Netgate pfSense Reviews

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.

I am using pfSense for its firewall, gateway, and intrusion detection. I used the Community Edition for years and then switched to the pfSense Plus free-from-home edition. There was a bit of turmoil when IXSystems announced that they would no longer offer the free-from-home edition

We immediately realized the power when we deployed it a few years ago. It exceeded our expectations. As time went on, I discovered more features in the different packages they provide and whether they fit my needs. Over time, it's been a learning process, and I've been greatly impressed with almost every aspect of this product. It has all the things I wanted but found lacking in other products.

All of the features work together to prevent data loss or any compromise of your data. It all boils down to the rule set. I have mine configured so that all the data goes out depending on my Netgate device. Some machines go through a particular VPN connection. If that connection goes down, I've got the rule set configured like a dead man's switch. It's cut off from the outside world, and I get an alarm, and it allows no more attempts to let traffic pass through that connection.

It helps to prevent downtime. Whenever there is an issue, it's the first place I look because I can check the statuses of various interfaces to check whether they're up and then zoom further out to see if it's something in my internet provider, like a faulty cable. It enables me to reduce downtime by quickly determining where the problem might be.

PfSense provides the visibility I need to make data-driven decisions. For example, if I have a spike in bandwidth usage, it shows me which devices on my network are suddenly eating more bandwidth. I can see what's causing that. It also greatly reduces the time spent maintaining my network, so there's a productivity boost.

PfSense has a learning curve, but once you've mastered that, it isn't that difficult. It's very flexible, and you can do almost anything necessary to secure a home network. It has packages that expand its capabilities. For example, you can install Snort if you want intrusion detection. If that's unimportant to you, you can use it to check the bandwidth of all the machines in your network.

Adding features is simple. You go into the menu to check which ones are available and click on the ones you want to install. If you've done your research on the packages you want and the settings you'd like to use, it's a matter of walking through the configuration in the menu. When removing the package, it will revert the settings 99 percent of the time. 

I like the interface. You can arrange the windows to see the important information and put them in the order you want. You can see the various interfaces you have at a glance in a single pane of glass. I have certain bits of information I want to see first, and there are secondary or tertiary pieces of information. If you are using VPN connections, you can see their statuses. You can see hacking attempts, which are logged. 

It's powerful. You can get quite granular in setting up a highly topical application of pfSense, but if you want just basic protection, you can do that easily. It depends on your needs and how brave you are. You can go deep into the system and do some cool things with it or set up the bare protection you would get from any firewall.

I'm trying to set up a gaming server for multiplayer games like 7 Days to Die. I spent three or four days trying to publish a private IP address through pfSense to the outside world. Some commercial and consumer-grade routers can do this, specifically gaming routers, but pfSense is not intended for this usage. 

That's a feature I'd like to see added, where you can go into a submenu, turn it on, and specify which machine or IP address you want to publish. It's not a must-have, but it would be nice to have. I spent a long time trying to figure that out. Ultimately, I was successful, but it was not intuitive.  

I have used pfSense since 2016.

I rate Netgate support 10 out of 10. You must have a license for pfSense Plus, and I called them about an unexpected hardware issue that caused me to switch machines. I emailed explaining the situation and got a response the same day. I provided all the information on the new box, and they gave me a license. It was a pleasant, non-stressful experience. 

I have used Smoothwall and a few other things that have been abandoned. I liked the look and performance of Smoothwall's interface. It had many of the same features as pfSense, but its capabilities weren't deep enough. I've also used basic Linux distros set up as firewalls, but pfSense is oriented toward an enterprise-level deployment, and I find myself between hobby and enterprise. I also like the added features pfSense provides. 

I am not using a Netgate appliance. I deployed pfSense on a very small machine that has plenty of RAM for the overhead, logs, and speeds I want for my network. 

When I first installed pfSense, there was a bit of a learning curve. I had to sit down with the documentation and figure out what to do. It wasn't difficult— just time-consuming. That information has carried forward with me. Other people look at me like I'm some kind of expert but I'm really a few pages ahead of them in the manual. 

