Netgate pfSense Reviews

We deploy Netgate pfSense primarily as enterprise-grade routers and VPN endpoints or VPN servers.

It's a firewall that provides frontline defense for any network. We saw the benefits of pfSense immediately upon the first deployment. It has several features that prevent data loss. For example, it allows automated backups of the configurations. It's nice to know that any changes are captured, and we can easily be pulled back to a new device should the current one fail. It also helps to optimize performance. We get good real-time statistics that Netgate can use to optimize performance. 

The automated backup is great. PfSense is an incredibly flexible platform. You can install whatever plugins you need and get lots of community support. There is tons of built-in logging, and the add-on packages you can use to analyze your traffic have been handy. That can generate a ton of data for us to look at how the network is being utilized and what changes need to be made or where we can improve.

From the hardware perspective, it seems like there has been a lot of turnover at Netgate. It comes with the territory because processors and other boards change so fast. But I'd like to see more continuity in the product line and a longer lifespan for a specific series. The operating system side of it has been rock solid, and the appliances have been great. I just want to not support many different appliances. I want one we can standardize for several years.

I have used pfSense for around 10 years.

The stability of pfSense is rock-solid.

The scalability of pfSense is also excellent, assuming you purchase the right hardware on the front end. In our case, we're doing physical deployments, not cloud-based.

I rate Netgate support 10 out of 10.  Their in-house support team is excellent. Each appliance comes with the minimum support needed to get a network connection. The support is knowledgeable and responds quickly, so the questions are addressed professionally and accurately.

We've used some Cisco products. I prefer the pfSense licensing model. You can get ongoing support and updates continuously. I don't need to pay again to patch a system. Cisco licenses connections. It's such a licensing problem at Cisco that I prefer dealing with pfSense.

We deployed pfSense on physical appliances. I think it's fairly easy for the average IT technician with no prior experience if they understand that it's primarily configured through a web portal instead of a command line configuration. PfSense can be deployed on one instance in 15 to 30 minutes.  

The documentation and community support are great, so many answers can be found without reaching out to their support. It requires no maintenance aside from regular updates and patches. 

The pricing is fantastic, and the market bears it easily. The total cost of ownership is so low because the license and the hardware are remarkably good. You don't have any recurring fees or licenses to maintain. With pfSense, you pay the upfront cost and that's it. The upfront cost is reasonable.

I rate Netgate pfSense 10 out of 10. I love using pfSense firewalls. 

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. 

Positive

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. 

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. 

The typical use case for Netgate pfSense is VPN connectivity, content blocking, and IDS/IPS. Users typically implement it for these specific purposes.

The best features of Netgate pfSense include its open-source nature, and one of the most appealing aspects is the absence of recurring expenses, as there are no licensing fees. Users get enterprise-class firewall networking with this product.

Customers who use other firewall products such as Sophos or FortiGate often conduct research and choose Netgate pfSense because the yearly expenses of other firewall products are higher compared to pfSense, which has no licensing fee. While there is no yearly licensing fee with this product, users still receive all the enterprise-class firewall features.

The stateful packet inspection feature is enterprise-class, and when compared to other firewall products, it matches their capabilities effectively.

Areas of Netgate pfSense that can be improved include the customers' requests for antivirus protection, which they refer to as Unified Threat Management, available in other products. Unified Threat Management can match up with other brands as well.

I have around one and a half years of experience working with Netgate pfSense.

Netgate pfSense is definitely a scalable solution.

The technical support from Netgate pfSense deserves a rating of 10 on a scale of one to ten, where one is the worst technical support and ten is the best.

Positive

The initial setup of Netgate pfSense is easy because it has a wizard. Users can run the wizard and set up the firewall within five minutes.

Netgate pfSense comes with Netgate appliances, in which pfSense is loaded, ensuring compatibility with different hardware platforms. The solution proves to be stable in operation.

On a scale of 1-10, I rate this solution an 8.

