The tool is partly for home-based usage and partly for business usage. I am in the IT industry, taking care of the security and technology parts. I also run a private business in my spare time when I am not working. I use Netgate pfSense as my firewall to separate those two entities: my home and business. I also participate in providing server space for projects involving Azure Flex and Azure Core, which is kind of like an AWS situation but in a more centralized manner. I use Netgate pfSense to ensure that everything is separate. I use Suricata to weed out any malicious type of activity and to keep an eye on just to ensure that all the other functions, both personal and business-related, remains unaffected, intact, and devoid of any type of attacks or the other type of malicious kind of activity.

The product has helped improve my organization's environment and personal environment since before the use of Netgate pfSense, and I really didn't even have a hardened firewall. With the implementation of Netgate pfSense, I am able to monitor my various network streams, so I have my servers, VLAN, my home VLAN, EMC, my WAN, and the specific VLAN for IoT devices. I even segregate some of my outgoing intranets as well, and I see how Netgate pfSense has allowed me to have a full and high-end visibility of a lot of the traffic that comes and goes, which for me is important because part of the job that I do is crypto related. When dealing with crypto-related business, you need to be careful as far as what you allow in and out of your network.

I wouldn't say the simplicity of the tool is its best feature. In a way, there is a simplicity to it, but I like the expandability of the packages that could be used. I like the data and the information that I can collect while observing network traffic. The whole layout of the application is pretty decent. The tool is not super expensive. It is quite an affordable tool. There used to be the free Netgate pfSense Plus that was provided earlier at one point, and I understand now, of course, that it is based on the yearly licensing model, and I think that took a lot of people aback. There is not a lot of money to be paid for the tool, and you get more than what you paid for, especially if I think about its use and consider what it does.

If I assess the flexibility of Netgate pfSense, I would say that I can not just run a firewall, but I could use HAProxy and run a bunch of other kinds of server-based applications that normally would occupy a different server, so it amalgamates a few services into one package, which is nice single point of contact. I like not having to go to two or three servers to run the services needed, especially the ease of the firewall, as far as the creation of rules and the security aspect are concerned. The updates that come in are pretty decent, and though not too often, they are often enough to keep things secure. I like the tool's flexibility in the sense that you do not have to buy an appliance. You can put it on your own hardware, and it can be very simplistic hardware with simple configurations. There are a lot of abilities to be used in the product, and benefits can be gained from the tool without having to incur a huge upfront cost in purchasing hardware. If you have a computer lying around, you can easily install it, and you can go with it. With the tool's free version, you can use the tool for free. It is quite a friendly tool in the sense that it provides access not only to regular people but also to high-end corporates and business individuals.

Getting extra features or added packages in Netgate pfSense is very easy since the GUI and the menus basically take care of everything. When you go to do the installation, you see the log messages come up, and it's very clear when it is complete. It is a pretty simplistic process.

As per my assessment regarding Netgate pfSense's role in helping prevent data loss, I would say that as far as data loss is concerned, I think part of it is the firewall preventing access to my network shares aside from the typical kind of blocking ports and not allowing traffic. I think very much the segregation of the VLANs is possible, and my server VLAN will have all kinds of data, information, databases, and file repositories, and all of that is completely segregated from my DMZ. Any kind of the shared services that I offer or kind of crypto-based services that I do, the connections, both incoming and outgoing, can't gain access to my server VLAN at all, and such segregation really protects my data aside from some of the built-in, immutable type of services that the kind of network repositories that I have that do outside of Netgate pfSense. The key thing actually is just keeping things separate and being able to get alerts if something funky is happening.

Netgate pfSense gives a single pane of glass management view since the dashboard is always the first thing that I look at, and I have got to configure it in a way where I see my traffic graphs. I have the gateways and interfaces that I look at, along with the interface statistics, services, and a lot of other functions that I can quickly just glance at, including my Suricata alerts, the filtering, and other alerts. I can look at the UPS and the run time for the battery. I could take a quick glance and kinda see all the information I need without getting too deep, making the tool's dashboard a pretty cool feature. It really saves a lot of time.

I use Netgate pfSense Plus. I generally have experienced zero downtime with the tool. If there is some downtime, it is because of my own doings. As far as the benefits of Netgate pfSense are taken into consideration, I can see it has a lot of the extras that you get, and it worked. At a certain point in time, Netgate pfSense Plus was free to upgrade. I don't remember how much Netgate pfSense Plus and pfSense CE software differ from each other, but I know they differ quite a bit. The one thing I will say is the major difference that I have used is the boot environment. If I am doing an upgrade, I will basically take a snapshot of my current boot environment. Even though it does it automatically when you do an upgrade, I just take another backup. If I do something that is a very specific change that makes me a little nervous, I take a snapshot, and then I always have something that I could boot back into if things go horribly wrong, which is a big plus and one way of eliminating downtime since you can go back to a previous instance that is fully functioning.

Speaking of whether the tool provides visibility that enables our company to make data-driven decisions, I can check my graph, and through monitoring, I will be able to check my WAN and see the quality of the WAN to the point I was utilizing a router or modem provided by my service provider I was able to through the graph when there was a drop in the traffic and the quality of the connectivity, and that led me to basically scrap the modem and actually configure my own setup to get the internet into my home.

