I use pfSense as my primary home router and edge gateway. My professional background is primarily in security engineering, though I focus more on pre-sales technical engineering. Due to my extensive experience in direct and security information management over the past decade, I leverage pfSense's capabilities to generate much of the data in my SIM system. This data is essential for laboratory purposes, testing, rule development, and use case creation. As a result, pfSense is a crucial component in securing both my home network and laboratory environment.

I appreciate pfSense's flexibility because I previously encountered issues with hardware reliability. While I'll eventually order dedicated pfSense hardware, I experienced consistent problems with SSD corruption. Frustrated with this, I considered switching to OpenSense. However, I discovered its potential after running pfSense in a virtual environment. The ability to easily create snapshots and recover from mistakes is invaluable. Ultimately, I've decided to continue using pfSense virtually due to its flexibility and convenience.

The ease of adding features and configuring them in pfSense depends on a user's familiarity with FreeBSD and network analytics. While I have extensive experience building firewalls from raw FreeBSD, pfSense offers a user-friendly interface that accelerates setup for newcomers. Its underlying FreeBSD foundation allows advanced users to access and configure low-level features. I appreciate pfSense's intuitive GUI and the secure default configuration provided during initial installation.

After the initial setup process, I immediately recognized the value of pfSense. The straightforward configuration questions provided a solid foundation, making the benefits apparent. While every implementation requires tailored adjustments, pfSense offers a versatile platform to explore various use cases. My primary focus was extracting in-depth information beyond standard firewall logs, such as detailed Suricata events and DNS server activity. As I delved deeper, I discovered pre-built packages that simplified data export to tools like Prometheus and InfluxDB, often meeting most of my requirements without extensive customization.

The advanced pfSense firewall rules offer significant advantages, such as implementing threat intelligence to block malicious actors from accessing our network. Configuring pfSense for radius or two-factor authentication can enhance security by preventing unauthorized access to our environment. These features are among the reasons I appreciate pfSense.

pfSense offers a centralized view of network data, but its built-in dashboards are sufficient for many users. As a fan of Grafana, I prefer a consolidated approach and could utilize pfSense data through either Prometheus or InfluxDB. However, extracting all data for central aggregation, as I'm accustomed to in threat management, aligns more with my preferred workflow. Nevertheless, the ability to customize dashboards within pfSense to monitor firewalls, DNS, and other critical services is valuable and meets the needs of many users, including those focused on point-of-service operations.

pfSense offers several features designed to minimize downtime, including failover, synchronization between routers, and ZFS snapshotting. While these tools effectively reduce downtime, I believe virtualization snapshotting and backups provide the best solution for my needs. Ideally, I would have multiple pfSense routers with a redundant setup, but budget constraints currently limit me to virtualization. Ultimately, the best approach depends on individual requirements and resources.

pfSense provides visibility that enables me to make data-driven decisions.

pfSense's visibility into system performance enables optimization at various levels. The initial user interface provides valuable information about RAM usage, active services, and general health. In contrast, more advanced users can access in-depth kernel-level data for granular insights into system behavior. By offering tools for novice and experienced users, pfSense empowers practical understanding and management of system resource allocation.

I appreciate pfSense's foundation on FreeBSD, which enables me to leverage additional FreeBSD packages for expanded functionality. WireGuard, a core feature I constantly rely on, facilitates my home and mobile devices' constant connection to my home network, allowing complete traffic monitoring and filtering. I value Pia ad-block's effectiveness in network traffic filtering, ad blocking, and malware prevention. Unbound's flexible DNS server complements the robust firewall, which is user-friendly and flexible for rule creation.

I've encountered persistent issues with the solid-state drives built into pfSense hardware devices. The devices consistently malfunctioned despite repeated attempts to resolve the problem, including complete reinstallation. Power outages significantly contributed to the issue, as frequent system corruption occurred following these events. Even after reformatting, bad sectors persisted on several drives across at least three purchased devices. Unfortunately, this has rendered some units utterly unusable due to recurring disk corruption.

While there seems to be support for virtual environments, I believe some modules specifically support VirtualBox. Unfortunately, I've had to customize my own setup again. To accommodate users on platforms like Proxmox, I need to install the QEMU Guest package to provide native support for such environments, similar to other open-source virtualization solutions like KVM. Out-of-the-box QEMU Guest support would be beneficial. I appreciate the inclusion of Suricata, Snort, WireGuard, and Telegraph, which work well behind the scenes. The Prometheus node exporter is also present. Having used pfSense for a decade, I continually discover new functionalities. Surprisingly, some features I needed were already available, but better discovery mechanisms within the product could help users explore them. I would like to see out-of-the-box QEMU support.

I have been using Netgate pfSense for ten years.

Stability has been a concern for me. Hardware-wise, performance has been inconsistent. Software stability has also been an issue, particularly during significant upgrades. I've encountered various problems that required troubleshooting. However, I've noticed a substantial improvement in stability and ease of use for upgrades and patching over the past year or two. While there have been occasional setbacks, such as with the new packet exporter feature, pfSense has become much more reliable overall.

The scalability is good because I started with a simple network, WAN, and LAN setup and expanded it to multiple LANs, VPNs, and internal networks.

Technical support has been good, especially for hardware issues. Whenever my image was corrupted, I could always count on them to send a new NISO image within a few days without questions. However, I don't need much support for configurations or other technical aspects as I prefer to experiment and learn by trial and error in my lab environment. That's the fun part for me.

I was going to move to OpenShift, but I never made the jump. Eventually, I think my saving grace was my ability to virtualize pfSense. Once I do that, I can bounce back from misconfigurations or something wrong. I have had no problems with pfSense since I got off the harness.