I use pfSense as a firewall for a university client with 10,000 to 12,000 users. I'm a consultant to the client, and they haven't introduced the product to their IT team. They are only starting to train themselves and use it to secure their environment from end to end. 

One of the biggest benefits is cost savings. It has reduced operating costs compared to Sophos by more than 50 percent. PfSense Plus helped us minimize downtime. I can configure it for high availability, and the machines are simple and reliable. The Netgear devices work well. They stay up. I built a cluster, and they work seamlessly. 

I like how affordable and flexible pfSense is. I can achieve the protection I need in a flexible manner. I enjoy using pfSense. It's effective and solid.

Two key areas need improvement: the traffic profile and better centralized management. It would be great if we could have a single pane of glass for managing multiple appliances running in different locations. Sophos has much better centralized management, but you're paying an arm and a leg for it.

The management is good, but it's quite basic. If I have multiple instances deployed, I can't manage the information like I would when I use something like Sophos Central to manage multiple devices in different locations. 

The portal is still not well-tuned. There are still issues regarding implementation and its effectiveness. But besides that, everything else is great, from the purchase to implementation, setup, etc. Only the portal needs a lot of work.

I rate pfSense 10 out of 10 for stability.

I rate pfSense 10 out of 10 for scalability. It's highly scalable. 

I have not contacted Netgate support yet, but I've heard that the technical support is excellent. I can't afford it.

We were using Sophos but switched due to the price. I was looking for a more affordable firewall solution, which brought me to pfSense. I sought something to replace our existing device. We needed something to do the same thing I was doing, including firewall, IPS, etc., but that wouldn't cost me as much as Sophos did.

PfSense isn't very easy, but if you know what you're doing and know what you're looking for, you can get it done. It's technical compared to Sophos. It's not difficult. It's just more technical.

PfSense was straightforward. The infrastructure is complex, but the implementation was straightforward for me. Maybe that's because I've had years of experience in IT infrastructure deployment. 

The deployment time depends on the features you want to implement. It took me about a week. The initial setup took less than two hours, but it took me about a week to finish the tune-up. I mostly deployed it by myself. I just looked up online videos from experts and understood what to do next. After deployment, it requires the occasional firmware update. That's it.

I rate pfSense 10 out of 10 for affordability. The company did the price review of Sophos and just took it out of the wall. Most of our clients have recommended Netgate. The total cost of ownership is excellent. It makes a lot of sense for SMEs. I pay a little bit on top. The Netgate infrastructure is much easier to approach. 

I rate Netgate pfSense eight out of 10. I recommend it to others. It's affordable and not that difficult to set up or manage. You need to be certified to use Sophos, but we don't need any specific certifications to own or manage pfSense.

We use pfSense as an edge router for customers. I use pfSense Plus. We're using Netgate boxes preconfigured with pfSense.

PfSense gives our customers high security, and it's easy to implement. Most customers are looking for a VPN, so we set up a static IP that makes the VPN easy. The benefits of pfSense are immediate. It has a few features that prevent data loss, such as backups and creating rules. It does packet inspection to ensure large known malware does not get through to the end users.

It offers features that help us prevent downtime, but that doesn't apply to our customers. It has failover, so if an internet line were to go bad, you could failover to another line. That doesn't apply to our customers because they can't afford a second internet line. 

I appreciate the depth of what you can do with pfSense and the simplicity of the initial setup. One thing we've done is create an image, and when we get a new customer who needs a device, we can put that image on there. The image gets them up to 90 percent of what we need them to have, and we only have to customize the remaining 10 percent. PfSense is incredibly flexible. It's complicated, but it's incredibly flexible.

We do a lot of managed services and are currently trying to get people off of L2TP VPN. Apparently, we can download a mobile config file from a configured NetGate device, and we're primarily Apple. We've experimented with it on a device that's not a production device, and we can't seem to get the phase one IPSec set correctly so that the Apple config will accept it. 