PfSense isn't something you can turn on and forget about. You need to configure the solution and test it. Then you can turn it on and let it run. From time to time, you have to come back periodically to make sure everything is still fine. The initial deployment takes about 30 minutes. It was a one-person job.

I would like to see the price of pfSense lowered by about $50, or maybe they could create a category for home lab users like me with one device. I'm not running a business or profiting from it. I realize that people need to get paid for the work that they do, so I can't complain. They decided that they needed to change their model after providing the product for free for many years. 

Before they changed and started to charge for pfSense, the total cost of ownership was phenomenal. It still offers tremendous value, but that was an adjustment. You can choose to go back to the community edition or just pony up the money.

I rate Netgate pfSense nine out of 10. I only give it a nine due to that recent issue setting up the game server. I eventually figured it out and published my solution to the forums. Otherwise, it would be a perfect 10. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One person can manage the product's deployment phase.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have Netgate 4100 and pfSense Plus.

My career is in IT, and Netgate is part of my home network, which does hot failover between two ISPs because I work from home a lot and do not want to be disconnected. It handles all my home security, manages remote access to my systems when I am abroad, and hosts some services such as health checks from Route 53, WireGuard, etc.

I was able to see its benefits immediately. One issue it helped me solve was that I was hitting bandwidth caps from one ISP and did not understand why. It turned out that the ISP was counting all return traffic from outsiders probing my home network. They would find my Linux device and see that there was an open SSH port, and they would hammer at it. This generated an enormous amount of traffic. Installing pfSense allowed me to detect it accurately and shut down this traffic.

It is hard to say if pfSense helped prevent data loss in any way, but unauthorized access to my network and the data I have on my network from the outside is not feasible now.

I can do all the things I want to do from the device. I do not have to set up services on other hosts. I do not have to have any other UI in place. I can just go to pfSense and do all the things I need. The slight caveat to that is that I am not operating AWS or GCP from pfSense. I have set up my health check from Route 53. I have set a couple of very simple things in AWS, but I do the rest of the things from pfSense. It is pretty close to a single pane of glass.

I use pfSense Plus and found pfSense Plus to be more robust than the Community Edition. Any network device needs occasional prophylactic reboots. The frequency of issues, such as the tables being all dirty or memory being scrambled, has significantly reduced with pfSense Plus. The hardware has considerably improved. Because I was running Community Edition on an older Netgate, it is difficult to understand where I am getting the improvement from, but pfSense Plus has certainly been a lot more robust. I have fewer instances where one of the interfaces just stopped working. That used to happen with Community Edition fairly regularly. I have not had that trouble at all here. Upgrades have been a lot smoother. They are down to just a reboot, whereas, with Community Edition, I had to regularly wipe the device, reinstall the operating system on pfSense, and load in my configuration from backup, which I was able to do and usually worked. I spend a lot less time in system maintenance using pfSense Plus than with Community Edition.

Its out-of-the-box performance meets my needs. When I wonder whether my network is a little sluggish, I am able to go in and find out things, such as one of my ISPs being dropped out of my load balancing config because of too many latent pings. It has been very useful and easy to do those sorts of things.

It is very flexible. I have not found a use case that I could not satisfy with the device. There are more use cases I am not currently using. For instance, I do not have an HA setup. I use it for my internal home DNS and DHCP services and to split the VLANs so that I have Internet of Things and guest VLANs. I trust the device's VLAN. It helps me deny traffic from large areas of the world that do not need to interact with my firewall.

With such solutions, there is always a learning curve, but with enough foundation, I have never found that curve very hard to climb. Whenever I have tackled a new thing, a little bit of searching on the web and playing with the UI has always gotten me where I wanted to be.

It is best practice to remove all installed packages before you do an upgrade because most upgrade failures have to do with having installed packages. These are additional packages that supply functionality above and beyond what comes in the base operating system. We have to remove them one at a time. I would prefer being able to click a button that says," I am upgrading, so uninstall everything and store in the configuration file what I had installed." It already keeps the configuration of all the packages installed. Even if I do not install them again, the configuration for those packages is still there after the upgrade. It would be very nice to have a one-click feature. There can be a check flag on the upgrade screen to remove packages first and then another check flag to reinstall them after the upgrade. This would be extremely handy, particularly when I have a lot of packages. It takes me about 15 to 20 minutes to uninstall and reinstall them all after the upgrade.