A skilled networking engineer unfamiliar with pfSense can easily configure a firewall. Setting up a NAT barrier between internal and external networks is straightforward; this functionality is included by default. VLAN configuration and other initial setup questions are addressed during the product's initial setup process, the specifics of which depend on the intended use case.

The average time to set up one pfSense box is 15 to 20 minutes.

One person is enough to deploy pfSense.

I prefer the software licensing model. In contrast, hardware costs can be substantial; I once paid around $400 for a piece of equipment, perhaps two or three years ago. I believe they've made improvements since then, although I can't recall the exact model number, as I moved from the smaller SG 1100 to the SG 2100 to accommodate more advanced features requiring additional RAM. Unfortunately, I encountered another hardware failure with the latter.

The cost of ownership is low, especially when purchasing the pfSense Plus and virtualizing it.

I would rate Netgate pfSense eight out of ten.

I use the paid version of pfSense because I constantly was replacing faulty hardware. The previous physical appliances struggled to handle the network load, so I switched to a virtualized solution.

pfSense can be essentially set and forgotten in basic configurations, but utilizing advanced features like Suricata IDS and TF blocking necessitates regular maintenance to ensure rule updates and system synchronization. Consistent care and attention are required for optimal performance in these scenarios.

I recommend that new users keep things simple with pfSense. While I enjoy pushing my products to their limits, simplicity contributes to a more stable system overall.

The benefits I have seen in my organization from the use of Netgate pfSense rewards around the fact of how quickly we can implement changes that are needed with the tool are definitely one of the main things. Overall, we have experienced less downtime with the tool. In my organization, we have had downtime with Cisco. Overall, we have noticed some performance increases as well with the use of Netgate pfSense.

The solution's most valuable feature is that I really like the third-party add-ons, as they give the firewall a ton of flexibility and extra functionalities.

My organization plans to solve costs-related problems by using Netgate pfSense. We were using Cisco's firewall products, and the license and hardware costs were just too high. With Netgate pfSense, I think we can get a full firewall tool with support and no need for licensing for under 5,000 USD, saving a ton of money.

There were no specific security issues or challenges I was trying to address using Netgate pfSense.

In terms of the overall flexibility offered by the product, I would say that it is very easy to implement, make changes, and adapt to different challenges that we may have with it. It offers a lot of different options, including VPN options for site-to-site client VPNs. Overall, it is a great tool. It is a highly adaptable solution that is, most importantly, very easy to implement.

It is extremely easy to add features to Netgate pfSense and configure them. If you are talking about third-party stuff, it is something that is within the firewall itself. You can go into the Package Manager and install it.

From a configuration point of view, it is extremely easy to use the tool. With third-party stuff, it can be a pain, but overall, it is extremely easy to manage Netgate pfSense since it is mainly a GUI-driven tool. It is super easy to configure overall.

If I assess the solution for helping our organization prevent data loss, I think it has been great for us. Everything has room for improvement, but it has been great right now.

Netgate pfSense provides our organization with a single pane of glass management. The tool offers great flexibility and is awesome. In our organization, we haven't had any issues with it. It just makes changes that need to be done extremely quickly and efficiently by the end of the day.

I have worked with Netgate pfSense Plus. I buy the hardware from Netgate, and it comes with pfSense Plus.

Netgate pfSense Plus provides 100 percent features that help minimize downtime. In extreme situations, implementing connections that were super helpful in the past and just the ease of deployment, the product offers is helpful since even if something happens to the firewall itself, I can have a virtualized firewall doing the same thing within less than an hour. It can help with that downtime. I know that Netgate pfSense is extremely reliable and a great tool.

Netgate pfSense provides 100 percent visibility, enabling my organization to make data-driven decisions. Netgate pfSense is very much configurable. It gives you 100 percent of everything you need to make decisions. It gives you details of all kinds of different graphs, traffic, and firewall rules, along with the things that you definitely need in the form of the data that you need to be able to just make quick data-driven decisions.

Netgate pfSense visibility helps me optimize performance. The data is just so easily accessible that you can make decisions very quickly. It also helps improve performance. In our organization, we have noticed a very noticeable performance increase since we shifted from the old firewall from Cisco to Netgate pfSense.

If I were to assess the total cost of ownership of Netgate pfSense, I would say it is extremely low and affordable. I think it is a really very simple and extremely budget-friendly tool.

In our organization, we have had such a good experience with Netgate pfSense over the last four years. In terms of improvements, I have not really thought much, to be quite honest. Maybe faster releases for the software or the firewall itself can be areas where improvements are possible. The tool is just a little bit slow to release patches, so it is probably one of the things where the tool can improve. In general, the tool is not bad at all at the end of the day.

Speaking about whether any enhancements are required in the tool, I would say that the tool has everything that we need for our usage. We have an extremely complex environment, the most complex of which is how we use Netgate's BGP to connect to our ISP. Netgate pfSense is extremely feature-rich for our specific use scenarios, and we have not encountered any shortcomings in the solution.

I have been using Netgate pfSense for around four years. The box itself says Netgate pfSense XG-1540. I don't remember the software version we are using right now, but all I know is that I keep it up to date. In my organization, it will be the latest version of the product.

I have not faced any issues with the stability of the product. I have one firewall in a very bad physical environment. It was very dusty, but it has been 100 percent reliable.

It is an extremely scalable solution.

In our school, we have close to 1,800 students and 210 teaching staff overall. With administrative staff, I think there are about 50 people.

I have the tool in different locations and on different campuses.

If I can call someone from the product's technical support team, l can have a technical person on the phone with me in less than five minutes. If you have any questions for them, they will come and try to give you the answer as quickly as they can, and if they don't have a reply, they will reply to you later via email. For the amount that it costs per year, the level of service that you get is unbeatable, honestly. I rate the technical support a ten out of ten.

The product's initial setup phase was extremely straightforward.