We've tried looking at the documentation but haven't found anything. While it's not the highest priority, it is rather frustrating. We'd like to do this, and the feature is right there, but we can't get it configured. We certainly don't want to try it on a production machine because it will break the current VPN. 

I would like to download the Apple mobile config so that I can tell it to configure my VPN connection to do that. We have some cross-platform things. So there's also a Windows VPN. You can download a script or a PowerShell, put it on a Windows machine, and it can connect to the VPN. It would be nice if I could say I want Mac only, Windows only, or both. I wish it could configure the IPSec phase one and phase two, or at least give me solid instructions on how to configure that.

It doesn't supply out-of-the-box visibility to drive decisions. You get 75 log lines, so if you're trying to troubleshoot something, you have to look at one log and then another. It integrates with SysLog systems, but our customers are not at the level where they want to pay for some third-party SysLog system. Usually, we can get things taken care of fairly quickly.

I would like to have the ability to control all my devices from one place. With Ubiquiti, you can get a controller that allows you to control all of your Wi-Fi devices, switches, and routers. From one area, you can switch to that customer and see what's happening in their environment. That's not part of pfSense. I understand why it's not because pfSense is open source and community supported. That's something that someone in the community needs to pick up and run with. It's not something the pfSense can easily implement. If they could, that'd be great.

We did have one issue with sales. Contacted them with a question and never received a response.

I have used pfSense for 12 years.

I give it an eight out of 10. I've never had any lag or downtime.

The higher-end boxes have a lot of scalability. You can run pfSense on a Unix box and add cards or all sorts of things. If you had a powerful Unix box and hot spot-able, there would be a lot of scalability to it. I primarily use their Netgate appliances from the 1100 to 2100 hundred, so the scalability is limited. 

The old 3100 had a lot more scalability than its replacement the 2100. But the next step up now is to the 4100, which gives you an additional preconfigured WAN port that allows you to easily separate networks. It jumps from $400 to $900.

I rate Netgate support eight out of 10. They're great. I called about an issue with a bad box. They answered the phone and I got somebody who was highly familiar with the product. He had me try several troubleshooting things, identified that the box was bad, and got me a replacement. 

Positive

We’ve used SonicWall and switched due to cost. Though SonicWall is easier to manage, the on-going costs are prohibitive.

The deployment difficulty depends on what you need to do. Let's say you get a box and plug it into your network, but you can't get it to work, so you call the folks at pfSense. They will help you configure it so that you can ping a remote device. That's pretty easy. 

I gave one of the pfSense boxes to one of my people who has minimal knowledge about setting up network devices. He could get it to ping in about 25 minutes. Then, I asked him to add a VLAN, and he's still working on that. That's been two and a half months. If someone needs something to put on their network, it's pretty easy, but if you want the full benefit of a firewall, it may take a while. One person is enough to do it. After deployment, you just need to do some periodic firmware updates. 

PfSense's pricing is reasonable. However, support is relatively expensive for smaller customers, and you need to pay per device to get it. So if Customer A is having an issue, I have to get support, and then I have to get support for Customer B, and so on. It would be nice as a managed services provider to get support for my company rather than individual devices.

I would compare the total cost of ownership to SonicWall. We can compare the basic functions of the Netgate 2100, the model we use most, to the SonicWall 3500. They have very similar functionality. The cost of the 3500 was closer to $4,000.

I rate Netgate pfSense eight out of 10. I recommend doing a lot of research or spending the $500 to get the extended support. 

We're using our offices including the main endpoint VPN connections from the main office to our seller offices.

The ability to load third-party apps, et cetera,  into the firewall is pretty useful for a commercial-grade router and file, which is very customizable.

Out of the box, it's about 90% plug-and-play. The last piece, you do need to know how you're setting the firewall up for your environment. It varies on what you're trying to do with it. It can be really easy or difficult, depending on your knowledge base for the application.

We were able to witness the benefits of the product pretty much immediately.