A couple of weeks ago, I would have had another area for improvement, even though it was outside their purview. They are switching DHCP providers from ISV to something, but it did not have a feature I wanted, which was client hostname registration for statically served IP addresses. I rely on this for host management inside my trusted network, but that feature has been released now, so I feel more comfortable moving to the new DHCP version they support.

I have used the solution for at least seven years.

Since operating Netgate 4100 and pfSense Plus, anytime I wondered if the device itself was laggy, it was not the device. It was something upstream causing the issue. I have an HA configuration and a load balancer, so if one of the links goes down, the device gets a little laggy as it drops that interface and brings up the other one as the primary. If the ISP is flapping, this will happen continuously, introducing a lot of network lag, but that is trivial now that I understand what is happening. As soon as I start feeling lag, I check the logs to see if that is the cause. The device itself has not ever been latent or lagging. It has been rock solid.

I found it very scalable. I am out of ports on my device because of having multiple ISPs and VLANs. I do not have an HA setup, so the device scaled very well for my needs personally. When we deployed an HA pair in a professional situation, we had a much larger network, and it scaled to cover that easily.

I have only contacted them to get a download of the operating system image ahead of any upgrade attempt just in case I needed to start from scratch.

Neutral

I have used a number of different solutions. I have used firewall software and hardware of all kinds, both professionally and personally, reaching back to the early 2000s.

The initial deployment was done many years ago. I remember it being pretty straightforward back then. One of the things I enjoyed about the device is that the configuration file is like the starter batter where someone gives you a lump of yeast and dough pinched from someone else's. 

I have been able to roll my configuration file forward every time I switched devices or operating systems. This has made it a lot easier to maintain the device. Even when I had to completely wipe the machine and start over, it was pretty trivial in almost all cases. It has certainly been a lot easier since I started using pfSense Plus to get my configuration back up and running again.

When I ran an IT shop a few years ago, we had an off-the-shelf solution where years ago, somebody had built a firewall solution using a couple of rack-mount PCs and some open-source security package. It was a black box. Nobody around understood it anymore, and I needed to replace it. I went to look for hardware that my shop wanted to use, like Cisco, but the price was well out of our budget, so we went with a pair of HA Netgate devices and pfSense. That solved our problem. I thought it was a good price point for a good solution.

Their pricing is quite reasonable. It is very good. Every firewall is a router, but typically, in an enterprise situation, these are separate. My home is essentially a small office. My partner and I work from home a lot, and I am the system administrator, network administrator, and security administrator. The values are high because I am not maintaining two machines. I am not spending my own power on two different devices. For small office or home use, such as mine, pfSense is valuable because it combines multiple functions into one low-power device.

I would rate pfSense a nine out of ten. 

We use pfSense as the main firewalls coming into most of the companies we support. I work for an MSP. We've used different things. Our higher-end customers even run pfSense high availability clusters, and those work like a champ.

It has made deploying firewalls a faster process due to ease of configuration.

One of the features we use the most is the OpenVPN and IPsec VPN tunneling built within it. We have places that are headquarters and multiple locations where we create tunnels. We support police departments and stuff like that. Part of our use case is one of our police departments that does their own dispatching, so they have software that they run in-house. So we set their points out where the points themselves dial back in through OpenVPN using client certificates to create that always-on tunnel. Prior to us taking that over, they were using FortiGates, and the FortiGate FortiVPN was constantly dropping, and they were constantly having to re-authenticate. They would have to put 2FA back in. Since we've put in pfSense, we have the cradlepoints in cars establish the VPN connection, and we hardly ever hear from them since there seem to be no issues.

pfSense's flexibility is great. If you don't have the money to buy the NetGate hardware, anything works with it. You can toss it on any low-end piece of hardware or virtualize it if you choose to virtualize it. It is super flexible.