When we deployed the product for the first time, we went through its documentation and how to do things. Otherwise, the strategy is usually based on the fact that we have four campuses, and they run in a similar manner. At least for us, we have a master configuration sort of thing, which we can kind of load into Netgate pfSense and make the small changes that we need, like VLAN changes and small things that apply to the location that the device will be deployed to, and it takes less than probably an hour or two to kind of have a firewall deployed working with the bare minimum, which is extremely fast compared to what it takes with Cisco.

In terms of maintenance, it has been pretty much like we do the setup and then forget it. The firmware updates, or physical maintenance, like cleaning the device, are there. From a greater overview, it is just kind of a set-it-up-and-forget kind of solution for us.

The product's deployment was done in-house, and it involved just me. The enterprise-level support from Netgate helped my organization a lot, especially during the first two deployments, but after that, it was easy.

Personally, I do not have any metrics or data points associated with the ROI that I can share with anyone. My CFO is the person who has information related to ROI.

In our organization, the whole point of moving to Netgate pfSense was that we wanted something that wasn't hard to use or where the licensing wasn't so expensive. We looked at different open-source options, but I can't remember their names. We also looked at UniFi's firewall, but Netgate pfSense came on top for us, considering the support provided and the fact that Netgate's team is the main set of people that keep up with pfSense's open-source project. With Netgate, we work directly with people who use Netgate pfSense, and it is great. We did look at other options, one of which was UniFi, but I cannot remember the name of the other alternative to Netgate pfSense. I think it is called OPNsense.

Suppose I compare the other tools I evaluated with Netgate pfSense, and I feel that the pros of pfSense revolve around the area associated with the product's cost in terms of hardware requirements and licensing. There are no existing costs for the licensing or the hardware. You can deal with the licensing part yourself and get it at a cheap rate from elsewhere or buy it from Netgate's boxes directly from the solution company. Another pro would be the ease of management the tool offers since it is possible to have everything that you need in the GUI, which is a little bit controversial because a lot of people like CLI, but sometimes you need to get something quickly without having to have hundreds of different things.

I haven't come across any cons in the product since most of our company's scenarios are simple and small since we are just a school compared to what other big companies have. Everything that Cisco's firewall was doing for us, Netgate pfSense's firewall does for us for a fraction of the cost and even offers a better performance. I would not know the tool's cons since I do not have anything on my mind right now.

I do not use Negate pfSense Plus on Amazon EC2 VMs. In our organization, we are using Negate pfSense Plus on Netgate's hardware. We use Netgate pfSense XG-1540.

To others who plan to use the solution, I would say that the support offered by the product is 100 percent worth it. The enterprise support is also extremely worth it. In a general sense, if people don't know much about implementation, they just need to read the documentation because many things, like the GUI part, could throw some people off. If you come from a CLI-based tool, the GUI aspect can throw you off, and I know it since it threw me off a little bit initially, but we were able to get through the implementation phase very thoroughly as the tool offers great documentation. By thoroughly going through the documentation, you will have a fairly easy time configuring the tool very methodologically. I really don't think I would recommend anything else apart from the fact that others need to read the documentation and take their time.

I rate the tool a nine out of ten.

It's a straight-up front edge router used in various scenarios for front-ending multiple websites and multiple web applications for various marketing scenarios which require certain back-end firewalling that you would need to utilize. We found that it works much better than others. It's not like the Ciscos, which, at the time, were incredibly expensive and difficult to work with unless you had a CCNA who was programming it for you.

I was looking for routers that were capable of doing multiple firewalling, which it does. We wanted it for setting up demilitarized zones and setting up some failover for WAN for the internet. We looked at that, and we played around a little bit with Untangle. pfSense was just far easier to get configured and working, and there were no hidden costs or fees involved, which made it very nice to use.

They have a whole section of package management that you can add stuff to. We use pfSense to do a little bit more than what we would or what I would normally do today in a medium to large enterprise.

The flexibility of pfSense is fantastic. You can use it in a number of situations. I have it running on my home Netgate. At the same time, I can just put it on a slightly larger machine and run a massive, highly trafficked web environment. It will run anywhere.

It's easy to add features to pfSense and configure them assuming about web networking and routing and traffic through an edge router scenario. For a home user, it's probably a lot more than they would get through, but they wouldn't need to since you can just install it, and it just works right out of the box. Just about everything is easy. It's extremely well documented, and the amount of help that's available is fantastic.

I saw the benefits of pfSense immediately. When you need your router to do something more than, for example, a store-bought router for home, you immediately see it since now I can do things. I can set up multiple LANs. I can create a firewall between the LANs. I can open up a full demilitarized zone or just port forward into specific LANs and have the LANs porting between themselves in various ways. You don't get that stuff in your normal consumer-grade solution. You have to spend a lot of money to get a serious data center router - and on top of that, you need to get somebody to program that from the command line, which is very expensive. In contrast, pfSense has a graphical user interface, which makes it all very straightforward and easy to use to set up some pretty sophisticated routing scenarios.

I don't use pfSense to prevent data loss as I have backups, both on-site and off-site backups. It's effective for preventing data breaches.

pfSense gives users a single pane of glass as a type of management. There is everything in one instance. It has a graphical user interface. It'll come up with a dashboard that you can customize to put whatever you need to see up on there. I can customize the dashboard to show me the most important things to me. It's incredibly intuitive.

Managing multiple devices is easy enough. You just log in remotely to the device, and it's all connected through the IP. It's really quite simple.

There are two versions of pfSense: the community edition, which is free, and the plus version, which is paid. I'm using the paid one presently.

The solution minimizes downtime. Once it's configured, it works. I don't have to worry about it. I fully know it backwards and forwards since I've been using it for 15 years now and it pretty much just works. I have certain instances of pfSense that haven't even been rebooted in years since it's up and running and it keeps running, and it runs well. I rarely need to touch certain my installs after they've been set and configured.