Once you've navigated around it, it's pretty self-explanatory as to where to go. Compared to other products out there, it's pretty easy.

We do have a sort of single pane of glass for management purposes. You do have to dig around. If we had, for example, ten pfSense routers deployed, it would be nice to have one console where you could see all ten devices, update them, and keep them all central. A management portal would be very nice.

I've been using the solution for seven years. 

The solution is very stable. Issues are rare unless a box gets hit with a power surge or something. 

I found the solution very scalable. I can load multiple VMs on it and add a second port onto it. Depending on your deployment, it is very scalable. 

I've only contacted support for corrupted systems. If the unit loses power and comes back on every once in a while, the file system gets corrupted, or it won't boot the device, and you have to reimage the whole thing, in those instances, I've had to reach out to them. They are pretty quick. I can get help within an hour even with just the free version. I imagine the paid version has good support. 

Positive

We used to use Ubiquiti, which was not a great solution. We also used something previously to that. Their interface was very clunky. You'd have to go through multiple different routes to get to the same thing that pfSense has on a single drop-down. pfSense has a more user-friendly setup. Plus, it has CLI integration, which is great. You can make configurations in the command prompt too, which is a lot easier.

To me, the setup is fairly easy. That said, I already knew what I was doing to set it up. If I were coming fresh out into the network and environment, I'd never switch one of the firewalls; there may be a challenge to go through and figure out what the router can do to make the deployment work. When you get the box, you plug it in. There are a lot of features that are ported in that don't come pre-installed. However, they have a complete database listed in their browser. You just go down and pick what services you need. If you don't know what is there, it may take you a while to figure out what the unit is capable of. 

There is no maintenance beyond occasional updates. They don't push those out too often. However, when they do come out, you have to go through them one by one to make sure the update is successful. It would be easier if you could do everything all at once and be done with it.

How long it takes to deploy varies as each office is different. If I'm building three or four VLANs, that's going to take time. In my role, I built one base configuration that contains the VLANs IP servers that I want to use. I've extracted that as a file that I can modify and push to different boxes. So if I get 100 2100 or 4100, it doesn't matter. All I have to do is change the interface names and push it back to the box. So to me, it's pretty fast, and it already has my settings ready to go.

I handled the initial setup myself. 

I use the community version. For configurations and troubleshooting, you do need to pay. I'm not sure what the pricing is for Plus.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten. 

I'm a customer and end-user. 

I use it for my firewall at home and when virtualizing labs to do routing between different network segments. I use it in the business that I am currently with at our main office and our other site. I worked at an MSP before that, and it was the firewall that we recommended to clients who wanted to go beyond what you'd buy at Best Buy, like the random Linksys or Netgear. I haven't touched the enterprise level, like the expensive ones where you might have 20 different Netgate segments with failover.

We deploy it either on bare metal or virtualized on our own virtualization platform. We have not deployed it on any cloud. The primary cloud services we use are software as a service, so our firewall doesn't apply to that. If we ran our own set of servers in the cloud somewhere, we'd probably consider pfSense for routing between them, but we don't have that use case.

When I started using it back in the day, someone told me that there's this firewall you can install on an old PC to get all these features that are normally only available on expensive enterprise firewalls. 

I realized the benefits immediately. When I installed it, I had access to features like multi-WAN, which is more common now. You can get small home office routers with multi-WAN these days, but when I started a decade ago, it cost thousands of dollars and required enterprise equipment. It was mind-blowing that I installed it and could hook up two Internet connections for no extra money.

It doesn't directly prevent data loss because pfSense doesn't have a DLP function, but the security aspects, like the pfBlocker, ClamAV plugin, and proxy, are all great. The security components help prevent data loss by securing the network. As far as I know, pfSense doesn't have a data loss prevention function that scans for somebody trying to exfiltrate data. 

The failover or load-balancing WAN helps reduce downtime. It also supports high availability between two firewalls, although I've never set that up. Those would minimize downtime of the firewall individually and the company as a whole.

