Netgate pfSense Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have been using Netgate pfSense for three years.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We'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 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. 

My company uses Netgate pfSense firewall routers for some clients, but I choose the device based on their needs. For locations like restaurants that require constant internet, I use a different device with cellular failover built-in. The cost-effective Netgate pfSense is a good option in simpler locations like doctors' offices. I can leverage Netgate's ability to handle multiple ISPs for clients with large internet demands. Ultimately, the choice depends on the client's budget and specific requirements.

In my role, I decide what our clients should implement for their network security. I want to create a secure environment by separating the business network from the Wi-Fi and phone networks. To achieve this separation, pfSense uses different subnets to effectively block any incoming traffic attempting unauthorized access to the network.

pfSense is highly configurable, offering flexibility to tailor its features and functionality to each client's network needs.

pfSense offers a wide range of plugins and add-ons, making initial configuration straightforward. However, since I primarily rely on endpoint security products installed on clients' workstations for their overall protection, my pfSense setup focuses on basic functionality. This includes configuring the firewall for my in-house network and leveraging its ability to handle multiple WAN connections. Ultimately, pfSense's affordability and ease of use make it a great choice for me as a secure and customizable router/firewall solution.

Network segmentation offers the biggest benefit for my clients. By creating separate Wi-Fi, phone systems, and business network segments, I can isolate any security breaches and prevent them from spreading throughout the entire network. As the decision-maker, I prioritize client security without needing them to understand the technical details. My focus is ensuring their networks are secure.

I have never had any downtime using pfSense Plus.

The most valuable features of pfSense are its ability to segment networks, create different subnets, create different VLANs, and use the VPN, as well as its affordability.  

pfSense lacks a centralized web dashboard for viewing all my clients' pfSense dashboards. A single pane of glass for both web access and management would be a game-changer. This missing interface is my biggest frustration with pfSense, and improvement is sorely needed. I have clients all over the United States and would deploy many more pfSense firewalls if it had a centralized web dashboard.

I started installing Netgate pfSense for clients almost three years ago.

I would rate the stability of Netgate pfSense ten out of ten.

I would rate the scalability of Netgate pfSense ten out of ten.

We've worked with almost every firewall: SonicWall, Cradlepoint, Ubiquiti, Fortinet, and UniFi devices. You get into the licensing of some of those with SonicWall and Fortinet, and it's just not the product that I like to sell to my clients. I'm always client-friendly. I want to find the most affordable product for them that does the best job. NetGate pfSense is the right one for some but not for others.

The deployment is simple. We preconfigure the device in the shop and then take it out and hook it up in less than one hour.

We have three people total who deploy the firewalls, including myself.

Netgate pfSense is a set-and-forget product other than deploying and periodically updating the firmware. pfSense has been solid for me.

Unlike many firewalls that require annual licensing fees, making them expensive for small businesses, pfSense is an affordable option.

I would rate Netgate pfSense seven out of ten. The only area of improvement is the web dashboard, which is currently lacking in pfSense.

I use other products to control data security. Most of my clients don't have an in-house server. I work with small businesses, and that's why the Netgate pfSense device works well. For my larger clients, we go to the cloud for data storage and data security with redundancy. So, I don't use pfSense for data security at all.

pfSense is a good value for some clients; it's client-specific. It depends upon other things we are deploying there, such as what kind of Wi-Fi network we use. If we are adding a VoIP phone system. It just depends on what the client's needs are, but It is the right device for the right client.

A lot of our clients are small businesses. I've got one fairly large business. It is a restaurant group nationwide with 700 employees, but its main office has maybe 30 to 50 employees. So, that's probably my largest deployment of the Netgate device.

The only maintenance required for the pfSense firewalls is applying the occasional firmware updates.

Some MSPs are more focused on making money. I'm not. I'm focused on the right fit for the client, and the money takes care of itself. pfSense is a great device. I'm not focused on what will make me money. I'm focused on what is best for the client. In many decisions, the Netgate pfSense is the right decision for that client.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It has been probably eight or nine years.

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I would rate Netgate pfSense a ten out of ten.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have used pfSense for about one year.

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

We use it as a firewall within our public cloud infrastructure. We use it in particular for IPSec, VPN, and Reverse Proxying HTTP Traffic. We have deployed multiple pfSenses and most of them are configured as HA/Failover.

We wanted to secure traffic between our main office and multiple public cloud data centers and providers. We also wanted to have access to our cloud components via VPN.