In terms of the total cost of ownership of Netgate pfSense, I think that for somebody like me who uses it in a cozy home corporate business environment, it is quite an affordable option. The tool is not expensive, and when it comes to the cost of ownership, if you have something lying around, like an old server that I repaired for Netgate pfSense. The benefit is that I am able to put it on an older server, so there are no hardware costs. The tool is not something that would go into a landfill. I think that the tool has been quite affordable and has paid itself over quite a few times. You could go cheap and use an ASUS router at home, which a lot of people do, but it may not have the stability, and it doesn't have the kind of horsepower on your engine speed or expandability of a polished product like Netgate pfSense.

The maintenance that is needed in the tool is just to make sure that the tool is up to date. It's not necessary to do the maintenance, and it's not just about updating Netgate pfSense but also updating the packages. It is great that you have a good product that can keep your environment safe. If you don't patch or have unknown vulnerabilities that surface, then you will end up wasting your money. I do have a patch process, so I check at least once a week for new installs or packages or if there is a version released and apply them shortly after. The total time to install the tool is probably a couple of hours in a month.

I

There are a lot of features I want to see simplified in the product. I want to see the licensing model part to be improved in the product. Those who need to do certain functions from their house would purchase Netgate pfSense Plus while configuring their machine, but if they have another network added to it, then it would basically change the ID of the device, and they have to go and request to get relicensed. Netgate pfSense will help you with the relicensing part for one time, but if you need to do it a second time, then you will have to pay for a new license, and that, to me, is not very fair. I think if you have paid for a year of service, it shouldn't matter how many times you need to request to rekey the license as long as it is not every other day. Two to three requests in a year shouldn't be an issue, and if I add another network card, why should I pay for a new license when there is not much of a difference.

The only thing that I would like to get some better utilization of is the ability to do free switching. If I need to go between different VLANs, I have VLAN 19.1 and VLAN 19.2, and I strictly use Netgate pfSense, but it doesn't route very efficiently and works quite slowly. I understand that it is not the router, but a lot of times, Netgate pfSense advertises it as a tool that is able to route traffic. I had to go in and purchase a separate router to manage my internal VLANs because Netgate pfSense was just choosing between the VLANs I had.

I have been using Netgate pfSense for a year and a half. I am just a customer of the tool.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

I haven't had an instance where the tool has gone down, and if it has, then that wasn't my fault. The stability is there in the tool. I have had the tool p and running a few times, and the only time I have had to reboot it is when there was a new release.

The scalability is really dependent on your hardware. If I want to scale it up, I can throw in network adapters, more memory, more CPU, and scale it up. It is quite a scalable tool, and it is really just dependent on what you throw at it. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

The solution's technical support is not bad, and they are pretty quick to respond. It is quite average as far as the technical part goes. There has been no bad experience with the support team. I rate the technical support a seven out of ten.

Neutral

I tried using OPNsense but I didn't like the whole approach, the menu system and the way it was configured. Netgate pfSense made more sense to me in a logical manner.

The product's initial setup phase is fairly straightforward. If you install an operating system, then you can install Netgate pfSense, so there is nothing to it.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

The basic installation of the tool takes less than an hour. The configuration part is something that you figure out as you go ahead with the tool, which obviously takes a bit longer. The basic installation is quite quick and can be done in less than an hour.

For me, considering how much I put into the tool, right now, I would say that the ROI is around 25 percent.

When it comes to Netgate pfSense, I use the basic TAC Lite license, which comes for about 100 USD. I don't think Netgate pfSense is expensive at all. You could look at other services that offer similar types of configurations, and you can see it may cost in the thousands range. Even though I want something for free, I think it is quite a reasonable tool. The only qualm I have with the tool is that it is a little stingy on how many times they have to rekey a license.

I would recommend the tool to others since for me, it is simple, the low cost of ownership, expandability, just the way it looks, I like the numbers, and when the data is there, you throttle how much information you want to see or collect. For somebody who likes to tinker or likes to see the numbers or wants to harden their network or has a corporate business and wants to ensure things are operating smoothly, the tool is worth it.

I rate the tool an eight out of ten.

We are a reseller. We resell the product to our customers as we are an MSP. We use it for various different verticals, from manufacturing to schools to typical offices. That is mainly the use of this solution.

There are a lot of limitations with competitors like WatchGuard and SonicWall where there are a lot of costs for licenses to utilize their products. We felt that by going to pfSense, we have a little bit more freedom. We can use certain features without having to pay exorbitant costs for licensing. It is better for the small to medium-sized customers.

They are the most flexible, for sure. In my experience, it is quite easy to add features to pfSense and configure them. There is a lot of support from the local community. Because it is an open-community-built platform, there is a lot of support out there. Adding features and configuring them seems to be quite simple from my experience so far.

There is an overall performance increase. The hardware is much more performance-driven. The constant upgrades certainly make it easier to keep up with the evolving environment. The community-driven platform certainly helps to ensure that things are kept current.

pfSense gives us a single pane of glass management. There is a user interface and also the command line. The user interface is very friendly and easy to navigate. The single pane of glass management certainly increases productivity. The ability to look at one single pane of glass, add different widgets, and see things at a glance certainly helps to cut down the time of looking for certain statuses or things like that. It makes things more efficient.

We deal with pfSense Plus in a few cases. It can help minimize downtime. We have not experienced it in any sort of live environment, but I am confident that it would.

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

It optimizes performance, and in most cases, it affects operations and makes things more efficient. Efficiency means money.

The ability to utilize the features instead of having to pay a license fee for every single thing that you want to use on a firewall is valuable. A lot of other companies give you a firewall out of the box that has very basic functionality, whereas pfSense gives you all the good features, and if you want to have more advanced features, you can pay a fee. You are able to use a lot of the features that you cannot use on other products. That is the best thing.