The solution provides visibility that enables data-driven decisions. It has logging. It has intrusion detection systems, which will give you a whole lot of data that you can make decisions on. For example: Who do I need to block? Is somebody trying to attack me? It'll allow me to collect all that information to make critical decisions regarding exposing certain resources to the internet.

pfSense helps optimize performance in combination with the hardware that it's running on. That will determine what kind of performance you're going to be getting out of the box. It's a very lightweight software package. Depending on the hardware, you can hit it with lots of traffic, and it won't even hiccup.

I would like to see more active updates coming out of the developers. I like the FreeBSD. That said, the developers in FreeBSD are less productive than what you see out of the Linux community, where there are millions and millions of developers. Being FreeBSD-bound, it seems they're short of developers who have to specialize in that operating system.

I've used the solution since 2009.

The solution never crashes and never lags. It works. You fire it up, and it will work for the next 50 years. As long as the hardware is working, pfSense will just go on and do its thing.

Scalability all comes down to hardware. When you put pfSense on more robust hardware, it performs pretty well.

For the paid version, if I have an issue, I need to open a ticket. Before I had my business going, I used the community, and it worked it worked just as well. I haven't had a need to call support. However, I pay for pfSense Plus support in case something happens that's over my head that I need to speak to an expert about.

I contacted them when I had a question about a Snort setup, which is for intrusion detection and prevention. It turns out you have to contact their specialist, and that Snort requires you to pay extra for that help. It's a third-party plugin for pfSense. However, in relation to pfSense, issues, I have not needed help.

I've used Untangle and Cisco routers, and I've tried OPNsense.

I prefer pfSense. I'm comfortable with it. It's rock solid. I've never had an issue with it. I tell it to do something, and it does exactly what I tell it to do.

I have purchased NetGate appliances for customers. For my business, I have hardware that I've repurposed for pfSense.

The initial deployment, either way, is very easy. It would probably be easier than most commercial routers that people buy.

A simple instance where you're just using a firewall router with one LAN can take less than five minutes. You just install the software. It picks up the WAN IP and gives you a LAN IP, and it's up and working as quickly as the software will install, which is usually less than five minutes on most devices and most hardware.

I do the deployments myself. I don't see where a team would be required for this. It's just a firewall router. If you need a complicated setup, it might take one person, a couple of days of planning, and then implementation. That said, I don't see where you would need a team to do that unless you're installing a bunch of other network hardware at the same time, multiple switches, or a ten-gig, one-gig type of scenario. However, that's not a pfSense issue.

In terms of maintenance, generally, there is none. It will update itself. I see very few critical security updates. Most of them are our feature updates. I have certain installs that have been running without rebooting for five years, and it just installed them. Mostly, I'm leaving it alone.

The pricing is reasonable for what it is. I usually put it on my own hardware. The licensing for me is relatively inexpensive for what I'm getting out of it.

The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is fantastic. You can use the community edition and get expertise from the manufacturer. It's quite reasonable. It's quite a good setup.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

I'd advise potential new users to install it, plug it in, get to know it, log into it, and you'll start to see how easy and robust it is. The more you use it, the more you learn, and you'll like it as much as I do.

I use it as a firewall and router. I use it in a few locations. I have three pfSense products.

I like that I can geofence and block different countries from accessing my network.

The flexibility is very good.

I noted the benefits of pfSense within a year. I had it on my VM for a year and then put it into production.

It's good at blocking malware and DNS attacks. I don't use it for data loss prevention.

The solution gives me a single pane of management. Everything is accessible from the dashboard.

It provides features that help me minimize downtime. I have a WAN, and if any of my WANs go down, it's okay; I have them connected to pfSense.

It helps me make more data-driven decisions.

With pfSense, I can optimize performance.

I don't really need too many features. I just use it as a plain firewall. I like to keep it clean. I don't like to run too many things on it.

The configuration can be a little difficult. You need to know the system a little bit. Even now, I do have one in a VM where I test my stuff, and then implement it into production.

They could make it easier to configure packages. They could have a wizard that helps you out a bit more.

I've used the solution for more than five years.

I haven't had any issues with stability.

I haven't had issues with scalability. It's easy to back it up and load the backup.

Technical support is fast to respond. However, I did have to eventually pay for them to help me out. I had some problems with the firmware. Someone remote into my appliance and fixed it. They patched it up and now it's working fine.

I've used OPNsense and SonicWall previously.

While pfSense has more features, OPNsense is a lot easier to use.

I have the solution as an appliance. Deployment for a device is a little bit hard, so it can take a few days.

Maintenance is required every few days.

I did not have any help from outside consultants. I manage the deployment myself. I was able to eventually figure it out myself via forums.

I like the fact that there is a free version. I'd like the entire offering to be free. That said, it's 100% worth the cost of ownership.

I use both the paid and community version.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

I would advise new users to test it before implementing it in their environment.

I use Netgate pfSense personally at home and the data center, our headquarters, so it is for enterprise and personal use.

The most valuable feature of the solution is that it is an open-source tool and is available at a very low cost.

In terms of flexibility, the tool is great, especially the fact that it is open source. On Netgate pfSense Community Edition, people can write stuff into it and get plugins for it. Netgate pfSense Plus version does a review process with the help of Netgate, so you don't have to have many plugins for it. The tool is very open to modification if you need to do that.

The benefits related to the product can be experienced immediately after the product is deployed, especially in terms of the speed improvement and features that we don't have with the current solution or the current technologies that we don't have with our current solution.

To deal with data loss while using Netgate pfSense, you can always export the logs or dump them into a log server, specifically a Syslog server. I don't really view the boxes in the data warehouse other than the logs. There are features in the tool that we can send out to the syslog server, which is what we do in our company.

