Netgate pfSense Reviews

• Snort
• CARP
• Load balancing
• VPN

• Reduced the cost of our firewall solution
• Enhanced throughput compared with similar priced devices
• Stability
• Reliability

I'm no expert on this subject, and the OS performs all that is required.

I've used it for over one year.

No issues encountered.

We've only had to do one reboot in six months.

None as yet, because the solution hasn't reached capacity yet.

I'm yet to use the official tech support as the community provides all that I have required.

• Sonicwall
• Cisco ASA

We switched due to licensing costs and scalability.

It's relatively simple and straightforward, with enough documentation avalable online for the average user to install and setup.

£2000+

This product supports multiple ISP's, so it's good for implementation.

It's made us more productive.

FTP was not allowed, and it didn't indicate during set up whether FTP was to be allowed or disabled.

I've used it for about one year.

The stability is good.

The stability is good.

The technical support is good.

It's free.

All the other features are good, and with it being free, it is very attractive to the users.

• 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.

• Battery backup
• True processor power at low energy cost
• Expansion possibilities
• Low noise emission

We like it mostly for being able to use BSD compiled software inside it. It is flexible, fast, powerful and full of features, such as an easy proxy filter, and clustering along with an easy and well developed web based interface.

Kernel support for laptop features, USB/Firewire ethernet cards, and specially built in WLAN cards. If the WLAN functions work properly, pfSense makes a perfect "repeater" or controlled and robust accessed point with built in QoS and firewall. Wider support for 3G and 4G USB cards as backup networks would be nice too. It was impossible to get some USB stuff to work.

We've used it for two years, with an HP Elitebooks 8350 for battery backup.

No issues encountered.

I got terrible kernel crashes on HP laptops while trying to setup WLAN, but it worked better on Fujitsu ones.

It has worked as expected so far.

I have never needed it.

I have never used it.

We have mostly used Cisco products. Their products feels like we are back in the stoneage when compared to pfSense. We switched as we needed more power (as traffic, bandwidth and user accounts grew). pfSense was one good clear substitute, and Cisco is too expensive if you want real throughput power, and it was too hard to administrate when we compared it with pfSense. also, anyone can learn pfSense pretty fast because of the intuitive web interface), and there is never trouble with invalid licenses. The features like IPS (snort/suricata) are well developed and can be used for free or at a small cost for extra security. The most valuable of all though, is that we could recycle old hardware to make our perfect firewalls, reducing the hardware cost.

It was easy.

We implemented these ourselves.

It's hard to say. The setup goes pretty fast and, once you know the hardware to be used, it will work, so there was no significant amount of time there. The laptops used in this project were already recycled and had enough power for us to make a cluster and be happy with them, so it pretty much only cost us the price of some 3G modems and some USB network interfaces. Maybe not more than 200 Euros per machine.

We evaluated IPCop and m0n0wall. We took a vote on our team and pfSense won the deal.

If you are unsure, do a labtest before you implement it. If you are still stuck on the traditional "stoneage" products, you may get amazing results.

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.