It is very good from a troubleshooting perspective. Things like logging are very good. We have been using these firewalls with filtering very successfully, and VPN has been very successful on them. We have not had any issues with that.

One thing that stuck out to me was the move to use plastic chassis on the Netgate devices or products. They are moving away from using metal chassis, and I find that the plastic seems to get hotter than the metal. Other than that, they are such great devices. They always seem to have all the cool things and bells and whistles.

One thing I would like to see Netgate do is to have a cloud-based management portal, similar to SonicWall, WatchGuard, Ubiquiti, etc. With all these platforms, you create an account, and you have a way to cloud-manage these products. Currently, one of the challenges that we face is not being able to manage those things from a centralized platform. It has always been one thing I have dreamt of for Netgate. That is the only place where it falls short. Apart from that, they are far superior in building, keeping up with the times, and keeping things current.

It has been probably eight or nine years.

A couple of times we have had some strange issues that have been unexplainable, but overall, it is stable. I would rate it a nine out of ten for stability.

It is scalable. I would rate it a nine out of ten for scalability.

They have been fantastic. I have never had an issue, and it has always been very good. They are a highly intelligent and very resourceful team. I would rate them a ten out of ten.

Positive

We have used everything, such as Cisco, SonicWall, and WatchGuard. You name the flavor. We have used them all, and Netgate is definitely a much better product than those. It also depends on the use cases. 

It has been very straightforward to very complex. We have set up entire data centers run by Netgate devices to small offices using a 2100. We have gone from the most complex to the least complex. We have seen everything in between.

Its deployment is a matter of hours. Our clients are small to medium size. We have about ten people working with pfSense.

It requires general maintenance. We have to keep up with firmware and updates. From a physical perspective, there is no maintenance.

It is very cost-effective. There is 100% ROI.

They are on the higher end, but you do not get stuck with spending thousands of dollars every year. You do not have recurring license costs to have people use a simple feature like VPN. That makes it more cost-effective in the long term. There is a very good price point. No one ever complained, and I have not ever thought that they were overpriced. That is for sure.

If you are looking to deploy a product that is reliable and high-performing and that is going to be cost-effective for yourself or your customer in the long term, you are doing the right thing by looking at Netgate.

I would rate Netgate pfSense a ten out of ten.

I use the solution in my company since we operate as a managed services provider that provides security solutions to our customers. I was looking for a device that had the required features my customer wanted, and that fit their budget, so Netgate pfSense is a product that clearly fits this space. Our company has started to deploy the tool for our customers.

In terms of the benefits of the tool for my organization, I am not an end user of the product. My customers use the tool, and what they have been able to achieve using Netgate pfSense is that they are better able to control their spending on internet services. Without Netgate pfSense, users can just take up the whole bandwidth from the network and make it difficult for other people to work, but with the bandwidth control feature, including the built-in functionalities in the solution, you can control what individual IP addresses on the network can do, thereby bringing in more control. My customers have even told their other MSPs how they need to increase their bandwidth, whereas what they needed to do was just control what they already had in Netgate pfSense. Controlling the bandwidth has brought savings to my customers, and it also helped them to have a better user experience with the internet services that they were purchasing.

The solution's most valuable feature is that it is a highly configurable tool. The tool has a lot of options, so there is literally nothing you cannot do with it, but you have to know your way around the product.

The problems my company's clients wanted to resolve by implementing Netgate pfSense were that they wanted a provision for enterprise network security, static control over load balancing, and failover. This area is typically the use case for our customers.

If I assess Netgate pfSense's flexibility, I would say that it is a highly configurable tool, which means there are many options. It has a lot of flexibility in terms of configuration. You can write different rule sets for different traffic types and scenarios. On the same firewall, you could have lots of variety in how you want to handle traffic.

If I want to add features to Netgate pfSense, I would say that because the structure is modular, there is an app store where you can download whatever feature sets you want but are not included by default in the tool. The tool also supports many third-party plug-ins. It is possible to add features to the tool.

Netgate pfSense provides a single pane of glass for management with a customizable dashboard. You can customize the dashboard. Any handy modules you want are possible on a dashboard with a single-view window where you can see what is going on, and it is customizable.

The single pane of glass management feature has an impact on operations since it simplifies management because, typically, my company is not on the customers' premises, so we need to have remote access to the firewall. The people who are doing the back-end monitoring have a single view, which makes operations easy because, with one single glance, you can tell if there is a challenge or not in the tool.

Netgate pfSense Plus is what came on the device that my customers purchased by default.

In terms of whether Netgate pfSense Plus helps minimize downtime, I would say that the main difference between Netgate pfSense and Netgate pfSense Plus is the availability of enterprise support. When I have issues or bugs, I have someone to go to and say that something is not working and ask what we can do about it, after which I can get a response. When it comes to Netgate pfSense and Netgate pfSense Plus, the software is almost the same. One of the versions comes with enterprise backing, so I have some support and OEM support instead of relying on the community. I have a proper company I could talk to about any challenges my customers and I may have. The support does help reduce the downtime. I haven't actually had any downtime with the tool on my customers' end. I haven't had any downtime using the tool.

In terms of whether Netgate pfSense provides visibility that enables my company's clients or me to make data-driven decisions if we don't speak of specific use cases, I would say that it is typically a next-generation firewall that does bandwidth control and provides IPS and IDS features. For instance, if my customers wanted to have an idea of how much internet traffic they are using, then Netgate pfSense would give you graphs that you can export and do further analysis. I don't think the tool's use cases are tied to data or data analysis.