In my enterprise, we are getting ready to push out two hundred devices, and I don't see a single pane of glass management. I don't necessarily consider Netgate pfSense to be an enterprise product because it doesn't offer a single pane of glass management. With Netgate pfSense, you have to touch all devices to make a change. My company has been messing around with Netgate pfSense for some scripting on it, but it is still not what I am used to using in the enterprise. One window for controlling all devices doesn't exist in the tool.

Netgate pfSense provides features that help minimize downtime since it offers high availability on the boxes. You can use multiple WAN interfaces, so multiple ISPs can be plugged into your device to help manage if the service from one ISP goes down.

Netgate pfSense provides visibility that enables our company to make data-driven decisions since it offers graphs, traffic graphs, and firewall graphs. I can see if there is a client on the network that is just flooding everything. Yeah. The tool has graphs, charts, and log files.

The visibility of Netgate pfSense helps optimize performance. If I see there is a network that is a guest network that is just maxing out at 100 percent, I can attempt to give them some more bandwidth. I can modify the quality of service to give them better or more bandwidth.

With the inclusion of firewall, VPN, and router functionalities, if I assess the total cost of ownership of Netgate pfSense, I would say that I get what I pay for when it comes to Netgate. I get more than I am paying for, meaning the return on investment is great. I feel reluctant to talk about the good return on investment experienced by my company from the use of the tool because I don't want Netgate to charge more money, and as a non-profit company, it can hurt us. The total cost of ownership is fine since our company does not have to spend a lot of money on it. I know that if there was a Linux conference three or four weeks ago, and they were giving me some grief points on how it dies after buying boxes from Netgate in a year, it dies, but I have not experienced that. My total cost of ownership is great. Other people would buy the box, which would die in a year, so they would just lose money.

Netgate pfSense needs to have a single dashboard for managing all devices.

As an enterprise customer, I expect Netgate's sales personnel to inform me of the new devices that are coming out. For example, there was a time when I was getting ready to buy a device, and then I thought that I needed to hold on, and so the order failed. I thought I needed to wait a few days before ordering a new device. I was getting ready to order another device, which was Netgate 1541, but after two days, Netgate 8300 was released, and it was far better than what I was getting ready to buy. I was really disappointed that the salesperson from Netgate didn't ask me to hold off on my decision to buy Netgate 1541. You don't have to tell me that something brand new is coming out if you don't want to spill the beans or anything like that, but it would have been nice if Netgate had asked me to hold off on my decision to buy Netgate 1541. I was getting ready to buy a product that would have been, immediately two days later, an old technology. I just expect more from a salesperson. When going through Netgate's website, while trying to buy Netgate 1541, I saw there was a list of features at the bottom of the product page, so I had to select the features I wanted, but I couldn't have all the features at the same time, and the website would prevent me from adding extra features, which actually was the cause for the order to fail. I had added features that you can't have at the same time, but nowhere on the website did it say anything like that, and that led to a delay in my time frame. I was trying to get something to solve a problem at a certain time, and then it wasn't until a day later, a day and a half later, that Netgate called and said that I couldn't have all of the tool's features, which was something that messed up my installation time. Issues with the product are associated with feature requests. It is not necessarily the box itself but more of the company that needs to consider improving its approach. For the box itself, everything in a single frame should be released.

I have been using Netgate pfSense for five to seven years. I am a customer of the product.

I haven't had any device crashes yet. The stability is great. I have not had a device crash. When there was a device crash, it was for the one at my home when we had five power outages, and it burned my hard drives, but that was not because of Netgate's box.

It is easy to scale up. I will be visiting a site soon that has Netgate 1100, and I am going to put in a Netgate 4200 over there. I don't think I am going to have any issues. I will be able to copy things off the config of Netgate 1100 and dump it on Netgate 4200 with a few modifications. The tool's scalability is great. If I need to add a drive or replace one of the hard drives in the tool, then that is something that can be done easily.

Based on the customer support for our account to figure out why an order didn't get through or why we can't get this part, we have contacted Netgate's team, but not for actual support. The tool's community is fantastic, and it is one of the driving pieces that I sell to my decision-makers, considering that the community supports the solution. With community support, I am not just calling out to five or ten people. Instead, it is possible to reach out to the world to respond to an issue that might have been of a lot of concern.

I have never contacted the tool's technical support team for any technical support, but it was just a question with my order.

I have experience with Juniper, NetScreen, OPNsense, Cisco, and Meraki. If I consider the box itself, Netgate pfSense is better than the other tools I have used.

From an enterprise perspective, I can't say Netgate pfSense is better than all the tools I have used because it doesn't have that enterprise management capability. As soon as they get that enterprise management capability, Netgate pfSense is the best out there in the market.

The ease or difficulty in the tool's initial deployment phase that one may experience depends on the box. If I speak about Netgate 1100, I believe that using a switched network interface or ports can be a little more challenging than trying to work on VLANs. The other boxes that aren't switched, like Netgate 4100 and the models above it, work perfectly fine and function as I would typically expect, so the installation is not hard at all, but you do have to know networking. I always hire people, and they are used to having stuff done for them when it comes to tools like Meraki. You just plug it in, and it works. The people I hire have no idea how to do any type of networking or act as IT or MSP professionals, and they can only work in the framework for which they have been trained. You do need to understand fundamental networking technology to make the tool work. For me, the installation is easy. If you don't understand fundamental networking technology, it can be hard to install the tool.

One person can manage the product's deployment phase.

There is a requirement to maintain the product since we have to touch each and every box to do software updates. The tool does require maintenance on our part.

I use the Netgate pfSense Community Edition and the paid version called Netgate pfSense Plus.

