Netgate pfSense Reviews

We use pfSense as a firewall to improve our security. 

pfSense is viable and works as it's supposed to. It prevents data loss. I've used it on several networks. It's there in the background and just works. It minimizes downtime by running dual WANs and automatically switching between two connections.

pfSense is relatively easy to set up and just runs. It's easy to use. The platform is flexible. We've been able to do everything we've tried. It seems very complete. I'm not using all of the capabilities, but it does what we want to do. 

Once you find what you're looking for, it's relatively easy to add features and configure them. Google helps out. I've been able to do anything I wanted.

The learning curve is a little long.

We deployed pfSense in the last five years. 

I rate pfSense 10 out of 10 for stability. 

It's a small firewall and we have a small network. 

I rate Netgate support 10 out of 10. I've only contacted them a couple of times, and it's been fine. They've responded quickly and done the job. 

I've only used off-the-shelf routers without a truly community-built firewall product. 

My background is in IT, so the installation is relatively straightforward once you understand a few concepts, but that's normal. I got pfSense running in a day.  d

The price of pfSense is fair. We have a relatively small network, and most of the competitors are pretty expensive. 

I rate pfSense 10 out of 10. It does everything it should do.

It's the main firewall for my household. It's also what I'm using to gain access to my employer's website and VPN. It acts as a gateway to my employers. My wife uses the device as a VPN to do her job as well.

I wanted something that is robust and makes it easy to diagnose if anything goes wrong. I'm also used to the system. I've used it since 2006 or 2007. So it was something that was really familiar with. I used to use the free solution. Last year, I decided to jump into the actual hardware devices that these guys sell. I didn't have time anymore to deal with aftermarket hardware. It saves me some time to have their devices.

The main benefit is peace of mind and no downtime or minimal downtime as compared to other solutions that I've used before.

Its ability to put some plug-ins into the system is helpful. There are a couple of packages that I'm using. Since I'm using it mainly as a firewall and sometimes as a VPN endpoint, it's really great.

The flexibility is good. The fact that you can add packages makes the device quite flexible. Also, it's quite overpowered for my needs right now, so that's a good thing. 

Price-wise, the quality to price is pretty much up there, especially when you consider that you don't have to tinker with anything. With hardware, you don't know where you know, how long it's going to last or anything like that. However, with pfSense, you have guaranteed support with NetGate, and this is great.

It's quite easy to configure. It's very intuitive. Maybe that's because I know the interface. There's also tons of of information available online. They have a very good user manual for the software as well. It's very detailed, and it's it's easy to work with. 

There's a forum where you can ask questions, and people are very friendly. Within a couple of hours, sometimes days, somebody has had the issue that you're having before. So, forum responses are quite quick.

It's really easy to work with. There's peace of mind and no downtime.

In terms of preventing data loss, any solution is only as good as its weakest point. And since this is at the very edge of my network, of the outside network, I feel I'm pretty prepared and protected from data breaches. That said, at the end of the day, I'm not opening myself up to many things in the outside world. It's blocking pretty well, and I don't feel threatened. If there's data loss, it's going to be from my end users, not from the device itself.

It provides us with a single pane of glass management for my household. There's only one device that I use.

The main advantage to me right now is that I'm using their reboot environment. It's really easy for me to update, and if some things don't go well, I can go to the previous version and be back up in no time. 

pfSense is just plug-and-play. Performance-wise, once you install the system, it works even when there's been a couple of software updates. It's probably overpowered for what I need. Performance is very good.

If I had to change internal providers, I might have some difficult times. For example, going from cable to ADSL. Right now, it suits my needs, and as long as they keep it updated, I'm pretty good with that.

I've used the solution since December 2023.

The stability is great.

I haven't had to scale the solution.

I haven't had to contact technical support. 

I have used other solutions, such as Untangle, D-Link, and Linksys. There were always a lot of limitations if you didn't adopt the commercial licenses, and those would be expensive. pfSense is reliable, especially with the NetGate hardware. It's also predictable. There's never a big software change. pfSense has been very stable since it's based on FreeBSD. However, it is on a lesser-known OS.

I use a physical device. For implementation, you have to use a console interface through a serial port and then a TTY from your own computer. For some people, maybe it's a bit more difficult. For me, it was really straightforward. It's as easy as setting up a switch. 

I loaded it up the first time and the only thing I had to do was modify my previous config, change the interface names, and just throw it back in there. It takes less than an hour.

There's only maintenance if there's an update. It might be down for a few minutes during that time. It takes maybe five to 10 minutes. Even if something goes wrong, it's pretty easy. You just reimage it and reload the safe configuration. It's much easier than other solutions, like Untangle. 