I can’t get any area where improvements are needed in the tool off the top of my head. I haven't had any challenges I couldn't resolve between myself and the support. Maybe Netgate needs to see if a medium-level Netgate pfSense Plus can be created for smaller organizations.

Most of what I need is already in the tool. If there is any need associated with it, I will be sure to report it to the support team.

I have been using Netgate pfSense for two and a half years. My company serves as an MSP for Netgate pfSense.

The only area to consider is that sometimes when there is an upgrade, there may be some changes. But when you have uploaded a stable version of the firmware, the operating system, I think it is a very stable tool. I have not had any issues around stability. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

I deal with clients in areas such as residential, government organizations, and medium-scale businesses. I have one customer in each category, which includes small, medium, and large businesses.

Normally, when it comes to the size of hardware before you make a purchase, due diligence is required to see that the device would be able to handle the current requirements and have some room for growth. With the solution itself, I don't see the need to discuss questions related to its scalability because that would be a function of the hardware and the size of the network where you are deploying the tool. Typically, if you have a huge network, you need to make sure that you have the equipment that can handle that volume of traffic from the on-site. The scalability aspect is not really a good assessment criterion to use to measure the tool. If I put things into a certain context and say that we have a network that has around 100 people, then you don't put up a device that can manage 100 people. Instead, you need to get a device that can manage 150 to 200 people, and then you can create room for growth. If you don't follow these steps, you will have to change the device after some time.

The solution's technical support team is okay. They respond quickly. I have only had the need to place two support calls in all of my dealings so far, and they were able to figure out my issues and resolve them very quickly. I rate the technical support a seven to eight out of ten.

Positive

In our company, we typically deploy a mix of security products that we prefer. At our organization, we have Sophos, Fortinet, and Netgate pfSense. Sophos, Fortinet, and Netgate pfSense are pretty standard. Netgate pfSense has all of the features that Sophos and Fortinet have, but what is more, it can be used without having to have separate licensing. Netgate pfSense really beats the other tools hands down in terms of price because there are no individual license costs for the features that you want to use. In Sophos, certain features require separate licensing. Netgate pfSense's advantages over other tools in price make it a top choice over the others. In our company, we have some customers who are particular about products, and for such customers, we provide them with what they request. For those who don't mind trying something different, Netgate pfSense is our default choice.

The product's initial setup phase is straightforward. The complexities in the deployment are produced by customers who do not know exactly what they want. Some customers have requirements, and my company needs to sit with them and streamline certain areas. The integration and the configuration are not the challenges associated with the tool.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

Typically, if all the configuration information is available, the tool can be deployed in a maximum of two to three days. One can have the standard installation done. The deployment procedure can be done assuming one day for the configuration and the second day for rack mounting. The process is quick when the customer has all of the information they want configured in hand. For some of them, the tool is typically deployed over a period of a few weeks because they don't know or have not decided how they want to implement a particular feature. Still, it would not be a delay from Netgate pfSense's end but rather a delay from the customer side.

I would not call it a cheap tool, but it is very cost-efficient. I don't see any product that gives you the same functionality within the same price brackets offered by Netgate pfSense. There is hardly any need to go to the open-source firewalls, especially with the ones that are coming back, and there are no enterprise security products in the price range that Netgate pfSense falls under.

If I assess the total cost of ownership of Netgate pfSense, I rate it as an eight or nine out of ten.

I don't use Netgate pfSense Plus on Amazon EC2 VMs, and I haven't had a customer who wanted to deploy the tool on the cloud. Most of them purchase and install their hardware directly from Netgate.

The maintenance of the tool's equipment is done once or twice a year just to blow out some dust and make sure it looks physically okay, which is nothing outside of what the regular network devices require. It doesn't require any special maintenance.

I would recommend Netgate pfSense because it is one of the products that my company markets to our customers.

As I have existing customers that use the solution, they serve as a reference point for my new customer. I tell others that I have deployed Netgate pfSense in a few official organizations, their use, and the problems that it has solved for them. I have case studies to speak about. If someone wants to go for a proof of concept, it is something that is doable.

I rate the tool an eight out of ten.

I am in IT. I use pfSense for my personal use. I use it to practice networking and understand how networks work. I apply all the networking-related things that I have learned to pfSense at home.

I also use it to isolate my IoT network from my regular network and from the devices I use for the cameras.

The main reason for implementing pfSense is that I like playing games. With pfSense, I can place quality control over the traffic traversing over the WAN connection or the Internet. I am able to prioritize and limit some devices to allow me to have a better connection to the Internet than some devices in our house.

pfSense is a flexible solution. It has features for setting devices into groups. I was able to group up the devices in our house to be able to set some restrictions on some devices and have full restrictions on other devices. It allowed me to control my kids' devices to limit access to the Internet to a certain time. It automatically stops on the Internet for those devices when that time comes.

pfSense gives a single pane of glass management in regard to the network. I was able to control everything in my network, which is good.

I use pfSense Plus. I got third-party hardware, not with pfSense, but I purchased the license to have a pfSense Plus version. That hardware went down a few days after I bought the license. I created a ticket, and the engineer allowed me to move it to another device because I had just recently purchased it. Thanks to them, I was able to have less downtime because I did not have extra money to purchase another license. I was able to bring it up as fast as possible. The backup and recovery of the configuration is very pretty easy. I just reuploaded the file and updated two lines of code, and that was it. Everything worked.