Netgate pfSense Community Edition is great and free. For Netgate pfSense Plus, we have to buy Netgate's boxes, and the pricing is great. As a non-profit organization, I would like to have a discount from Netgate, but if you are ready to buy a hundred boxes, it would be nice to have a discount. I understand that Netgate pfSense does not charge a lot more for the box than what we are paying for them. The pricing is fine.

In terms of how difficult it is to add features to Netgate pfSense and configure them, if I talk about writing from scratch, it is something that I don't do. If someone has a plugin, pulling that in is ridiculously simple. If I say that I want a Tailscale plugin, then I can put it in, and it is already in the system, and as long as I know how to do networking, you can figure out how to use a plugin since it is not hard at all in regards to Netgate pfSense Community Edition and Netgate pfSense Plus.

I have not used Netgate pfSense on Amazon EC2 virtual machines.

One needs to realize the difference in the switched version, and to do so it is important to understand Netgate 1100 and Netgate 2100 and the individually addressable ones since it is the area that threw me when I first got Netgate 1100, I was like, what in the world am I working on currently. Managing the VLANs on the tool threw me a ton, and it took me about an hour to figure out what was going on with the solution.

As the tool really needs centralized management, I rate it an eight to nine out of ten.

I USE Netgate pfSense for home networks, lab environments, and R&D. In production, professional career-wise, I have built pfSense production firewalls that run in various configurations and high availability for different organizations serving a different number of clients and servicing any amount of requests throughout any given day.

It also serves thousands to tens of millions of requests a second a day from small to large deployments.

Netgate pfSense is an extremely flexible solution. It is an open-source tool that has a very large community of professionals, enthusiasts, and hobbyists alike. There is a lot of flexibility in doing whatever you want with it. It also offers enterprise-grade support so that you can have something equivalent to the Cisco enterprise-grade data center firewall product. You could build that with pfSense or OpenSense, which is a derivative of pfSense.

The initial benefit I saw of pfSense was way before I ever used it professionally. It is a robust tool that can replace your consumer-grade firewall router solution. I also saw immediate benefits in my professional career as it is a powerful solution that can be compared to other solutions like Palo Alto or Meraki today.

Netgate pfSense can be a fully functional L7 firewall. You can not only have the base Layer 3 functionality of the firewall, but you can add things like Snort and pfBlockerNG to build out and become an L7 firewall doing actual inspection and security analysis.

It is very easy to add and configure features to Netgate pfSense.

pfSense has a built-in auto-configuration backup. While that is technically data loss from the sense of protecting the firewall, it is a feature Netgate offers to every pfSense user, licensed or not. You get this feature if you have a Netgate appliance. Just using pfSense won't get you that. There are third-party packages you can use to set up pfSense configuration backups if you don't have pfSense Plus.

In terms of data loss outside of that, you configure it in a way that puts it as a security device. By default, pfSense is not inherently a security device. It is a Layer 3 filtering firewall. If you want it to be a security appliance beyond basic TCP/IP Layer 3 filtering, you can run Snort or pfBlockerNG to turn it into a security appliance. Doing so can aid in data loss prevention by using the tool for basic intrusion detection prevention.

Netgate pfSense provides a single-pane-of-glass management capability. Its dashboard has a lot of prebuilt functionality, allowing you to have a single-page view of the firewall's status and everything going on with it.

pfSense Plus provides features that help us minimize downtime as a supporting part of the infrastructure.

pfSense Plus provides visibility that enables us to make data-driven decisions. The kind of data-driven decisions that could be made with information from pfSense are things like how much bandwidth I am using and what is the throughput of all my band connectivity.

I can also decide whether I need to go from a 1 Gig network to a 10 Gig network or a 2.5 Gig network and whether I need to increase my commit for my WAN circuit because we see that we are averaging above 99%, etc. The kind of decisions that it can help you make are related to your network and your connectivity.

The visibility that pfSense Plus provides helps us to optimize performance. It could help you to improve performance on the network side. It is, after all, a firewall router, so it is a network piece of equipment. It could help improve performance in that if you are actively monitoring, pulling data from pfSense, or actively reviewing the different types of information and graphs that pfSense provides, you could make decisions to see that a machine is consistently using lots of network traffic.

I have been using Netgate pfSense for 15 years.

I have pfSense Plus in production. I have both pfSense Plus and pfSense Community Edition (CE) running at home. They are essentially the same, and the only difference between them is the support and auto-configuration backup.

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

We use Netgate pfSense to deploy to our customers.

Netgate pfSense has a lot of different applications you can use for VPN and multi-way traffic. It's very simple as far as firewall rules and NAT rules go. It's an overall solid application and product. We don't really have too many RMAs, and there are no monthly fees associated with it.

Netgate pfSense is extremely flexible due to the nature of the multi packages that you can use for different VPNs. You can do the same thing in multiple different ways, and it's very handy when you're trying to troubleshoot problems.

You can add packages to pfSense with Snort and pfBlocker to keep hackers out. We've been using pfSense by creating rules that only allow our IP addresses into those devices. That way, they are never open to the outside world, and we've been doing that for almost 20 years.

Netgate pfSense has a high-availability application called CARP that allows you to put two devices in failover mode.

The visibility that pfSense Plus provides helps us optimize performance because that's all in the updates they push out.

We use pfSense Plus on Amazon EC2 VMs, and it's been pretty good and fairly quick in testing.

The solution should provide a single pane of glass and a management console for all devices.

I have been using Netgate pfSense for 20 years.

The solution is fairly stable unless there's an environmental issue.

I rate the solution's stability an eight out of ten.

I rate the solution a nine out of ten for scalability.

We have previously used SonicWall. SonicWall has all the packages prebuilt. With Netgate pfSense, you have to download and install the packages and then configure everything. These include antivirus and anti-spam, which you have to turn on, but they cost money.

It's really just a configuration setup. SonicWall and Netgate pfSense are two very different firewalls. It's very difficult to compare them other than monthly and yearly licensing versus buying at once.