It's easy to add features to pfSense or configure them, especially if you're familiar with pfSense. They have a complete repository of apps that you can choose from and different types of monitoring packages you can put on it. They're all very, very straightforward and very easy to set up. I even run a pfSense for my home firewall. I've got AT&T fiber coming into my house. I bridge the public IP through, patch the modem into my pfSense, and have no issues whatsoever. I even run multiple VLANs off of it.  I replaced a FortiGate with this setup.

The benefits are witnessed immediately after you deploy it. Immediately after you deploy it you're no longer having to read articles to figure out what flaw has been found in this version of FortOS or what flaw has been found in this version of SonicWall that's being run. You just you don't seem to have that in the pfSense platform.

pfSense provides with a customizable dashboard landing page.  You can add widgets to show you any piece of information you want to see. I can add in a widget where, from the dashboard, it'll show me, what OpenVPN clients I have connected. It'll show me traffic graphs from LAN, optional ports, uptime, what version of BSD I'm on, what version of pfSense I'm on, whether there's an update available for PFSense, IP information, et cetera. It gives me all this within the main loading dashboard screen.

To manage multiple devices, you would have to subscribe to a third-party service to have the ability to do that.

This is truly set it and forget it. We didn't quite run into that as much with FortiGate. Even with the third-party add-ons, we don't seem to run into issues with the pfSense product where we have to be so hands-on.

There are two versions of pfSense, the community edition, which is free, and the paid version, Plus. We run both. We're getting more away from the community edition since we're starting to just purchase NetGate appliances. We're buying it strictly through NetGate. At this point, we're even starting to add on the tech support, which is top-notch.

pfSense can help to minimize downtime. You can set them up in a high-availability cluster, and that pretty much minimizes all downtime. Your secondary appliance picks up if your primary appliance goes down. It makes it really easy to apply updates or reboot the one firewall. It switches over so seamlessly. Your users never know the difference. When the primary firewall comes back up, it'll take over the primary function again, and then you can reboot your secondary firewall.

The visibility in pfSense enables us to make data-driven decisions. You can use traffic graphs and the historical data of those traffic graphs, especially if you're monitoring your WAN connection, to know whether you're oversaturating your line and whether you need to update your bandwidth coming into your building or not. That way, if you're seeing slowdowns on the internet, you can go back to your traffic graphs and figure out if you are seeing the slowdown from your provider or just oversaturating the line. If that's the case, I just need to call and order some more bandwidth.

As far as optimizing the performance goes, I like the fact that you can take interfaces within pfSense and put bandwidth limits on them. If I have a guest network, I can put a throttle limit on it to make sure that somebody doesn't hook to my guest and eat up so much bandwidth that my primary network can't function.

They're very affordable for what they offer. However, they should become more MSP-centric. They could design a centralized dashboard that I, as an MSP provider, can create sites and load my pfSense in there. That way, I can schedule updates to run after hours and things along those lines. They need to design for MSPs that are using their products and make centralized management easier.

I've been using pfSense for at least a decade. 

pfSense doesn't ever crash. If I had any gripe about these things, it's the fact that sometimes the update process will break the appliance. I'm not sure what causes it. I've had a few appliances where they've been running fine, and I go to apply an update, and then they just don't boot back normally. At that point, I reach out to support. They give me the reload file that I need. I reload the appliance. I dump the config back on it, and then it's good to go.

As long as you're buying an appliance that will support the bandwidth that you need to push through it, scalability is fine.We've got some of them running 10 to 12 VLANs. We've got one particular one that has no less than five different OpenVPN setups depending upon the department you're in.

Their paid support is top-notch.

With the community edition, and this probably is one of my gripes to pfSense, and this is more on the NetGate side, is that they don't make their images readily available to you. So you have to open a support ticket. You have to give them the hardware ID. You have to give them the serial number of the appliance, and then they will send you the file that you need to reload the operating system. Even so, we're talking about less than an hour of waiting time, and somebody will respond to the ticket and give you a link where you can download the software to reload it.

Positive

We've used SonicWall. We've used FortiGate. We always seem to go back to the Netgate and the PS pfSense just due to the fact being open source, they seem to have fewer security flaws in them than running something that is a closed proprietary system. With FortiGate, you constantly need to update, since they're constantly finding flaws in the FortiOS, and we just don't seem to have that from pfSense and the NetGate supply of products.