I handled the implementation myself. I did not need the help of third parties. 

The pricing is reasonable. Before I got the 6000, I was on my own devices. They developed a pricing schedule last year. At first, I was worried, however, it's maybe $130 a year and it's very reasonable compared to other solutions. With the 6000, the price is included within the device itself. 

Compared to other solutions, the total cost of ownership is very good. It's not that it is so much cheaper, it's that it fulfils the needs of more people. With the level of support provided, the price is very reasonable. 

I'd advise new users to take the time to read about the device and the software beforehand. Otherwise, you're going to waste a lot of time trying things that you think are going to work. Since it's not necessarily the same thing as, let's say, Untangle, you have to familiarize yourself with the interface and with the system before actually diving in deep.

I would rate the product ten out of ten.

The solution's most valuable features are high availability and the VPN options. Netgate pfSense has the ability to support multiple interfaces and spin up virtual IPs.

What drew me to Netgate pfSense from the beginning is that it's free, open-source software. I wanted the solution for additional control over firewall routing, and there wasn't really anything else on the market that would do that.

Netgate pfSense is very flexible. I like that it can run on enterprise bare metal and Raspberry Pi. Obviously, Netgate has a lot of appliances ranging from extremely small to extremely large.

pfSense Plus is extremely low-cost. Its comparative features include high availability, the ability to tune system variables, and support for hundreds of interfaces.

It would be great for the solution to have better logs. Some of the solution's graphs that show visibility on system performance or session count lack resolution. For example, you may only be able to see the session count by day if you want to look back more than a month.

In contrast, we would want to see the session count fluctuate by an hour or five-minute increments. It would be helpful to be able to query larger data sets, even if you had to break them up into smaller subsets.

I have been using Netgate pfSense for seven years.

The solution's scalability is very poor past 5,000 clients and impossible past 10,000 clients.

I had a very poor experience with the solution's technical support.

Negative

I switched from Netgate pfSense to Fortinet. Scalability and high availability are significantly better with Fortinet. It took me about 10 to 15 hours to set up high availability in Netgate pfSense just because of the way it works with virtual IPs and CARP.

On the other hand, it takes about 15 minutes with Fortinet. It's just a completely different experience. Also, the performance availability for appliances is a thousand times better with some of the higher-end offerings at Fortinet versus the highest-end offerings that Netgate has.

The solution's initial setup is difficult because of the extensive setup it takes to achieve high availability.

In our case, it took us around 40 hours to fully deploy the solution from start to finish.

I think Netgate pfSense's TAC or support is a little expensive, considering how inexpensive everything else is. Netgate's most expensive appliance costs around $5,000. However, an annual subscription to TAC costs around $1,000, which is roughly 20% of what you pay for the hardware. It seems a little excessive.

I would say it's pretty easy to add and configure features to Netgate pfSense. However, if you add features that Netgate does not officially support, you can run into issues with your support contracts. It's easy to add features, but it's extremely difficult to support something that is not an official Netgate plug-in.

We saw the benefits of Netgate pfSense pretty immediately after deploying it. We have been scaling, though. As we got to a very large deployment across different sites, we started to see additional problems, but then we also saw additional value added. Initially, there's a lot of value, which increases over time, but eventually, you hit a wall where it's just not that valuable.

On the surface, it looks like pfSense Plus provides visibility that enables data-driven decisions. Unfortunately, after many back-and-forths with support, they say that it looks like the firewall has done something, but there's nothing in the log. There's no data to support their theories. On the surface, it looks like it should, but we found in practice that it was missing a lot of data that would help us make decisions that we needed to make.

The solution's total cost of ownership is good for what it is. I don't think I would ever use it in an enterprise environment anymore. As a value proposition, it's really good for a small business application or a company with multiple sites that you need to be able to interconnect.

You can set up an entire ecosystem for $ 5,000 to $ 6,000 with top-of-the-line hardware from Netgate. Unfortunately, with our user account, throughput, and bandwidth, we've just outgrown it and can't use it anymore.

We've bought appliances for Netgate pfSense's deployment, and we've also deployed the solution on separate machines. Most recently, we used the appliances.

Technically, we never got Netgate pfSense to a good solid state. For the four to six months we had it in production, it was constantly down and needed at least 20 hours of maintenance a week.

Overall, I rate the solution a six out of ten.

We're primarily using the solution for testing. We're also using it internally at our own site, mostly as a reverse proxy, but also for the speed. Not all firewalls have 2.5 and and ten gig WAN ports.