Everything works well. My streaming is working fine. My kids do not complain about any lags. I can play my games without having any issues. I do not experience any lags. When my wife is working, she does not have any problems downloading or uploading files back to her work. We are pretty happy with the performance.

For me, the firewall is most valuable because I can play around with the firewall. That is the best asset for me. I can limit what I want to limit, and I can open what I want to be open.

I like the versatility of pfSense. Compared to other products I have used for home and small businesses, this is the easiest to understand. It has enterprise features compared to, for example, Ubiquiti UniFi. Their router is limited to some features, whereas with pfSense I can do, for example, routing and dual WAN. I also have several VPN options. 

It has a lot of features, but I wish there were even more features. Some of the features I am looking for are still not there in pfSense, like, for example, content control. Because I have kids, I want to control the content or what they watch. There is a feature in pfSense called pfBlocker, but it is limited. If I set that up, it is blocked by an IP address. Sometimes my devices are borrowed by my kids. They are able to get a full connection to the Internet, but their devices are limited. If content blocking is added to pfSense, it would be great. If I can block content by a user, that will be a preferred solution.

The frequency of feature releases can be better. We have been waiting for some of the features for a while, but they have not been released. I know they prioritize what is used in the enterprise area, and then they provide some features for regular consumers like me. If they can balance that 50:50 and focus equally on the enterprise and consumer suggestions, it will be great.

The interface and support are perfect for me. I saw a post on their blog that they will be moving to the Linux operating system. Hopefully, they would have better wireless because the wireless for pfSense is horrible or horrendous. If they move to Linux, hopefully, they will improve it.

I have been using pfSense since 2020. It has been four years now.

It is very stable. I would rate it a nine out of ten for stability.

It is scalable. I would rate it a nine out of ten for scalability.

We are a family of five. Five of us are connecting to the pfSense Internet.

They are great. They are perfect for me.

Positive

I have used TP-Link and Ubiquiti EdgeRouter. In regards to features, the two are on par. They are way behind pfSense. pfSense is way ahead of these two in terms of what it could offer. In terms of security, TP-Link is very bad, EdgeRouter is in the middle, and pfSense is way ahead. In terms of performance, TP-Link is worse, and EdgeRouter and pfSense are neck to neck. I prefer pfSense over others.

I installed it on third-party hardware. The longest period of initial configuration was when I deployed it for the first time. After that, it is very fast because I can back up my config and restore it if I break something.

It took an hour or two for all the installation and configuration.

In terms of maintenance, it requires regular updates. That is the only maintenance that it needs. I also need to monitor if any known or zero-day bugs are found in pfSense. I am watching that because pfSense is the device facing the Internet, so I need to be always alert about any zero-day bugs. I also need to be mindful of the configuration to not accidentally expose any ports. These are the three things required in terms of maintenance.

In four years of using it, that payment of 189 dollars per year has already paid off. Over these years, I only experienced it going down two or three times, which is less than 1% downtime per year.

It is cheap. If you are a technical person, it is a pretty cheap solution because first of all, the Community Edition (CE) is free. I am in Australia, and my pfSense license is about 200 dollars. It is not bad because it is per year and not per month. It is cheap compared to other solutions.

I am not using the hardware. I am using the software. It is very cheap. It does not cost me a lot. The only cost is just the one-year payment. If I need extra hardware, I need to purchase that from the third party whose hardware I am using.

I would recommend pfSense to others. I already recommended it to my boss, and he is using it now. He is loving it as well. It is easy to use, and there are a lot of resources available. If you have any problem, someone would have already encountered that problem and found a fix, so it is easy to fix based on that. It is very reliable. The downtime experience is very low. It is almost zero.

I would rate pfSense a ten out of ten.

We use pfSense as a small business firewall and as a VPN gateway. 

PfSense provides us with a cost-effective but reliable network appliance. We have a standard networking device that lower-end help desk people can use effectively. It's less complicated. We moved from another platform that although the hardware was reliable, the software wasn't particularly reliable, and it was difficult to use.

It helps our operations because it's a standard platform anyone on our help desk can use. Every site will be pretty much the same. Once cloud management comes out, it'll be even better. 

PfSense is fairly simple to configure and has a good administration interface. It's built on pfSense, so I know it'll be reliable. It is quite flexible, and adding and configuring features is pretty easy. There's a lot of support for add-ons, and we can do a lot of stuff with it, so it suits our needs perfectly.

It secures against data loss pretty well. Plus only has a few additional features over the Community Edition. We mainly use Plus because it comes with the Netgate hardware.

The only feature I want to add is cloud management. I'll be an early adopter of that one. We're ready for that feature, and it's one of the few missing things, so that'll be excellent when it comes.

Another thing that's primarily an issue for us is that Netgate may soon stop production of the 1100. That's what we use for our telephony gateway. It doesn't need to be high performance, but it does need to be low cost. If they stop it and make the 2100 the lowest, that will be problematic for us. We will need to start using something else because it will become too expensive for our purposes. 

Effectively, we are using it as just a VPN gateway, and 1100s are great for that. What's annoying is that we cannot buy the 1100s directly because we're not a partner, and it isn't approved for connection to Australia, so we need to buy it through a company that went out and got it approved. We lose a bit of margin doing it that way. We can buy 2100s and above directly, but we must go through a reseller to get 1100s.  

I have used pfSense for two years.

I rate pfSense nine out of 10 for stability.

Netgate pfSense is scalable.

I rate Netgate support seven out of 10.