We don't use it that way, but it has extensive logging. If you were to dump all those logs into something like Graylog, Elasticsearch, etc., you could analyze and decide based on that data. We don't use it like that, but I know that with the extensive logging that it has, it could be used that way.

PfSense has an excellent ability to optimize performance, especially with the plugins. It helps me determine where my bandwidth is going and get reports on latency, jitter, etc. I use all of these features regularly. If the internet is slow, I can go see who's hogging it by downloading giant files, or I can identify where there's a lot of latency on a particular gateway.

I like that there's a community edition that I can install on my own virtual machines or hardware. I can test things without messing with them in production, which is incredibly useful. If you have a Juniper or Cisco, you can typically only afford one. 

You're forced to make changes in production and hope they don't break anything because there's no easy way to have a testing environment. The free version of pfSense offers load balancing or failover WAN, which is also helpful. Most commercial firewalls don't have that in the cheapest iteration of the hardware. 

The community edition makes it easy to learn because you can try it before buying it and putting it in production. There's no equivalent if you want to buy FortiGate, WatchGuard, or any of those and fiddle with them on your hardware before putting it in production.

Many plugins for pfSense are easy to install off the store, and they work. The basic function that you want to do are pretty easy. However, it is more complicated than your average home office router, but that's to be expected. The fact that it is an open-source project that's trying to be all things to all people does mean that sometimes things can get a little bit complex, sometimes unnecessarily. For example, the IPSec VPN setup has five hundred options, probably more than anyone needs, but it works. Their documentation is excellent. In instances where you might not figure it out on your own or the interface might not be super clear on how to do something, the documentation is usually good 99 percent of the time. 

I appreciate pfSense's flexibility. I can buy supported hardware from Netgate with it already on there, buy support for my own hardware, or run the community edition on my own hardware or a virtual machine and get all of the same functionality. 

Snort or Suricata don't block things they should out of the box. It's always been a pain point of pfSense. If you turn on Snort or Suricata for IPS or IDS, no setting is effectively set and forget. Turning any commercial firewall to the lowest setting will provide you with a decent amount of security with almost zero false positives, but pfSense is not that way. You've got a babysit Snort and Suricata to the point where sometimes you turn it off.  

I know one of their rising competitors, OPNsense, has the ETS rules. I forget who provides it, but you turn on a rule set, and they just work. They have a built-in set of rules for Snort and Suricata that you turn on and it provides a reasonable amount of security. That has always been a pain in the neck with pfSense. It's the single biggest thing that they could do to improve it. Honestly, they're losing business OPNsense for that one reason. 

I have used pfSense for at least 10 years.

As long as you don't use bad hardware, it's fine. PfSense has issues with some Realtek network chips. If you use bad hardware and get bad results, it's your own fault. I usually have as much uptime as there is between patches. It's highly solid after reboot other than installing the most recent patch.

I've never used pfSense at the high-end enterprise scale, but it can scale nearly infinitely as far as I can tell. There's a higher-level pfSense that's carrier grade that can handle hundreds of gigabit routing. We've got a Netgate plan and never had any problems. 

We see solid performance no matter what we're running on it. The fact is that it can run on a low-end, low-power fanless ARM CPU for a branch office. PfSense is usable in a lot of situations. It's also extremely scalable, which is also flexible in the sense that you can install it on some random old PC that you have at your house and use it for your home firewall. You can also use it in an enterprise with a multi-gigabit incoming connection and thousands of clients.

I rate Netgate support nine out of 10. I have contacted them a couple of times over the years. Each time I called them, they solved my problem or gave me a workaround within a reasonable time. It seemed like the people I talked to knew what they were doing. Sometimes, you call technical support and end up with first-level tech support who reads off a script. They don't listen to a word that you say and tell you to do all the things you've already done. 