We have multiple websites that are proxied via HAProxy and secured via Let’s Encrypt TLS Certificates (generated via the ACME Plugin).

We deploy across multiple virtual data centers that are in different physical locations. Multiple teams have their own deployment. One HA / Failover cluster is the entry point to our websites so there are millions of HTTP requests per month. We also have around 20 to 30 users (Dev and Ops) who use the VPN feature. Behind the pfSense firewalls, there are around 100+ servers and no end users.

We replaced a Sophos UTM 9 Failover Cluster with a pfSense Failover Cluster and we can now make config and certificate changes without downtime. Also, the TLS certificates are rotated automatically.

The performance optimization documentation has improved our organization. The base setup is great but with higher bandwidth, it is really hard to find good documentation on how to tweak the setup to get the most out of your connection.

pfSense sort of gives us a single pane of glass management. We use the same product multiple times so we only need to know one product but it also does not offer a single management platform for all deployments. Whether this is good or bad depends on the point of view. On the one hand, we need to manage multiple setups, but on the other hand, we have a clear separation of concerns and risk zones (if the user account on one system is breached not all systems are affected).

It is hard to pinpoint a specific feature that is the most valuable. I think the big community is a major benefit. Most problems we encounter were already encountered and mostly solved by someone else. Most of the components are open-source tools, so the error messages have hits on Google which makes debugging easier.

pfSense has Plugins and is open source so everybody can add features or improve the product. For example, HAProxy, ACME Plugin, Prometheus-node-exporter, Nmap, etc. I see it as a relatively flexible product. If something is not working via the WebUI, SSH or WebKVM is always there.

Most of the time it is very straightforward to use a feature or plugin, the documentation is great and has examples that are very helpful. If something is a bit tricky, pfSense luckily has a big community. 

Performance Optimization Documentation could use improvement. The base setup is great but with higher bandwidth, it is really hard to find good documentation on how to tweak the setup to get the most out of your connection.

We have been using pfSense for eight years. 

pfSense is a very stable solution. In all the years I had around three instabilities.

Two people handle the maintenance of all pfSense Firewalls.

It can be used in small to big deployments. If the bandwidth hits more than 10GBs or 20GBs you need to optimize it to get good results. I would also not recommend it in very big ISP deployments with TBs of traffic.

I have never used the support for any technical issue. The community forums and Google always were enough.

Positive

In one of our virtual data centers, we had a Sophos UTM 9 as failover but it had some very annoying problems (Let’s Encrypt TLS Cert generation or WAF config reloads resulted in a two-minute downtime).

The old installation was straightforward, but the new installer has some bugs and does not really work.

We implemented it ourselves. 

Previous deployments were done by a System Engineer and the current deployments are done by me (DevOps Engineer) and a System Engineer. It was a one-person job.

We have better uptimes and lower support costs in comparison to the Sophos firewall and we are also saving on licensing fees.

The licensing seems fair. We owned the TAC Lite License for some time. The problem was, that the license is bound to a device ID which does not really work well with VMs where this ID changes sometimes.

We use pfSense Community Edition as our firewall within our public cloud so we only pay for the VM and the traffic.

I would rate it an eight out of ten. It is very good but has some fields in which it can improve.

You need to have an interest in the topic and also (like any security product) it needs regular attention. But it is a reliable firewall and the combination of BSD and ZFS makes it pretty solid.

Our most common use cases are for our corporate firewalls, and currently, I'm using it as our school firewall. So it's our perimeter firewall. So, we're running three firewalls on our network. 

So we have separate networks each because we have, like, different use cases. So we're running three at the moment.

We've been running it for six years now, and so far, it's been good.

Netgate pfSense has been utilized to create and manage VPNs within our organization. So we're running pfSense with VPN on one of our private cloud providers. So we're using IPSec VPN on that.

For everyday tasks, we just get alerts. It's anything that's suspicious, including from our Netgate. So, it's part of how we maintain cybersecurity in our school. This is working alongside our endpoint security solution. 

We were using an open-source endpoint solution for that. So we're integrating that with the one we have on pfSense. 

The ease of use. Like, it's easy to manage the firewall, rule-wise and interface-wise. For me, it's quite easy and friendly to use.

We have a set of rules so that it can manage all of our rules. We have a complex network here in our school. We have a lot of rules running, so it's really easy to match all of those rules using pfSense.

Integrating pfSense with other products was a bit tedious at first. We researched and tested for about a month, so it was not too hard but not instant.

