Netgate pfSense Reviews

We use pfSense for the firewall, VPN server, client-server, and internal network.

pfSense helped us during COVID-19 because we used OpenVPN to connect from home.

I like the Package Manager feature. 

The main problem with pfSense is that it lacks adequate ransomware protection. I would also like pfSense to be more robust like Cisco or Fortinet.

I've been using pfSense for two or three years.

The stability is very good.

Scalability is very good. We didn't have to slow down, and we worked with it for months.

The pfSense page, community support, and YouTube tutorials are good.

The initial set up is complex and took two days to deploy.

pfSense is open-source.

I like Fortinet and Sophos as they have more tools to prevent ransomware attacks. Sophos has a client-server, and pfSense doesn't have that. Fortinet and Sophos are under a paid license, and pfSense is open-source and free. This is the main difference.

I would recommend pfSense to potential users. I would tell them to just read the tutorials because they're very useful. 

On a scale from one to ten, I would give pfSense a nine.

The solution is fairly scalable when it comes to integrating with other applications and data sets. They have a lot more customization compared to the competition.

They could improve their commercial stance and be more agile when it comes to the commercial pricing of enterprise deals.

For a feature update, they should increase the API integrations into decentralized identity platforms making it stronger.

I have been using the solution for two years.

In my experience, this solution is able to increase its scalability.

Technical support is very supportive. When we are in contact with them, there is no problem at all.

The setup was straightforward.

When doing deployments of the solution we generally average approximately six to eight weeks.

The pricing is lower than some of its competitors. However, If you do not have a strong technical team and are trying to get pfSense to do some of the same functions as some of the competitors such as Fortinet or Palo Alto, It will cost you a lot in professional services to do it. You then lose the low cost-benefit of this solution.

I have evaluated Fortinet, their pricing is reasonable for the SME market, but they are not enterprise players. The strongest solutions in this field are certainly SentinelOne and Carbon Black, they outperform everything else.

I would recommend the solution to others.

I rate pfSense an eight out of ten.

The primary use case of this solution is to protect our business network.

I like the fact that it is open-source.

The Surakarta and the web blocking functionality seems to be quite good. It's not perfect, but none of them are.

The interface is straightforward and easy to use.

I would like to see the dashboard modernized.

If you look at some of the other providers, their dashboard is more modern looking.

Also, simplifying the rules for the GeoIP. Making it simpler to understand would be an improvement.

I have been using pfSense for approximately one year.

It seems to be relatively stable. I haven't had very many issues.

If I do have any issues, it is more to do with the way that I have configured it. Other than that, it works fine.

It's a scalable solution. We have 14 computers with more powerful hardware that allows us to deal with larger networks.

Apart from what you see on the interface, you can also use the command line to create a cluster if you need to.

The initial setup is straightforward once you read the manual.

I did evaluate another solution but felt that the cost was too high for what it was. Based on the consumer market, I didn't feel that it was at the enterprise level.

I would recommend reading the manual and the administration book. It has all of the proper information.

Many will jump into pfSense without reading the manual properly, or taking the time to understand the definitions, and how to set it up properly.

If you don't, then you might have a bad experience, which would not be fair to the product.

To give a fair comparison and trial, definitely read the technical documentation before implementing it.

Given the fact that it's open-source, relatively easy to use, and it seems to do the job quite well, I would rate pfSense a ten out of ten. I think it deserves that.

I use pfSense for the security of my company.

With pfSense we have low balances for the internet and the internet is always available. When our service provider fails, it takes communication to another service. The employees always have access to the servers that they need. They always have an abundant flow or they always switch to the lead when the internet fails.

It has a good web cache. I used to use a DHCP server and DNS server. For my company, I use pfSense as a load balancing application.

The HA proxy is the main feature that it's used for. 

Many people have problems setting up the web cache for the web system.

They should put an anti-spam in a web application firewall.

I have been using pfSense since 2006. 

The stability is rock-solid. 

I think scalability is good enough. 

I do the maintenance for pfSense.

There is a lot of information in the online forums. 

I have used other solutions but I chose pfSense because it's easy to use and configure.

The initial setup was very easy.

Before I set up, I wrote down all the levels on a paper and I drew the plan I wanted to protect. After that, I deployed it pfSense. I filtered the access to the users and to the servers. Everyone has the access that they need.

The deployment took less than an hour.

It's open-source. You can pay for support if you need. 

I would rate pfSense a nine out of ten. 

We have a hosted platform with our client. We've built a VPN site and the solution is deployed as a VM. The client connects to it and it protects anything that's behind it like a regular firewall. Everything we have there is hosted in a data center, all our servers and things that clients connect to. So we're using it as our gateway device. We are customers of pfSense and I'm the owner of our company. 