I've been able to get people who ask pertinent questions and ask for logs. They remote into my machine or SSH into the firewall, so I'm happy with it. It was worth the money that we paid when we needed it.

Positive

I have used Smoothwall and OPNsense. Back then, I used to have a weird firewall that I can never remember. If you count OpenWRT, a replacement firmware for Linksys, as a firewall. However, you can't install it on any x86 OS that you want.

It depends on whether the user is familiar with general concepts like putting an ISO on a flash drive and booting off of it using some basic command line. It's very easy if they've installed operating systems before and understand how to boot off a flash drive. Flash the image to a flash drive and boot off it, then follow the prompts. If they don't have that basic experience, I wouldn't tell them to deploy it themselves. I'd tell them to buy a box from Netgate with support. 

That can be tricky if you've never done it or don't understand the concept of moving off of a flash drive and installing an OS. There's not anything Netgate can do about that because there are thousands of different pieces of hardware you can try deploying pfSense to, and pfSense can't give specific detailed instructions for every one of them. That's when you go buy Netgate. 

The first time, it took me days because I had no idea what I was doing. Now, I can set up a pfSense with good basic functionality in an hour. It doesn't take very long. I've probably done it hundreds of times now.

After deployment, you've got to install patches periodically. If you're using Snort or Suricata, you've got to pay attention to those. If you're using pfBlocker, you've got to install patches. If you're not using any of the plugins like Snort, Suricata, pfBlocker, Grid, or any of those sorts of things for advanced functionality, then there isn't any maintenance other than periodically installing your patches like anything else. 

The community edition provides all of the basic functions for free on your own hardware, and pfSense Plus comes with a Netgate appliance. It's a reasonable $200 bucks or so to buy pfSense for your hardware, and then it's $800 or $900 a year for commercial support, which is also reasonable for a firewall.

It's hard to gauge the total cost of ownership because there's a free, open-source version that, if you know a lot about pfSense already, it's almost zero cost. You can run it on any old hardware you've got. If you need support and multi-gigabit IPSec WAN speeds, you'll need to pay for that, but you will with anybody. 

I rate Netgate pfSense eight out of 10. They could polish up a few things, especially regarding IDS/IPS rules. A few interface things are a little more complicated than necessary. 

If you're moving to pfSense from a random Linksys or Netgate router, you need to realize it will be more difficult, and you'll need to learn more about networking concepts than you necessarily had to do with the random router that you've got. It's more complicated like that. 

That's to be expected because you're either a techie kind of person who thinks building your own firewall is fun, and they're willing to spend the time and effort to learn it. Or you want an alternative to FortiGate, Juniper, or whatever, and you want to buy a commercial Netgate product. This is going to be more complicated than the Linksys router I bought for $80 dollars from Best Buy.

I have three firewalls running my entire county and 11 smaller versions of the firewalls doing OpenVPN tunnels to my remote sites through StarLink. 

PfSense has been highly flexible, and it's worked out great for us for the most part. The Plus version has support, which we will pay for since it is our edge firewall. I have not had an issue with adding features.

We're doing a lot of OpenVPN tunnels, and some of the fields in the OpenVPN setup on the server side do not lend themselves to multiple sites. It's kind of ugly. It's a big list of allowed IP addresses. I'd much rather see that via the table individually. 

The individual firewalls have a single pane of glass view, but we have so many of them. You need to log into each to manage them.

 I'm officially about two years into using pfSense and one year in production.

I have not had any crashes happen. 

Overall, I've been happy with these firewalls.

I rate Netgate support eight out of 10. They were highly responsive. It was strictly email support. I didn't buy phone support.

We were running a Sophos firewall as the edge router of everything we did, and it wasn't meeting our expectations. I've used Cisco firewalls for most of my career. The Sophos firewall was underpowered and overburdened. It was constantly causing issues, such as filling up the logs and crashing the firewall in the middle of the day. I have not had that issue with the pfSense.