For the third-party packages, I'd rather have it built-in, like a core feature of pfSense, part of the core model. This feature of pfSense would be great, instead of relying on a third-party module.

I have been using it for six years. 

It's about 95% stable, not perfect, but quite reliable.

If I needed to scale it and merge our pfSense machines into one, I'd prefer a dedicated hardware appliance instead of running multiple x86 servers on the firewall.

We have around 4,000 endpoints. 

I reached out to support for an unusual CPU usage issue after an upgrade. They were responsive, and even though I ultimately found a solution, they were helpful in diagnosing.

Positive

We used Fortinet. We opted for pfSense because of budget limitations. pfSense was a more affordable solution for our requirements.

pfSense is easier to manage and offers modularity for features. With FortiGate, everything is there, but we might not need everything, and too many features can be challenging.

The initial setup is very straightforward and intuitive. 

We use the pfSense software directly and install it on our rack servers. So, we're adding three instances of that.

I handle all the deployment processes. I am the core manager for the entire infrastructure, so I manage and deploy everything.

I consider how many users and gigabytes we expect on the network and try it on a test network first to validate before actual deployment.

Just my core team members manage the whole deployment, so that's enough for us.

Migrating the old one to the new one took around a month because we have many rules, and the new Netgate was quite different.

From the maintenance perspective, it is not difficult at all. 

While configuring or maintaining pfSense, we had high CPU usage on one firewall, but the GPAC subscription provided a good response. The support team was helpful, and we resolved it in a few hours. So, we had good support because of the support subscription. 

We just have the yearly support subscription.

I just found pfSense online. I just tried it out on a home lab and found it worked well enough for us. So, just started out, like, searching online and responded and tried it.

I would advise you to try to estimate your network first and do a test network just to have a proof of concept of what you want to run and check the routes you want to run against your network, making sure that your requirements are valid before deploying it.

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

We use the Netgate pfSense firewalls for each location in the same metropolitan area.

We implemented Netgate pfSense at the most basic level, aiming for a reliable firewall solution without incurring the high costs associated with Cisco products.

Netgate pfSense is a flexible firewall solution. It supports OpenVPN and IPsec, providing various options for establishing secure connections. Additionally, it offers features for monitoring user browsing behavior, enabling administrators to implement restrictions if desired. Overall, pfSense is a versatile platform that can be adapted to meet the needs of different network environments.

Adding new features to pfSense is quick. We select the feature we want and click install.

One feature that pfSense had, which my Cisco PIX firewall lacked, was built-in failover. With the Cisco PIX, if I wanted to implement failover, for instance, if one internet connection went down and I had a backup, I had to purchase additional hardware and a whole other firewall. However, with pfSense, failover configured two ports on the existing box to switch between them if one connection failed.

The security of pfSense is excellent. It effectively prevents unauthorized access.  To date, we haven't experienced any security breaches.

pfSense Plus provides a cold spare that helps minimize downtime. In the event of a failure, the other firewall can be activated while the broken one is restored and configured.

We saw the value of pfSense within a few days. Some of it was instant, but other things took time. When we first implemented it, we saw some value, and a few days later, it kept impressing me with more. A week went by, and I still saw more value.

With a firewall, VPN, and other router functionalities, pfSense offers an excellent total cost of ownership. It's a one-time purchase with no hidden fees, making it significantly more affordable than Cisco products, which require additional licensing, subscriptions, support, and per-feature purchases. While pfSense necessitates some time investment to learn and configure, this is comparable to the effort needed for any enterprise-grade solution, including Cisco, which also incurs substantial licensing costs. Overall, pfSense's upfront cost and user's time represent its total cost of ownership. 

Netgate pfSense is 100 percent flexible and configurable. We can do anything with it. We have not run into any scenario where it didn't work.

The overall documentation has room for improvement. Currently, we need to search forums for answers, as the official documentation by Netgate is not very helpful. The community support is excellent, and there should be a feedback loop to incorporate missing information from the community forums into the official documentation.

I have been using Netgate pfSense for four years.

I would rate the stability of pfSense ten out of ten.

The scalability of pfSense fits our company requirements.

Based on both my partner's and my experience with technical support, it is excellent.

The user community support is fantastic. It's a large and engaged community where members show genuine interest in one another's questions.

