Netgate pfSense Reviews

• We only use our pfSense as a stateful packet inspection firewall. 

• We have around 10 VLAN interfaces with many allow/block policies, VIPs, and NATs. 
• Running on VMware as a virtual machine.

The main improvement was we were able to replace our old hardware-based firewall with a virtual machine having HA.

The ability to perform packet captures on the command line and via the GUI is useful for diagnosing problems.

• I would like to see multiple DNS servers running on individual interfaces. 

• It would be useful to manage firewall policies on a source interface and destination interface basis.

We use this solution as our firewall, proxy, IDS, IPS, and VPN.

This solution has increased the level of security, given us more control, provided a deep insight into network traffic, and is a great VPN solution.

The most valuable features are the Proxy IPS and VPN.

We would like to see ready-made profiles to cover most users' needs. 

• 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.

While it is difficult for me to point to any one specific advantage of the solution in respect of the firewall, I do know that it has many benefits. For one, it is open source. 

The stability could be improved. Whenever there is an update, in spite of developments I may have made, I am required to make certain changes to the coding. 

I have been using pfSense for perhaps two or three years. 

The stability could be better. 

The solution seems to be scalable. 

The solution is easy to set up.

I develop the solution on behalf of my company. 

With my scant knowledge of networking and the firewall I would rate pfSense as an eight out of ten. 

pfSense is very good because it allows us to do what we want.

The solution could improve by having centralized management and API support online.

I have been using pfSense for a long time.

I have found pfSense to be stable.

We are providing support for our customers here in Sweden.

The initial setup of pfSense is simple.

The price of pfSense is reasonable. However, there is a free version available.

My advice to those wanting to implement pfSense is to start out with the free version before going with the appliance.

I rate pfSense a ten out of ten.

• Firewall rules 
• Modules, e.g. Squid

It was very useful for our DHCP network (guests) and web browsing filtering.

I think the product has improved greatly, so I actually don't know.

I've used it for one year.

No, it's very easy to deploy.

Absolutely not, as the product is stable like a rock.

No need to scale in.

We've used the community version.

We have WatchGuard Firewall and pfSense firewall.  They are used together and not as a substitution.

We just had some small problems with setting up the modules.  However, there was lots of documentation available online so there were no problems at all.

We implemented it in-house.

Well it was great as I didn't need to buy a new firewal..

Close to zero, because we've used an internal server for it.

No other options were evaluated.

It's a good product, and it really could be a valid firewall solution.

Firewall and VPN, Internet link balancing, as the proxy was installed on another machine. Used redundant firewall as a cluster.

Improved service performance and availability through redundancy. The company already had specialists in Linux, which facilitated the project.

Ease of monitoring and placement of other packages and functionalities next to the equipment.

Improve analysis of logs and dashboards (control panel) with improved alert functionality.

We just did not like its QoS interface.

We tested the solution for a very short period (one week), to compare it to Zeroshell. The idea was to decide which one to use. Our main focus was QoS.

No issues to deploy PFSense; it was straight forward.

PFSense sounded like the de-facto standard for simple SOHO solutions. We just did not like its QoS interface. For us, it seemed very "rigid" compared to Zeroshell. So we went back to Zeroshell because we considered that its QoS interface had much more flexibility and its latest version now even included nDPI too.

Initial setup was very straightforward; the interface is very self-explanatory.

Implementation was done in-house.

We also evaluated Zeroshell.