It was harder to order them than it was to deploy them. As a county government, we ran into purchasing issues, but we ultimately managed to make it happen. It took us about three months to deploy all of them. After deployment, you need to update the firewall codes and back it up. That's pretty typical.

PfSense was quite a bit less expensive than some other alternatives, and it's worked as well as we could hope. We have three 1500s and 11 of the 4100s. The total cost of ownership has been pretty beneficial.

We looked at some other options. I'm a Cisco guy, but pfSense firewalls provide more bang for your buck. 

I rate Netgate pfSense eight out of 10. 

We use pfSense as our router and firewall on several sites.

We implemented the pfSense open platform because we wanted to move away from SonicWall.

We use the community edition of the software and purchase the Netgate router separately. I used white boxes initially, but now I'm also using the Netgate hardware. It's a great product.

The pfSense offers exceptional flexibility, far surpassing SonicaWall's capabilities. Its intuitive interface, complete with a better layout of management screens, makes it a breeze to use. While Cisco routers may be overkill for many applications, pfSense performs well.

Using pfSense is easy. It has intuitive management screens. And if I ever run into a blockade, I pay for the technician annually. I am confident in sticking with that platform. It's always worked for me. It's tried and true.

I hired a seasoned professional with extensive experience using pfSense on white boxes for years, specifically the community edition. His mastery of configuration was evident, and I was impressed by his expertise. After he walked me through several scenarios, I was convinced of the benefits of the Netgate product and began replacing my aging SonicWall devices with it, drawn to the ease of use that Netgate offered.

Netgate pfSense provides a single-pane-of-glass to manage all our firewall needs.

It's relatively straightforward for a novice to deploy pfSense, likely easier than SonicWall. However, I've used SonicWall extensively and am gradually phasing them out. While SonicWall is a solid product, pfSense is remarkably easy to set up.

The intuitiveness and ease of use are the most valuable features of pfSense.

One thing that has always bothered me is that when I buy an appliance, there are two tiers of support: email-only and a premium tier, like TAC, that allows me to speak to someone on the phone. If I'm purchasing their hardware, I should have phone support for a certain period, even at the lower price point. My only complaint is that I need phone support, not just email, because if there's a support issue, I don't have time to wait for an email response. I need to speak to someone immediately. Therefore, I think I should receive TAC support for the Netgate pfSense for at least the first year after purchasing the hardware.

I have been using Netgate pfSense for six years.

I have never experienced any stability issues with pfSense.

To scale we need to add a unit.

I had email support for about a week before calling Netgate to request telephone support. I explained that if I'm calling for assistance, I'm likely experiencing an urgent issue and need immediate help. I decided to pay $699 or so for annual telephone support, which has been excellent. The support is prompt and effective, making it well worth the investment.

Positive

I previously used SonicWall but migrated to pfSense because it is a more intuitive router and firewall.

Compared to Cisco, Netgate is definitively the product that is better for my use case. I know there's a want in the industry for Cisco devices. However, in the hotel vertical, I just don't need it, nor do I need to pay for the expertise in configuration of that platform.  

The first time I deployed a pfSense, a seasoned professional guided me through the process, making it incredibly easy to complete.

Netgate pfSense is fairly priced. It's probably the most powerful router firewall I've come across.

The total cost of ownership of pfSense is reasonable, considering the value it provides. I appreciate the VPN, router, and firewall functionality it offers, which is essential for my business operations. In fact, the ongoing costs associated with pfSense do not significantly exceed the initial purchase price.

I would rate Netgate pfSense nine out of ten.

Other than firmware updates, pfSense requires minimal maintenance. I update the firmware every two to three months for routine maintenance or immediately if a security vulnerability is discovered.

For a new user, I would recommend TAC support. I've spoken with others in my industry who have had positive experiences with TAC, particularly compared to email support. They've reported being up and running within five minutes of contacting TAC. Additionally, problem resolution is also swift and effective. So, I highly recommend new users invest in TAC support. It's well worth the money.