The format, the layout and the interface are excellent. We really like that it is quite simple to use and straightforward. The quality, in particular, the ones we have is the Netgate unit, is particularly robust in terms of the look and feel as well as their speed and quality.

We appreciate its flexibility. Its usability is great.

We were able to witness positive results from the product pretty much immediately.

Its SD-WAN capabilities are great. The onboard storage is nice for keeping configs and logs, et cetera.

We do get a single pane of glass for management. It's well laid out and provides clear visibility into management features. Everything is easy to find within the menu bars and options. It is all very logical.

We're using the Plus version with Netgate.

pfSense does provide features to help minimize downtime. There's a failover availability, and there are high availability configurations. We don't use that; however, that's good to have if you need it. Having multiple endpoints or configurations on all of the ports is possible. It helps keep up our site and other sites.

With the logging capabilities, the solution provides visibility and enables you to make data-driven decisions. A lot of our clients are smaller, so they are nowhere near the limits of what pfSense can do by any means. 

The ease of changing parameters helps us optimize performance. It's a lot easier than what can be done with competitors, for sure. 

The solution could improve by adding in some sort of user account credentials in the sense of accommodating more levels of users. From what I've found, everybody has basically the same access. 

A formal partnership with some sort of VPN vendor, like OpenVPN, would be nice.

I've been using the solution for a couple of years. 

The stability is very good. there is no lagging or crashing. It's reliable. 

The scalability is good. However, we and our clients aren't too large. 

I've never needed to contact technical support. 

In the past, we have used Fortinet devices. pfSense is definitely easier to configure and use. It doesn't have quite the same feature set. However, that's fine - you don't always need the full feature set. We find that the add-ons that are available are fine. You just have to find them from a third party. 

The initial deployment was easy.

There isn't any maintenance needed beyond updates. The base install probably took ten minutes and to configure it properly takes two to three hours with some internal servers and multiple ISPs. You just need one person to handle the process. 

I'm using pfSense via Netgate devices, which are reasonably priced. The solution seems to be reasonable. It's well-priced for what you get. It's a bit lower than the competition if you are trying to gauge the cost of ownership. And it adapts well to different speeds.

I'm a customer and end-user. 

I'd rate pfSense eight out of ten.

If a person is familiar with firewalls, they'll be fine adopting it. The interface is pretty easy.

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.

I use pfSense to provide IT services for small businesses. They typically have a broadband or fiber connection through a router to the ISP, so they're looking for some additional security. We can get a Netgate appliance with pfSense for a few hundred dollars.

We saw the benefits immediately. I live in Edmonton, and one of my clients is a machine shop in Montreal. We configured the firewall and sent it to the shop with instructions on how to set it up. They set it up, and once it was running, I could remote in and start providing IT services to my client two time zones away.

It can help you prevent data exfiltration from the outside, but you'll always have a problem with employees who want to do bad things. It isn't a completely zero-trust approach. It has logs that will tell you if something seems odd. That requires the owner or IT professional to stay on top of it.   

The stability of the Netgate hardware and pfSense software helps to prevent downtime. At the machine shop in Montreal, we had an older Netgate model running for almost seven years, which we replaced last Christmas. It wasn't failing, but we upgraded it to ensure uptime. We spent about $200 on that device or about a few months of coffee for the office. You can deploy pfSense on your own device, but it gives the client comfort to see an actual device instead of something I cobbled together. 

I don't know if there's a particular dashboard other than the volume of data you are passing through the firewall that we check to ensure it is as expected. All of the businesses we handle are small, so we don't need some of the advanced features, such as VLANs, and I'm not going into them to fiddle with them constantly. If the power is somewhat dodgy, as it is in Montreal, they come back online in the proper configuration.  

One of the main benefits of our use case is pfSense's inclusion of OpenVPN. We can set up a server-client configuration so employees can access the office outside business hours. This enables us to provide secure remote access to their workstations and other devices inside their worksite. OpenVPN is included, so I don't need to purchase an expensive VPN solution with its own client. 

I also value the community on the pfSense website and other forums. If you're trying to set something up, there's invariably someone else who has done it before. It's open source, so the community is massive.

PfSense is quite flexible. You can tune it to meet your needs. If my client has something provisioned to their clients, we can run that through the firewall. We can also set it up so that everything is locked down and all traffic moves through the VPN. Like any other firewall, you can set up rules. I haven't encountered anything that I wanted to do that I couldn't. 

Setting up the VPN is always tricky, but adding features isn't hard overall. OpenVPN is easier to use than any other open-source VPN solution. It does all of the DHCP and DNS forwarding and other firewall tasks out of the box.  