There was more hands-on work with FortiGate. If you're doing any type of web filtering, they would come out with an update where a website that did work would start getting miscategorized. And then all of a sudden, it would stop working. And you would have to go in and make a white list and an exception for it.

We buy the appliances and then install the appliances on our customer sites.

The initial deployment is easy. How long it takes depends on how simple or how complicated it is. As far as just a simple firewall goes, I can have one of them up and running in 15 to 20 minutes.

Even if you are not too knowledgeable, it would be very easy. When you first boot into it and go to the web interface, it has a wizard that walks you through setting the IP address on your LAN and configuring whether you're using DHCP or static on the LAN. That wizard that walks you right through what to do right out of the box.

Just one person is generally needed for deployment. 

After the deployment, it's pretty much set it and forget it. I will go in and I will check quarterly if an update needs to be applied, however, they don't come up with updates that often. Maybe once a quarter, once every six months, an update has to be applied to the appliance. Other than that, I am only logging into these appliances if I need to make rule changes or if I need to bring up an additional VLAN in the network.

The licensing model is good. It's probably a little expensive for the hardware that you get. However, a part of that price is the support. And their support is top-notch. Even if you're only using the community support, and you're not paying for the extra support, they probably pad the hardware prices a little bit to help offset their support people. 

I love the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) of pfSense. That's one of our selling points to our customers. You can buy this, buy once, or, you can look at going to Meraki or FortiGate or something like that, but, be paying licensing fees every single year to keep that product up and running.

I'm an MSP.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.

If you're going with the NetGate appliance, I'd let new users know that they are already optimized for pfSense. If it's something that you're looking to virtualize or if you're looking to use a community edition on your own hardware, my recommendation would be just to make sure that you use Intel network cards. I have never had a problem out of an Intel NIC for getting the OpenBSD underlying platform to recognize those network cards and load the proper drivers for them. That way, they show up within the pfSense software.

The solution's most valuable features are high availability and the VPN options. Netgate pfSense has the ability to support multiple interfaces and spin up virtual IPs.

What drew me to Netgate pfSense from the beginning is that it's free, open-source software. I wanted the solution for additional control over firewall routing, and there wasn't really anything else on the market that would do that.

Netgate pfSense is very flexible. I like that it can run on enterprise bare metal and Raspberry Pi. Obviously, Netgate has a lot of appliances ranging from extremely small to extremely large.

pfSense Plus is extremely low-cost. Its comparative features include high availability, the ability to tune system variables, and support for hundreds of interfaces.

It would be great for the solution to have better logs. Some of the solution's graphs that show visibility on system performance or session count lack resolution. For example, you may only be able to see the session count by day if you want to look back more than a month.

In contrast, we would want to see the session count fluctuate by an hour or five-minute increments. It would be helpful to be able to query larger data sets, even if you had to break them up into smaller subsets.

I have been using Netgate pfSense for seven years.

The solution's scalability is very poor past 5,000 clients and impossible past 10,000 clients.

I had a very poor experience with the solution's technical support.

Negative

I switched from Netgate pfSense to Fortinet. Scalability and high availability are significantly better with Fortinet. It took me about 10 to 15 hours to set up high availability in Netgate pfSense just because of the way it works with virtual IPs and CARP.

On the other hand, it takes about 15 minutes with Fortinet. It's just a completely different experience. Also, the performance availability for appliances is a thousand times better with some of the higher-end offerings at Fortinet versus the highest-end offerings that Netgate has.

The solution's initial setup is difficult because of the extensive setup it takes to achieve high availability.

In our case, it took us around 40 hours to fully deploy the solution from start to finish.

I think Netgate pfSense's TAC or support is a little expensive, considering how inexpensive everything else is. Netgate's most expensive appliance costs around $5,000. However, an annual subscription to TAC costs around $1,000, which is roughly 20% of what you pay for the hardware. It seems a little excessive.

I would say it's pretty easy to add and configure features to Netgate pfSense. However, if you add features that Netgate does not officially support, you can run into issues with your support contracts. It's easy to add features, but it's extremely difficult to support something that is not an official Netgate plug-in.