Neutral

We have used some other hardware, but the software was a dog. It's pretty difficult. We've also used some UniFi solutions, which are good, but they haven't sorted out the VPN component, so we'll continue using Netgate. Once they work out the kinks in their software, they'll possibly have a compelling solution. 

However, if Netgate stops selling the 1100, that could be quite problematic for us, and we'll probably go with Ubiquiti because it's too expensive to use 2100s for VPN appliances. 

PfSense is straightforward to deploy once you know what to do. It's a one-person job and takes a couple of hours. After deployment, it requires upgrades, but that's it.

The total cost of ownership is good because you buy it upfront and don't need to pay a subscription fee. We've spent a bit more, but we pass that along to the customer. In the end, everyone wins because they get a reliable solution, and we get something much easier to manage. 

I rate pfSense five out of five for pricing. It's fairly priced. We wouldn't buy it if it weren't. There are cheaper firewall options, but they aren't as reliable and easy to manage. Of course, there are also more expensive ones.

No ongoing subscription fee is nice because many of them are small businesses that don't want to pay for an ongoing subscription. It's always being updated, so that's good from a security perspective.

I rate Netgate pfSense seven out of 10. I would recommend it to others.

I use the solution in two ways. I deploy it commercially and I use it in my home lab as well. 

It's very easy to deploy. It's nice when you've used something for a while. You get comfortable with all of the benefits. I know what I'm doing. I'm very familiar with the product.

The addition of packages makes it very customizable. The flexibility is very good. Not all firewalls out there have that. Typically, you are tied into three or four different plugins. pfSense, however, allows you to add more than the standard handful others offer. 

It's easy to add features and configure them.

They do improve it consistently, which makes me want to return to it over and over as a solution. 

It just introduced, with the latest revision, the ability to save your backups incrementally as well as go back and make changes. I can go back to a particular backup, and that's quite useful.

The solution does prevent data loss. You can pick up your configuration files consistently, whether you want to do it daily, monthly, hourly, et cetera.

Users can manage everything under one single pane of glass. 

I also use pfSense Plus. It provides good features that help minimize downtime. The updates come quicker to Plus, which is helpful. It also helps optimize performance. Having the pane of glass offers consistency in terms of finding things. The UI is very intuitive.

Updating some of the packages can be a bit difficult. It's hard to stay on top of them all. There also might be a bit of a lag on updates.

If they could get to something like Meraki, where I could remotely log in and not have to deploy a package to do that, that would be nice to have. 

It would be helpful if they had more documentation. Some online details seem out of date and you have to spend a lot of time going through forums to uncover what everyone else is doing.

I've been using the solution for probably ten years. 

The stability is very good. I'd rate it nine out of ten. 

Most of my clients who are users are under 50 users. I handle mostly SMBs. I'd rate scalability eight out of ten.

Technical support is awesome. I haven't dealt with them a ton, however, every time I do, via email, within an hour, they've responded. 

Positive

I've used Cisco Meraki over the years. It's a bit different. There's also a cost factor. 

I've also tried OPNsense. I didn't like the look of it after using pfSense for so long. 

The initial deployment is straightforward. It's awesome. I always bench test it before deployment. I do it through my office, not on-site, to go through the various variables that could make things go sideways. 

The implementation only takes about a day. I can manage the process by myself. I don't need a team. 

A majority of my deployments are for home users.

There's not a lot of maintenance. You just want to keep packages updated when the time comes. 

I have witnessed an ROI from a remote perspective. I'm able to remote in for some users and fix any problems that way.

The solution is fairly priced. The total cost of ownership is pretty good. They do offer appliances as well and those are quite cost effective. 

I'm a consultant. 

I'd advise new users to learn at home first and play with pfSense just to get used to it. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

The solution is primarily used for anything to do with security. SMEs are using it to protect their businesses.

The companies we work with are fairly generic. What we see most is companies using the solution since it's affordable.

The price point is the most valuable aspect of the solution. Customers really value that.

Customers value the following features:  

• It's highly configurable
• It's flexible. 
• The features are easy to use.

The interface is somewhat challenging if you compare it to other commercial products. If you compare it to something like Sophos, where someone with decent firewall knowledge can get it up and running in a very short time, you need to be a fairly skilled security worker for this product.

Configuring the interface can be a bit hard.

We've found working with SAP networks challenging. The model that they have in terms of partner networks works very well in the US. However, it's very challenging in our part of the world. What works very well here (Kenya) is a distributor-reseller model, where you have the vendor appoint a distributor. Then the reseller can quickly serve the client. The partner support could be better here.

We've been selling the product for two or three years. 

The solution is quite stable. I'd rate stability nine out of ten. I rarely have a failure.

We largely work with SMBs. 

Support is excellent. 

Positive

We have used other products as well in the past. For example, I do have knowledge of Sophos. We are a reseller.  We've had it longer than pfSense. Sophos is a bit easier to set up. pfSense pricing is very good, however. It does need a more friendly UI.

The initial setup is a bit complex. There are other products that are easier to set up. The installation is not a problem, however, the complexity comes in with the configuration. The installation itself, which is basic, won't take long. The configuration process is longer since it can be from challenging to quite complex. 

There is some maintenance required. There are updates every quarter. Previous to the last update, you couldn't do an update without breaking. It's easier now, however, there is still maintenance. 

The solution is cost-effective, however, that does come at a cost to the client. They do have to buy the product in the US and ship it to Kenya. The total cost of ownership, including acquisition and support, can be quite competitive. 

We are resellers. 

I'd recommend the solution to other users.