In most of our use cases, the pfSense interface acts like a single pane of glass for me to log in, monitor, and configure. You can use the command line interface, but I use the web interface. I would only use the CLI to review logs because everything is on a text interface rather than a browser window, so it's easier. However, for a business user, the web interface is easier if they don't have any complex needs. 

Our customer's IT operations are optimized to go through the pfSense firewall and OpenVPN. It enables us to get work done without constant callouts from the clients. When we upgrade to a new unit, we give them configuration files to install on their workstations. 

They could improve the VPN wizard to make the configuration easier. I don't know what happened last time, but it was a little fiddly. Adding users isn't difficult, but it's a step that's in a different panel from the configuration of the VPN client itself. You need to create the user on the firewall and then associate that with the VPN. They should make it easier to link the firewall configuration with the VPN client.

I have used pfSense for between five to seven years.

PfSense has always been stable, even in an inhospitable environment. A machine shop is bad for devices because of all the dirt and oil, and I had one that continued running for five years without any complaints.  

I always pick a Netgate device that has sufficient hardware for each of my clients, but if I had to expand suddenly, I know Netgate has a range of devices that would work. However, I do think they focus on small and medium-sized enterprises.

I deploy pfSense on Netgate appliances. It's easy for a typical network engineer with no experience with pfSense. If you know about networking, it's an easy device to set up. Coming from a Cisco background, I found it dead simple to install. I have deployed boxes in under an hour. One person is enough to do it. The maintenance and updates are easy. I've never had an issue with updating and fixing bugs. You can do it all remotely. 

I rate Netgate pfSense nine out of 10. Having a basic understanding of networking concepts, like firewalls, routing, and VPN will help you navigate the pfSense interface. 

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. 

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 use the solution in my home network as the main firewall before all data heads out to the internet. I use it for DNS resolution as well.

I noticed the benefits of pfSense immediately after deployment. I was able to take complete control of my security to my house, and it gave me all the things that I needed in order to secure my home network.

The GUI and the user interface have been very clean, understandable, and feature-rich across the board.

The flexibility of pfSense is great. 

It is very easy to add features. 

There are features that help to prevent data loss. The rules engine of pfSense, a traditional firewall rule structure, has always been the same.

There's definitely a single pane of glass. There's definitely a lot there in front of you. 

pfSense provides visibility that enables users to make data-driven decisions. I'd rate the capabilities seven out of ten. 

Sometimes it's a bit of a challenge to know how to do something when you want to do something, for instance, setting up a point to point VPN.

Configuration is sometimes a challenge just due to a lack of knowledge on my side. I find that if I don't set up the rules correctly, and this goes to lack of knowledge of being an expert in the firewall space, it's a bit of a challenge sometimes in setting that up.

I would ask them to update it to a more modern interface, as it does look a little tired compared to GUIs today. However, the features are there. A redesign would be greatly appreciated, just from a human engineering aspect.

It might be easier if they separated things out a little bit more instead of putting all the aspects of what pfSense can do for you in a single menu. For instance, they have services, and they have all the services that you could have on your system. It's a lot.

Sometimes I find it difficult to find the data visibility that I would need in the interface to then go make a data-driven decision.

pfSense helps optimize performance. From a performance standpoint, setting up firewall rules does a great job of laying out exactly what those rules are. The layout of the firewall rules makes it easy to create a secure environment on my home network, albeit not very big. However, all the features are within the firewall, and I can create individual rules and organize the rules.

I've used the solution for six years. 

I have never experienced downtime from my pfSense device. I'd rate stability ten out of ten.

The scalability is very good. I'd rate it a ten out of ten.

I contacted technical support when there was a major upgrade a few years back, and I needed some assistance.

The quality was perfect. They were fast and very helpful. Even though I wasn't a paying customer for support, they still gave me great guidance and helped me focus on the issues at hand.

Positive

I've always had my service provider, Verizon, with their main router, and that router usually has a firewall built into it. I've never used anybody else besides pfSense outside of that.

The initial setup is straightforward. I've done it for my son at college in a matter of two hours, from unboxing to operation. It's easy to deploy a box. I can deploy it by myself.

It does not require any maintenance.

The ROI and the TCO are significant. You get a lot of features under one product. However, I don't use it as a router. I only use it for firewall and VPN capabilities and DNS.

The pricing and licensing are spot on. It's well below the industry average.

I did not look into other options. I knew of pfSense as being a leader in the industry, and that it is utilized by major corporations in large environments. To that end, I assumed it wouldn't hurt for me to have familiarity with the product and use it at home.

I'm an end-user.

I use the Plus version of pfSense. However, I do not pay for support.

I would rate the solution eight out of ten.