The solution's initial setup is super easy. I've taught several people with little knowledge of how to do it, and it's been very simple to explain and set up.

From start to finish, the solution's deployment can be done by one person in probably an hour.

I think Netgate needs to charge a nominal fee for the actual software so that it gets paid for because a lot of people skirt the licensing and use the community edition. Netgate should charge something nominal like $50 a year for the community edition to deter people from using it for everything.

Depending on the specifics, adding and configuring features to pfSense could take three or four hours for a RADIUS server with a VPN or less than two minutes to set up a NAT rule.

We were embedded with pfSense in 2023. It took us some time after we deployed the solution to see the benefits.

I have 236 devices in production. Some of the cheaper models are more susceptible to power outages, which cause them to fail. However, some of the more robust models are expensive, but they last for many, many years, and there's very little interaction that we have to do with them.

The only maintenance the solution needs is just updates to the device as required.

New users should do some basic research before configuring Netgate pfSense. There's lots of information about the tool on the web, and it's very easy to get the answers to your questions because somebody's already probably run into that issue. There are tutorials on basic configuration on YouTube.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

I've set up Netgate pfSense for my friend's law practice for his access to VPN after the AT&T service dropped their FortiGate. It was so much easier to use. The VPN and VLAN support I needed that Meraki and AT&T tried to give me was crap. I also use Netgate pfSense at home as my router or office network.

I also have the tool set up for a remote person in Texas for a site-to-site VPN when she needs it to do some work. I've currently got three of them that I use personally and professionally.

I love the solution's flexibility. You can buy their hardware, get support, and use other people's hardware. Netgate is constantly releasing patches and updates, which is nice. There is also tons of free material on the web and on YouTube on how to set it up.

We saw the benefits of Netgate pfSense within weeks of deploying it because it gave me the ability to segment my network quickly. It was pretty straightforward and much easier than some of the competitors out there.

Netgate pfSense gives me a single pane of glass management. It gives me everything I need with regard to the firewall.

Netgate pfSense Plus provides features that help us minimize downtime. The ability to do high availability and failover of LAN links is a nice feature.

The visibility that pfSense Plus provides helps us optimize performance. I can see traffic analysis and tune it a little better.

I'd say the solution's total cost of ownership will replace itself within a year. The stability of being able to download a different package if someone needs it has made my life a lot easier.

Some of the functions are not menu-driven. You have to know to click here, then go over to this setting and click here.

It would be nice if the solution had a wizard for some of the complex functions. When trying to walk people through something, I have to look at the video or read their document.

I have been using Netgate pfSense for three years.

I haven't had any stability issues with Netgate pfSense. The tool might get bogged down if I add more things. I still reboot mine once a month. Other than that, I haven't had any crashes.

It'd be nice if I could add memory to their appliances to improve their performance. Scalability, to me, is really another hardware device. I haven't seen an option to change the hardware.

The solution's technical support team is very responsive. Regarding the quality of their answers, the support team is excellent and very knowledgeable.

We had the FortiGate firewall that AT&T was providing, which they discontinued. Unfortunately, their replacement was less compatible than the FortiGate, so we jumped to Netgate pfSense. We were doing managed services at AT&T. I dumped their managed service at my firewall because Netgate pfSense was so easy to use.

Since I've been in IT for years, the solution's initial setup is simple for me. If you have a device that doesn't have a keyboard and you're using a serial console, it's a little bit kludgy on what to do. You can figure it out if you read the documents ahead of time.

Deploying the solution for my home use took me about a day and a half. It was all about design and learning all the functions. Deploying the solution for the business took me about two weeks because I had to figure out all the rules. Software-wise, it was easy, but we had to figure out what the customer wanted.

The solution's pricing is comparable to other products. The basic plan provides the support I need.

Depending on what you're trying to do, adding and configuring features to Netgate pfSense is somewhere in the middle between easy and difficult. Some things are really simple, while others are difficult.

Remembering everything you have to do is challenging because sometimes you have to click somewhere, and then you don't remember where you clicked. So, it'd be nice if everything was better tied together.

I initially started with the free version on third-party hardware, and then they discontinued it, so I just bought the appliance.

I prefer to do manual updates myself, but the solution lets me know if there's an update. I regularly do firmware updates when they are available.

The solution provides great support, articles, and a lot of documents.

New users should document what they want to do upfront and then try to look at all the documents on the Netgate site. My biggest advice would be not to try to do it cold. If you're going to use the VLANs, figure out all that information for your routing. If you don't have a document, you won't be able to implement it very easily.

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

We use the solution as the main firewall and a proxy for load balancing our web servers.

The best feature of the tool is its all-in-one capabilities. It is a firewall with built-in IDS and IPS, load balancing, and VPN connections. The VPN integration, particularly with internal AD environments, provides stable connections. Centralized authentication is a notable benefit as well. We primarily use it for these features on our server level and are planning to expand their use in our complex environment to connect employees and services.

Netgate pfSense is cost-effective because you can start using it for free. You can research how to install and configure everything, then install it virtually on any device or partition some hardware. This allows you to start using a firewall without any initial cost.

For larger companies, if you have one or two people skilled with the tool, they can design the complete network using it. That's all you need. You don't have to invest in expensive subscriptions or big hardware setups.

My only suggestion is that Netgate pfSense implement more graphical monitoring. While there are accounts with add-ons for graphical monitoring of data networking, IPS, IDS, and firewall-level events, having more graphical representations like blocks would make the tool more capable. Although it has commercial support and a good GUI, it can still be challenging for someone without firewalls, command lines, and networking knowledge.

Adding features to the solution through packages is somewhat limited. The marketplace doesn't have as many options as you might expect.