We saw the benefits of Netgate pfSense pretty immediately after deploying it. We have been scaling, though. As we got to a very large deployment across different sites, we started to see additional problems, but then we also saw additional value added. Initially, there's a lot of value, which increases over time, but eventually, you hit a wall where it's just not that valuable.

On the surface, it looks like pfSense Plus provides visibility that enables data-driven decisions. Unfortunately, after many back-and-forths with support, they say that it looks like the firewall has done something, but there's nothing in the log. There's no data to support their theories. On the surface, it looks like it should, but we found in practice that it was missing a lot of data that would help us make decisions that we needed to make.

The solution's total cost of ownership is good for what it is. I don't think I would ever use it in an enterprise environment anymore. As a value proposition, it's really good for a small business application or a company with multiple sites that you need to be able to interconnect.

You can set up an entire ecosystem for $ 5,000 to $ 6,000 with top-of-the-line hardware from Netgate. Unfortunately, with our user account, throughput, and bandwidth, we've just outgrown it and can't use it anymore.

We've bought appliances for Netgate pfSense's deployment, and we've also deployed the solution on separate machines. Most recently, we used the appliances.

Technically, we never got Netgate pfSense to a good solid state. For the four to six months we had it in production, it was constantly down and needed at least 20 hours of maintenance a week.

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

We have been building local firewall systems since 2008. 

The main use cases for Netgate pfSense are its exceptional stability and reputation as a premier network operating system worldwide. Millions of people are using it, and we have rolled out a new hotspot system that works from the cloud. The service is running under the pfSense portal.

Netgate pfSense impacts our organization positively because it's open source and has a free edition, which helps us significantly in building our own systems for our customers. It helps in building a new firewall system for the Turkish market. It helps us substantially.

Netgate pfSense's best features are that it's open source and flexible. We have implemented IPsec VPNs, site-to-site VPNs, and client-to-site VPNs. 

We appreciate the flexibility of the Netgate pfSense solution, but we have waited approximately two years for new updates to the Community Edition. We are now moving to OPNsense.

I appreciate Netgate pfSense because we have been using it for approximately 18 years, which is a considerable amount of time. We are waiting for pfSense to integrate AdGuard, Pi-hole, or Zenarmor directly into the pfSense kernel. When I install packages, such as Snort or OpenVPN client export tool, I need to install AdGuard or Zenarmor because it's very challenging to ban TikTok, YouTube, or social media for our customers. In the early days, we managed this using SquidGuard, but since the blacklist has changed, we are struggling. There are many other blacklists I have tried, but I couldn't make them work. It has to be much easier for engineers to implement this. It's easy to integrate AdGuard into OPNsense; it becomes a function under the firewall. You can easily switch blacklists on and off, and create custom blacklists to block all social media with a toggle. We would appreciate such facilities in pfSense as otherwise, we have to manually enter all the websites, DNS resolver, and DNS overrides. Writing numerous rules on the LAN side during installation takes considerable time.

We have been using Netgate pfSense since 2008.

Netgate pfSense is a stable solution for me.

It's a scalable solution. Two months ago, I purchased a brand new server edition, a Lenovo ThinkSystem server with 128 GB RAM. I installed this pfSense server in a data center, and it's working fine. Many people connect via VPN; three or four sites are connecting site-to-site, and we also established another IPsec connection to one of the biggest ISPs in Turkey. It's working great now.

We have never asked for technical support from Netgate. We rely on the resources on the web for information.

Neutral

Two months ago, we switched to OPNsense, and we are now studying OPNsense. We made a strong decision to switch to OPNsense because of the large solutions. There are many facilities, such as AdGuard and Zenarmor, which can be easily installed under OPNsense. We are studying OPNsense, and we will likely switch to OPNsense in 2025 because we are still waiting for a stable version of pfSense. 2.7.2 is very old, and we have switched to the 2.8 beta version, but we are still making our tests now.

