Great Enterprise Firewall
What do you like best about the product?
I think pfSense is performant, powerful, and stable. It's got active development, and while I think the pace of innovation is kind of slow. I believe it's one of the best open source firewalls made. It's FreeBSD base provides a great stable base and wonderful networking capabilities. This router really can do everything a Cisco can and more.
What do you dislike about the product?
I think the project tends to shy away from things like configuration management and newer "hot" technologies because they have alternatives coming down the pipeline. Which is great, and I look forward to things like pfCenter, but not having at least some hooks in Ansible is a problem. When things get brought up on forums, people can be nasty. But I guess that's the internet for you.
I wish the base OS was more vanilla FreeBSD w/pfSense packages that could be installed on top. Sometimes I want to do things and I'm afraid to add packages that are outside of the official pfSense package list because there's a fear it could bork the system.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Replacing more expensive firewalls and getting much more performance.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Read the documentation, take the official training. Buy support if you have questions or need help.
pfSense is the my favorite firewall distribution
What do you like best about the product?
It's absolutely free and it's in my opinion better then many of the enterprise class firewalls I've been in contact with. It's easy to manage, easy to update to newer versions, and best of all it's easy to extend. For example you can extend it with IDS/IPS (Snort), reverse proxies, various tunnel services, network landing sites etc.
What do you dislike about the product?
I shouldn't say everything about pfSense is a walk in park, there have been hick-ups along the way. For example, not to long ago (3-4 years ago) there was a problem with Snort rules not being saved or overwritten with every update of the database. Also it's IPv6-support was a bit late (but on the other hand, so was a lot of other firewall vendors as well). Some services you'll have to tweak manually by editing files, but for most of the time (99.9%) you won't have to do this.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
pfSense it my goto firewall solution when either friends or customers is in the need of a firewall/router solution. Since it can run of old or cheap hardware (beware of the throughput though) it saves both myself and my customers money. And besides, it's great for security.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
A tip of advice, if you are to run pfSense on a flash drive, don't forget to enable a RAM-disk for the logs or you'll end up with a dead flash drive within weeks. Trust me, it happen to me. Go to System -> Advanced -> Miscellaneous and scroll down to RAM Disk Settings and the "Use RAM disks". Then pfSense will use your RAM for /var and /tmp. This prevents the system from constantly writing writing log files to the flash drive, which can me many thousand entries per second, which will wear out the drive very fast.
pfSense
What do you like best about the product?
What I like the best is how versatile it is and it performs as well as other name brand routing platforms. It is easy to customize for my client's needs.
What do you dislike about the product?
I am completely satisfied with pfSense and it has met all my expectations. I have not experienced an issue with pfSense.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Making custom routers for my diverse clients. The benefit of pfSense is that it is quality software for a fraction of the cost of the competitors.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Make the switch to pfSense and use reliable hardware. It is worth it. I have had less problems with pfSense than any other product I have used.
Good product, but phenomenal support
We're migrating away from NAT instances and six Virtual Private Gateway connections to a single instance running pfSense. So far, everything works well and we'll cut our VPN costs by more than 50%. Good stuff.
But wow, what support! I opened a ticket to get some help configuring IPSec tunnels, and was instantly into a live session with their support rep – and it turned into a multi-hour marathon with a highly capable tech on the other end. We wound up debugging a whole bunch of things beyond the simple IPSec problem, and he stuck with it until we had everything up and running smoothly.
So yeah, the product is good, the pricing is good, but the people behind it are awesome!
2 hours in and I've made no progress
The "quick start guide" (that's anything but) isn't up to date, isn't easy to read and I think makes assumptions that aren't clear to me (new to VPCs and networking on AWS, but I have 15 years in planning and building networks).
I wanted to like this despite the $50/mo premium, but I can't get it running for lack of clear documentation so for now, it's useless.
The one and only firewall
What do you like best about the product?
Many options for configure a free and open source firewall to protect and manage your private cloud
What do you dislike about the product?
Too many options and old style interface (a newer version with new UI is coming)
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Full mange of our private cloud
Open Source Enterprise Grade Firewall
What do you like best about the product?
This is easily the most configurable open source firewall project I have come across.
If you want to build your own rather than buy rack based commercial products then i highly recommend.
We have full control and transparency over our perimeter with this solution.
The array of plugins available is great and integration of proven IDS and IPS solutions is very good also.
Over all its very good.
What do you dislike about the product?
Its very hard to configure, and sometimes getting the right instruction for your version can be a nightmare.
Very steep learning curve but worth it.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
As a smaller business PFSense has enabled us to comply with legislation and ISO certification without breaking the bank.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Stick with it, but do some test builds and hardening before going live.
Lots of gotchas to work out.
Saved us £100's on a fantastic Router
What do you like best about the product?
pfSense is the ultimate free alternative to a router worth thousands!
It has all of the features most small businesses need.
Its easy to setup and configure as well as being secure and very powerful.
What do you dislike about the product?
The GUI does look slightly dated although the functionality is ideal.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
We avoided spending hundreds on a high end router/firewall by re-purposing retired hardware.
We use pfSense as our main office firewall and for VPN and content filtering.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Well worth switching to! you will not regret it.
Works like charm.
I have been using pfSense for many years. Its amazing project/product having more 200 000 users globally. I have build own AMI for AWS and understand a lot of work put in to pfSense to run on AWS. New version coming 2.3 will brings a lot that helps to upgrade process on AWS with Repositories etc.
If you understand how AWS network plumbing works then you will have no problem to use pfSense. It is reasonable price for all features it offers. If you can take advantage of many features you will save a lots of money using pfSense compare to other products. Its all about to be able do design it all well.
We use pfSense on AWS and is great to forward AWS DNS records using DNS resolver. Multi global IP address allocation per single interface using Virtual IPs functions with Elastic Global IP. Provide internet access to many servers and much more.
I recommend this product for AWS.
Nice product
AWS native VPNs cant have more than 1 tunnel between the same endpoints ( 2 per region ) .
Pfsense Software VPNs solve the problem .
- Not in AMI user guide : disable Source/Destination Check for the instance created on AWS console. I waste a lot of time to figure this out .