I'd rate the product seven out of ten. There are a few challenges. However, it is stable and offers good support. 

We use pfSense for firewall, ad-blocking, and IPS functions. We have two pfSense instances on Dell hardware, and one exclusively does IPS/IDS. I have the firewall features turned off on that. The other use case is for the firewall features, reporting, and VPN.

The first benefit is that pfSense offers an affordable firewall solution. It's open source and available on any platform. If you wanted to pull an old machine out of your garage, you could set up a pretty decent pfSense installation. Having learned a little more about pfSense and some of the additional packages that can be bolted onto pfSense, I've used it now for quite a few different things.

I haven't had any particular instances where I felt I was under attack or the firewall was somehow inadequate. I feel very comfortable that this will do everything to protect data. The initial deployment was positive, and we started seeing the benefits within a couple of hours.

The pfSense Plus has vetted rules and software releases from Netgate. Having that extra layer of accountability from Netgate with the Plus features is a positive. 

I like the VPN features. We use WireGuard, which is part of the pfSense package. That was easy to set up, so I could connect to other customer sites seamlessly. Is there such a thing as being too flexible? It's a highly flexible platform, especially regarding support for third-party packages. It's almost like you're overfilling your grocery cart, and items are all falling on the floor. You can add too much to it. 

The single pane of glass management could be better. For example, it relies on several additional packages to provide some of the features advertised as part of its capabilities, but those packages are not visible directly through the initial pfSense dashboard. 

It is easy to add features, but configuring them takes a lot of knowledge. I would like to see an additional wizard added to pfSense when you add some of their other packages. You can add a package from pfSense to do a particular task, but you need to be a product expert or willing to spend time on the Internet for hours and hours to figure out how to configure some of those features correctly. 

We have used pfSense for about one year.

We haven't experienced any crashes or performance issues. I have pfSense loaded up with third-party packages, and it's just rock solid.

We're a small shop, so I don't have much experience deploying it in bigger, better, faster scenarios. 

I rate Netgate support nine out of 10. They were very responsive. It took some getting used to because I always used phone support. I love phone support. I like talking to people, but the support level that I paid for was email. They were on it fairly quickly. It was a licensing issue, and they told me exactly what the problem was within 24 hours.

Positive

I've used Cisco firewalls before and found them very complicated. You don't know what you're doing, and it's dedicated hardware. I've used some other common off-the-shelf products, such as Netgear and Linksys. I thought pfSense was the best fit.

The initial deployment of the pfSense firewall is easy. It took nearly four hours, including the additional configuration tweaks. We're a small environment, so it was pretty straightforward

After deployment, it doesn't require much maintenance. It's essentially fire and forget. I chose to do the updates manually, but you can set it to update automatically. I should note that I chose Dell platforms to run pfSense because there's a lot of industry knowledge regarding the combination of Dell and pfSense. Anyone deploying some no-name hardware from other companies will probably run into some trouble.

PfSense is affordable. I appreciate that it's based on a support requirement instead of bandwidth or users. We're pretty small, so we don't touch many of those levels that they might have. 

Since I'm using my own hardware instead of a Netgate appliance, this is the most bang for your buck you can deploy. I pay for the Plus and feel the benefits behind the software and configurations. The average user might be fine with the community edition, but I wouldn't go that route for a production environment. I think this is a cost-effective solution. I can amend it to manipulate the various hardware configurations without much pushback from Netgate. 

I rate Netgate pfSense nine out of 10. I highly recommend it. It isn't a perfect solution. It's a little difficult to configure. If you can afford it, I would pay for the phone support.

I have the Netgate 6100 firewall with pfSense at my house, and I also have several business clients on it. I use it for site-to-site VPN from one doctor's office to another so their PBX phone systems can replicate across the network. 

PfSense helps prevent data loss. It's a firewall, so unless you open ports, they are completely closed off, and nobody will crack into your network. You can set up various rules that will let you know if you have an intrusion or block an IP address, country, etc., for malicious threats. 

I haven't experienced any downtime with the 6100, but I've had problems with the Netgate 2100 appliances. One of the data-driven procedures is performance. If you make a change, your traffic comes up almost immediately. If I had to compare pfSense to SonicWall, I probably wouldn't use SonicWall based on the boot time. When you have to restart the system or something like that, pfSense is quick, whereas these other firewalls will take 10 minutes to come back online. 

The visibility pfSense provides helps optimize performance. Some of the stuff is visible in their charts and graphs. You can see their traffic moving in real time. That's beneficial to me, especially if I'm looking for something. For example, if you're looking for an IP address that's seeing a lot of data, you can narrow it down to what device it is.

The most valuable aspect of pfSense is the community. If you have a question, you can post it on the forum. The backups are also good. I restored it from a hard drive recently and was back up in 10 minutes. 

I like pfSense's flexibility. It lets you install it on multiple applications, such as a VM, appliance, or white box. For a short time, the community edition had a free upgrade to the Plus edition, so you could technically download the version and convert it into a Plus version. They offered support there for a while, but I don't know if they still do. 

If you log into it, it is a single pane of glass, but the features are scattered everywhere. If you make a firewall rule and you run a port, it will automatically make the firewall rule for you, so you don't have to do that. That's convenient versus some firewalls where you have to make the net rule, then you have to make the firewall rule to allow the net to operate. 