I like the site-to-site VPN and the basic firewall features.

Right now we have to use a lot of third party plugins with other providers that have their own built-in features so I'd like to see layer 7 advanced firewall features included in the solution. It would definitely improve the product. 

We've used pfSense over the past three years. 

The stability is very good, it's just that it's not as easy to use as SonicWall. There are limits as to who we can put to work on the solution, a limited number of our engineers work with it.

The solution is very scalable. We don't sell pfSense to the end users, we use it ourselves. Our clients have SonicWall but the whole company benefits from the firewall. 

We've never used technical support but we're looking into it now and I think it's very comparable to SonicWall.

It's harder to set up pfSense than SonicWall. Only a couple of people in our company can do that. 

We are currently using the open source solution so it's free. 

There's a learning curve to this solution, it's not as simple to use as some of the other GUI based firewalls. You need to play around with it a bit. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

We use pfSense for our firewall protection.

The most valuable features are ease of installation and support.

The domain blocking lists need to be improved. The supported list for domain blocking is community-maintained, and I would like to see something from the manufacturers of pfSense that is a little more global.

I would like to see different graphs available in the reporting.

We have been using pfSense for two months.

pfSense is quite stable. It is one of the pros.

The scalability is very good, where you can do an HA configuration and then bring in another box, if necessary. We have ten users in the organization.

We get very little usage and have no plans to increase it.

The technical support is A+, pretty good.

The initial setup was straightforward.

This solution provides enterprise-level features at a fraction of the cost of an enterprise firewall.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

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

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

The most valuable features are the Proxy IPS and VPN.

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

Our primary uses for this solution are as a network firewall and a VPN Server. 

This solution has helped our organization by protecting our network from attacks.

The most valuable feature is the proactive network protection.

We also find the following components valuable:

1. pFBlocker
2. Squid
3. SquidGuard
4. Firewall

This product needs improvements with respect to reporting and auditing.

I had an appliance that died six months ago. Then I didn't want that hardware anymore, so I bought two new servers. A single power supply but dual on a network with three times four network cards. On that, I installed the pfSense (Community Edition).

From inside to outside, I have about 15 to 20 node servers and users going outside. From outside to inside, I have only three tech support people, myself and two other ones. With regard to clients using the platform from outside to inside, on the servers inside, I have about 1000.

I had some outages in the network and we provide services for our company. We sell mobile credits. The terminal gets access to our own server inside the network and if one internet fails, then the other one is still up and we have a back-up link on the devices. 

If the devices cannot send the first IP address, they make use of the second IP address, which is the back-up link to access the servers. In terms of outages, ever since I used pfSense, I have that feature. 

In terms of experiencing delays, the server has the primary IP and the secondary IP configured on the client terminals. The total solution works.

I'm still experimenting with some new features. I want to do a high availability configuration. I haven't done that yet, but I'm using OpenVPN, it's very handy. 

Some suggestions for improvement of pfSense are:

• Adjustment in the interfaces: I had to adjust those interfaces manually and of course that is a great feature that you can restore it but it is immediately also one point for improvement. If you don't have to adjust, if it's just stamped and it works, that's great.
• With regard to the Community Edition, when I installed it, we use Proxmox as an equivalent of PMWorks and I installed the Community Edition in Proxmox. That was very difficult to get to work at first. A lot of tweaking. That is very, very not easy.
• When I'm inside of my network and I go to a URL, the URL points to a server inside my network. It doesn't hang, but I don't get a response. It just stays blank. 
• I can imagine that inside my network, I am going outside, and it points to the public address, so I can reach it. With eSoft, without any adjustment, it worked, and I was able to do that. I went to search pfSense for an option, and I had some documents open to read about how it is done, but it isn't clear enough. It's not that easy. I would appreciate it if I could get easy help on that.

pfSense is very stable. My own disappointment is the appliance only worked for a year and two months. It might be just bad luck, but that was very disappointing.

I had to use pfSense Community Edition on a general desktop. That was done within three hours. It took me three hours just to get the hardware, download the software, and then set it up to get everything working again. 

After that, I ordered the new server with two servers: one has to be active and the other standby. I am going to try higher scalability on it using pfSense. 

The configuration is already on the servers. I did all this myself because of my experience. The utilization of the CPU, etc., it's very low. 

I like pfSense. It doesn't take too many resources and it's very stable.

I did not utilize pfSense customer support. You have documentation, there is enough documentation online to get you through. I haven't actually used tech support. When I bought the appliance, I was entitled to one year of tech support. I never used it, it wasn't needed. 