Since we have been using pfSense for almost 18 years, we have learned extensively about Netgate pfSense. We have worked extensively and watched many educational videos from the United States, and we have made ourselves ready for pfSense. If one understands the system, it's easy to handle, but without knowledge, it's very challenging for everybody. Many people try to work with pfSense in Turkey with the free edition, the Community Edition, but they couldn't succeed because it's a complex system. It's a vast ocean, and understanding every protocol is necessary. Basically, all firewall systems are the same. Brands such as Cisco, FortiGate, and Sophos sell well in Turkey, and we are competing with these companies. Our target market is the small market, not the big companies or holdings, especially in the hospitality sector, where we deal with hotels and motels.

We would appreciate seeing facilities similar to OPNsense for Community Edition. In Turkey, people generally don't want to pay for yearly subscriptions to firewall systems. We barely recouped our investment for our Safe Hotspot system in Turkey. Competing with other brands such as Sophos, FortiGate, and Cisco is challenging. These brands also require annual payments, and due to Turkey's economic conditions, everyone is eliminating such costs. We have produced our hardware for pfSense, but it was not Netgate; it was only pfSense in the early days. We made our own rack mount 5 or 8 port firewall systems in Turkey and sold many.

The initial setup of Netgate pfSense is not complex; it's very easy. I can even have one of our resellers burn a pfSense USB stick and install pfSense without knowing anything about it. 

Because the Community edition is free, we only charge for our services to the customers. In Turkey, we cannot demand normal pricing; if we were in Europe or the United States, we might collect more money from customers. The conditions in Turkey are very challenging, and collecting payment is difficult. We often charge half or one-third of the price compared to Europe.

We would like to buy Netgate hardware, but when I checked its price in Europe, it seemed expensive.

I would rate Netgate pfSense a 10 out of 10.

We're primarily using the solution for testing. We're also using it internally at our own site, mostly as a reverse proxy, but also for the speed. Not all firewalls have 2.5 and and ten gig WAN ports.

The format, the layout and the interface are excellent. We really like that it is quite simple to use and straightforward. The quality, in particular, the ones we have is the Netgate unit, is particularly robust in terms of the look and feel as well as their speed and quality.

We appreciate its flexibility. Its usability is great.

We were able to witness positive results from the product pretty much immediately.

Its SD-WAN capabilities are great. The onboard storage is nice for keeping configs and logs, et cetera.

We do get a single pane of glass for management. It's well laid out and provides clear visibility into management features. Everything is easy to find within the menu bars and options. It is all very logical.

We're using the Plus version with Netgate.

pfSense does provide features to help minimize downtime. There's a failover availability, and there are high availability configurations. We don't use that; however, that's good to have if you need it. Having multiple endpoints or configurations on all of the ports is possible. It helps keep up our site and other sites.

With the logging capabilities, the solution provides visibility and enables you to make data-driven decisions. A lot of our clients are smaller, so they are nowhere near the limits of what pfSense can do by any means. 

The ease of changing parameters helps us optimize performance. It's a lot easier than what can be done with competitors, for sure. 

The solution could improve by adding in some sort of user account credentials in the sense of accommodating more levels of users. From what I've found, everybody has basically the same access. 

A formal partnership with some sort of VPN vendor, like OpenVPN, would be nice.

I've been using the solution for a couple of years. 

The stability is very good. there is no lagging or crashing. It's reliable. 

The scalability is good. However, we and our clients aren't too large. 

I've never needed to contact technical support. 

In the past, we have used Fortinet devices. pfSense is definitely easier to configure and use. It doesn't have quite the same feature set. However, that's fine - you don't always need the full feature set. We find that the add-ons that are available are fine. You just have to find them from a third party. 

The initial deployment was easy.

There isn't any maintenance needed beyond updates. The base install probably took ten minutes and to configure it properly takes two to three hours with some internal servers and multiple ISPs. You just need one person to handle the process. 

I'm using pfSense via Netgate devices, which are reasonably priced. The solution seems to be reasonable. It's well-priced for what you get. It's a bit lower than the competition if you are trying to gauge the cost of ownership. And it adapts well to different speeds.

I'm a customer and end-user. 

I'd rate pfSense eight out of ten.

If a person is familiar with firewalls, they'll be fine adopting it. The interface is pretty easy.