It's easy to add features, but some require configuration. Depending on the feature you're adding, that can be tricky. I wish their GUI were easier to use because it's always been scattered instead of having everything in one column. You have to click one thing to get something to work kind of like UniFi. You have to be a little techie to get it working as you want. The only other problem I've encountered is that sometimes it has buffer bloat, and you have to go in and change some firewall limiter rules to get the bloat to go away. Once you get it down and have done it a couple of times, it seems fairly straightforward. 

If the GUI interface were better, that would be a huge benefit. There's a fork of pfSense called OpenSense with a far superior interface. Everything's in the left-hand column. When you click on one item, you see everything listed under a single tab. You don't have to jump back and forth through the program. 

Everybody is sometimes scared of open firewalls, but they get updates regularly. I check them all the time. I wish it had an app or some alert feature that you could set up. That would make it a little bit easier if something went wrong because you usually don't find out until the last second.

I've used pfSense for 10 to 15 years.

PfSense is highly stable. I don't typically have any crashes. Usually, it's hardware problems, such as a hard drive or memory chip. Beyond that, I have had no issues with any appliances that pfSense installed.

The scalability is good because if you have two identical devices, you can do high availability, so it's highly scalable. 

I rate Netgate support 10 out of 10. Netgate technical support is just phenomenal. If you pay for support, they're on it right away. I've had to call them a couple of times and ask for a system image for some of their lower-end devices. I've noticed that an upgrade will sometimes break them. You can take the serial and model numbers, send them an email, and they'll send you the image. You just download the image, flash it over onto the device, and restore from the backup.

Positive

I've used UniFi's Dream Machines, FortiGate, SonicWall, and OpenSense. I've got one instance of OpenSense out there. They're all about the same in performance, but everything has its own learning curve. The learning curve of pfSense is higher than OpenSense because of the GUI, which is a little confusing and intimidating for someone brand new.

A brand-new user might be confused, especially if they don't have too much networking capability. If you have a white box and download the software, you need to configure everything, including the network interface card, but if you buy an appliance, you should be able to plug into a port and get an IP address. That's not the case with the community. It isn't. For those who want to dabble and play around with it, there's a bit of a learning curve there at the beginning on how to get it. They have some good documentation, but it's a little confusing.

I can have it running in 10 minutes. It depends on what you're doing and whether you have VLANs, which can be confusing to configure. But you can set up a simple home user with no VLANs in 10 minutes. For maintenance, it'll tell you if there's an update, but I typically wait a while before I do the update to ensure that it's solid. They do good testing on it, but I've had some problems where it breaks something else when they do an update.

The price of pfSense is on par with everything else. It depends on how big an appliance you buy and whether you're purchasing it directly from Netgate. Some rack-mounted systems are expensive—a couple thousand bucks. The one that I use at my house was $700.

The total cost of ownership isn't too high or too low. I think it's right where it needs to be. Obviously, with new appliances and faster technology, your prices will go up, but that's expected with any product you buy. It was all free when I first started using it, and you could put it in any box you wanted to buy. 

I rate pfSense eight out of 10. The reason I give it an eight is that the GUI needs to be cleaned up a little. I think Netgate would sell more if the GUI were a little more like Opensense. Before buying, I would test the community edition on a virtual machine and select an appropriate appliance based on your deployment. 

We have a tiny business that uses pfSense to create a secure VPN between our two locations. 

It's a reliable platform. We also value pfSense's security features because we have to comply with PCI for credit card payments. We need to be confident that we'll have the security. PfSense offers that.

We realized the benefits of pfSense almost immediately. I read about a company using it and thought it would be the most secure thing. It's a bit daunting at first because you have to configure it. However, they create ISP versions, so you can leave those alone and not configure them. This does the whole thing in one box, whereas, with the ISP thing, you have to think about how many different appliances you'll need to make it work.

I like how easy it is to access VPNs and stuff like that. It's so simple to set up a site-to-site VPN. The solution is flexible enough to do just about anything.  It's super easy to configure the features as long as you have the details you need, or you can build out stuff if it lacks what you're after because it has a plugin architecture.

It depends on how you run it, but pfSense can help you prevent data loss. Still, it's more about preventing people from getting in and having the confidence that you won't be compromised. And if you need those extra features, you can always add them and all those things that can monitor what's happening in your website or organization.

The web interface allows you to see bandwidth, how things connect, and much more. PfSense Plus prevents downtime. It has a feature that records everything you do so that if a unit fails, you can swap it out and enter your details, and then it loads your configuration on a new device. PeerSpot Plus provides visibility that enables data-driven decisions. You can set it up to do that if you want it. 

They could always make pfSense slightly more user-friendly and modernize the interface a little. 

I have used pfSense since 2015, so it's been around nine years.

I've never seen pfSense crash.

It's at the scale that I need it, but you can certainly scale it up to the enterprise level if you want to have a better product. It depends on the hardware. 

I rate Netgate support 10 out of 10. I only contacted them once. It was very quick and efficient. I had a sensible solution within five minutes. I couldn't imagine having better support.

Positive

I used some Netgear hardware, but I don't remember the model because it was eight years ago. When I switched to pfSense, I stuck with it because it works reliably. 

Deploying pfSense was pretty easy. I'm an IT guy, so I did it myself. After deployment, you need to do some routine maintenance, like upgrading occasionally and checking your file logs. Apart from that, it does everything for you.

They have a free community version and a paid version. The free version works if you are a home user who needs a fixed cost, but that's not my use case. 

I rate Netgate pfSense 10 out of 10. I can't think of a way to make it better. Before deploying pfSense, prepare your area and your network. Understand your entire network and what you want to do before you start doing anything then follow the documentation.