• I had no idea what users were downloading and, therefore, what was killing the internet connection
• I did not have not statistics on the quality and stability of the internet
• To get a VPN I had use a pay software that offered lower performance than I have now

I always need to open different graphs on different windows of the web browser to have an overview,  Therefore, it would be good, if it is possible, to have a customizable, large dashboard.  At the moment though, the others options are good because I am a beginner with the pfSense.

I've used it for six months.

No issues encountered.

There was an issue with the Layer 7 filters on an old PC.

No issues encountered.

No previous solution was used.

It's very straightforward, even for beginners.  There is documentation and different tutorials and videos available in different languages.

I implemented it myself.

The only cost to set up is the hardware for a standard PC and any ethernet card extensions.

No, as I asked a friend they told me to get pfSense without doing other research.

Don't install pfSense on a machine with only the minimal recommended hardware configuration, but on a better machine.

• 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.