I previously evaluated eSoft by Untangle. Untangle is an open source company but you have to buy custom add-on's to get it to work. I bought eSoft and it's very good.

I am also the CEO of my company. This technical part, it's not my profession, but I get less and less time to invest, and more time playing around with this stuff. 

When we were growing, a small company, eSoft was small, so I needed a bigger one. I had to reset eSoft every week because of the growing traffic over it. I wanted a bigger one and it was not available. 

What I wanted to do was not possible with Untangle. Untangle was basic stuff. I bought the pfSense appliance and it's open source, but I support the project. 

I bought it and I got disappointed because I again wanted a bigger one. My first choice would be Cisco because of my background but Cisco is expensive.

eSoft was good. Before switching from eSoft to pfSense, Cisco at that time was not an option. 

Every software in our company, every desktop, every server, is open source. If it isn't CentOS then it's Red Hat or Ubuntu. 

Open source was preferred and pfSense was number one on the list.

Ever since the first time I used it, it's very straightforward, it's very easy.

My strategy was to get it connected to the internet first, then apply some rules for forwarding and VPN. 

The first one was very easy to set setup. VPN was not that straightforward but there is enough documentation to get you through it and that helped. 

In terms of time, the Community Edition took very long to install but once installed, to configure, it took around 15 to 20 minutes.

I did the setup all by myself. There is documentation online and that is sufficient. It's good enough, very good support in the documents.

If you haven't invested a lot of money, you will definitely see the return on investment with pfSense because you hardly spend anything, except for the hardware. 

With the appliances, pfSense should look into longevity issues. Your hardware should take, like Cisco's and others, years before they break. In terms of other retailer equipment, it's a safe bet towards pfSense.

That's why I purchased it but I have to look into the high availability. There is documentation of people that I know that are going to get it to work. I'm going to test it because that is our business that we are talking about also.

It should work because of the resale mobile credit for our customers. Another thing I will definitely try is the virtual IP because the virtual IP feature can bridge the two interfaces. The SSL certification is from Google. 

That was it for me, I'm 100% happy.

I prefer appliance licensing with pfSense (Community Edition). 

1. It's free. 
2. It's very stable. 
3. It's only on the hardware, it can be very fast.

Choose the appliances because it is nice to have the hardware cut out for it, i.e. the right hardware for the right software. 

I used to be a Cisco network expert. I used to train people and I've done some Cisco projects myself. I know Cisco by heart but I was less excited about Microsoft, so I went researching for open source solutions and I came across pfSense.

I was able to compare pfSense with Cisco. I used it for a client of mine as well, and it was interesting. After that, I started my own company and I came across pfSense again. 

I looked into pfSense. You have OPNsense from the Dutch and then you have pfSense. I've tried both and I like pfSense more.

I definitely plan to increase using pfSense. I am going for a higher capacity. If power fails or one server dies, or one gateway dies, the other servers will take over seamlessly. That's the ultimate for us.

I would definitely rate pfSense an eight and a half out of ten. Definitely eight and a half, not lower, could be a bit higher. Because it's stable, it's good. If the small issues I've mentioned are worked on then I would go to a 10.

My primary use case for pfSense is as a firewall. We also use it for intrusion detection, intrusion prevention, website filtering, and quality of service (QoS).

My company mainly works in the health and educational domain, schools and universities. I prevent the improper use of content from schools and universities. I defend the medical records for the patients in our hospitals. That is the main use case for me for the firewall.

One of the most valuable features of this solution is that it's almost entirely free and I can do everything with it.

It has everything I need, but the main drawback of pfSense is that it's not user-friendly. I hope to have something to make the interfaces more user-friendly. I would also like to see some documentation that can help with use cases or that has advice and tips. I have found some documentation available but it's usually from an earlier version. If they develop this, pfSense will be the best. The only thing that Fortigate is better than pfSense is that they have 24/7 support. pfSense also needs improvements in the intrusion detection area.

I depend on and use VMware ESXi with vSphere in my deployment, virtualization. pfSense is more stable and reliable if you install it directly on the server, i.e. not being installed as a virtual machine. That makes it very stable.

The scalability is good. You can integrate some nodes of pfSense but it's not very user friendly.

I would be more relieved and more happy to have support. You need to have some people who can help you in any use case.

Lots of reading and trial and error. It's tough for the network engineer, but it is magnificent in performance from my point of view.

We implemented in-house. Not user friendly, but if you want to do anything you can do it with pfSense.

Free. Would purchase for better customer support.

It is completely free.

We also evaluated Fortigate.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. I give it this rating because of the rich features available. pfSense is free and I can do everything with it. It works as a firewall for servers also.