One example is the IPS/IDS system. Netgate pfSense still uses Snort 2.9, even though version 3.0 has been out for about a year. Version 3.0 offers important improvements like multi-core support, significantly speeding up processing. The solution seems slow to update to newer versions of these third-party packages.

The tool should provide beta versions with the latest package updates sooner so users can benefit from new features and improvements.

Another issue is the lack of a package marketplace. Despite being open source and customized by many developers globally, there isn't a wide selection of community-created packages. The reasons for this aren't clear to me - it could be security concerns or other factors.

Based on my experience using Netgate pfSense for about four years, I can't say the improvements in our environment are solely due to the product. It's a combination of Netgate pfSense and another monitoring tool we use.

Monitoring is crucial. The easier the monitoring and user interface, the simpler our team can work on and investigate issues. Accessing data becomes more difficult when you use commands or other complex methods.

With our third-party tools, log viewing is very straightforward. The tool logs everything important. This was helpful when our site was slow, and we needed to determine why. The logs from Negate pfSense and our IT systems help us identify issues.

However, the solution's combination with a third-party monitoring tool provides a graphical interface. This makes it much easier to review logs and pinpoint problems.

If Netgate pfSense had a better graphical interface, it would be one of the best products available. I think the graphical interface should be much better and easier to monitor. For example, I encountered errors when I installed HAProxy, a load balancer available in the solution. It was difficult to determine the errors because the backend wasn't working properly. It took us a long time to identify the exact issue because more detailed error information isn't directly available in the current interface. You must go through different steps to trace and see what errors are coming up.

If the tool could improve in this area and provide more error details directly in the interface, that would be beneficial. As for packages, if they could update to newer versions of third-party packages more quickly, that would be helpful. I understand they might not be able to use the very latest versions immediately, but if they could provide updates within three to six months of a new package release, users could try new features sooner.

One additional feature that would be helpful is SAML authentication. Many companies now use Azure or AWS; in our case, we use Office 365 for email and authentication. If SAML authentication was available in pfSense, we could have integrated it with Office 365, allowing users to log in directly using their existing credentials.

The tool can integrate with Azure AD internally, but SAML or two-factor authentication, such as SMS, would provide better security. Firewalls are usually kept behind the scenes and not exposed, but this feature would be useful in some cases.

We've offered Netgate pfSense to many clients, managing it for them and migrating them from existing firewalls. They're generally happy with the change. However, some clients were looking for these additional authentication features. While we can integrate with Office 365, a direct connection option would be beneficial.

I have been working with the product for four years.

I use Netgate pfSense Plus. We mainly chose it for early updates and commercial support, as advertised on their site. I've only used the support once, though. We started with the free version, which worked fine without issues. After three to four months, we upgraded to the Netgate pfSense Plus environment. Since then, it's been very stable. We've never had problems that required rolling back changes after updates. The updates are very stable - we don't have issues when we update the firewall. So overall, it's been quite stable for us.

I rate the solution's stability a ten out of ten.

My company has five users using the solution in two locations. The solution's documentation shows that it is scalable.

There is a lot of support material available on the Internet. You need to do some research. In my experience, I've only had to contact Netgate pfSense support once in the last four years, and that was because I messed up the operating system in our virtualized environment.

We were previously using Cisco ASA 5500. After three years, we needed to upgrade the hardware and the subscription. At that time, we were moving from an on-premise solution to the cloud, so we decided to try Netgate pfSense. Our vendor recommended it. We wanted to get at least six months of experience with it to ensure its features were stable and it could handle higher loads without breaking. That was one of the main reasons we chose the solution.

The solution's deployment is straightforward. The basic setup took us just about two to three hours. However, designing our custom network configuration took a bit longer. Overall, we got the tool up and running in about three to four days in my environment. There were three people involved in the deployment process: myself and two other team members.

Netgate pfSense doesn't require much maintenance on our end. It's pretty smooth. We monitor alerts. When there's a new update, we test it in our staging environment to see if it affects anything. If it's smooth, we upgrade.

The tool has helped us save money.

The tool is flexible; even the free, open-source version offers many features. From a cost perspective, even the subscription model for commercial support isn't too costly. However, it's important to have someone knowledgeable about Netgate pfSense to take advantage of it. While there are online resources, a professional or someone experienced can get much more out of the solution. I've heard that the IPS/IDS licenses and other features can be costly.

The solution is very cheap. It's so affordable that even students can use it on their laptops. It's a good, cost-effective product.

The solution has a single web interface, which you could consider a container. Within this container, there are multiple interfaces or sections. You must navigate to different settings to manage different aspects of the system.

So, while it's all contained within one web interface, you can't see or manage everything from a single screen.

I recommend the tool to our clients. We help them implement and support it. I rate it an eight out of ten.

We use it for home solutions and 200+ enterprises. We use it to address routing issues (NATing issues through VPNs).

Our environment consists of many enterprises with many subnets.

pfSense makes everything easier compared to Cisco or Fortinet.

Policy-based firewall rules are the most valuable feature because every other brand it is 200% more complicated to accomplish the same operation.

The flexibility is easy. We can implant in small businesses for less than 500 CAD and in 5k users enterprises. The only part that needs to be improved is the hardware, everything else is out of the box.

I would rate the ease of adding features a ten out of ten. With telecom knowledge, the product is crystal clear easy.

Evaluation and contracting could be improved.

I have been using pfSense since 2016.

The scalability is good, they should offer filtration or a next-gen firewall.

From my experience, their support is very quick.

I haven't evaluated any solutions since 2016. With pfSense you get the bang for your buck. pfSense routing, VPN, policy rules, NAT forwarding, everything is better.

The initial setup is straightforward. It was easy. We have 16 years of experience. I did the deployment, it only required one person.

It is cheaper than other options.

I would rate it a 9.5 out of 10. My advice would be to take the time to do an online course if you find using the solution a bit hard. It is worth it.