Positive

I switched from Cisco Firewalls to pfSense Firewalls. I had a Cisco PIX, but they started implementing a subscription model where we had to pay for individual features. It was like, if we wanted this feature, it's a dollar. And if we wanted that feature, it's another dollar. I decided I was done with that approach and wanted something different. I like that with Netgate, what we buy is what we get. It's not a subscription model. We can get a support subscription, which is perfectly natural to me, but we don't have to buy or pay extra for every feature. We get what you get.

It was a gradual learning experience, beginning with our initial purchase and installation of a pfSense firewall. Its features impressed us, so we decided to replace another firewall with pfSense to enable failover capabilities. This success led to a broader implementation across our network. It wasn't a planned, calculated rollout; rather, it evolved organically as we replaced outdated firewalls and discovered the benefits of pfSense, particularly its ability to work in tandem with other pfSense devices for enhanced functionality.

The initial deployment takes a couple of hours and can be done by one person.

Netgate pfSense offers good value for its price. I prioritize getting the most out of my money, so I choose pfSense. I don't always seek the cheapest or most expensive option but rather the best value for my investment. With pfSense, I get the most product for every dollar spent.

I would rate Netgate pfSense ten out of ten.

I am one of two IT people in the organization, and we are the only two who can access the pfSense firewalls. We have what will soon be four metropolitan locations that use pfSense.

Other than updating pfSense, no other maintenance is required.

I recommend pfSense to others. It's an awesome product that fits everything we've ever needed, and they don't overcharge for every little license feature.

I work in IT at a German insurance company, and I studied computer science. I also work in the network sector, so I know a lot about network solutions. I work with VPN solutions, Fortinet, and other products. For me, pfSense is a private home solution for my family. It's not the solution in my company.

I use pfSense as a firewall appliance, and the function is very good. But I think it's for users with more experience. It's not a solution for beginners.

If you are a professional, it's not difficult to add features to pfSense and configure them. But it is difficult if you are not. 

I utilize the core features. I have pfBlockerNG, SquidGuard, OpenSSL, and WireGuard. So, these are the core features I need.

The core benefits are that I can virtualize it with platforms like Proxmox or VMware, and I can buy third-party appliances. And Netgate offers a lot of hardware possibilities.

pfSense offers a lot of things that help to prevent data loss and intrusion, protect telemetry information, and so on. 

pfSense gives a single pane of glass management. But for me, it's not a problem because I have one appliance, but I think if you manage a lot of appliances, it could be better. It's important to be able to centralize management if I have 10 or 20 appliances.

I use pfSense Plus, it's called the "Zero-to-Ping" license [TAC Lite]. It's a very good solution, but it's a bit too expensive for private use. pfSense Plus is very good, but, for example, if I want to add another pfSense appliance for a cluster, it requires two licenses. For private use, if I want two licenses, it's very expensive.

pfSense Plus provides features to minimize downtime. One of the key features is ZFS. It's the file system. ZFS is very important for backups. I can make snapshots, and that is very good to make backups.

I am satisfied with the visibility that is provided by pfSense Plus. It is very good and optimizes performance because the hardware acceleration is very good for IPsec, SSL VPN, OpenSSL, and so on. This is very good support from pfSense.

The best feature is a function called pfBlockerNG. In pfSense, you can whitelist and blacklists for IP addresses or dangerous DNS sites. The top feature is the VPN. It's a very good SD-WAN solution and a very good VPN engine. It supports a lot of VPN techniques; it supports IPsec, SSL VPN, and WireGuard. It's the core feature of pfSense.

The flexibility is very good; we have a lot of possibilities. You can connect it with different WAN connections, whether you have a cable provider or fiber.

The feature list is good. For me, it's more important that we have fewer patches and better stability compared to OPNsense. I think OPNsense is too big. They support a lot of things, but pfSense is better. I think pfSense is better for stability.

The only thing that could be better is the hardware compatibility for LTE devices. This is a bit tricky for me; I wish the hardware compatibility were better for LTE devices.

I wish the FQ_CODEL limiters were improved. They're very good, but the FQ_PIE limiters don't work well. FQ_PIE limiters are important for cable modem connections. In Germany, we have a lot of cable providers for these interfaces, and the FQ_PIE limiters don't work well in pfSense.

I have been using it for eight to ten years. It has been a very long time. pfSense is very popular in Germany.

I use the latest pfSense Plus version.

The stability is very good.

I use it for my family, for maybe 20 or 30 devices. It's not a big environment.  

I utilize the pfSense forum and the community forum, and it's okay for me.

My preference in comparison with OPNsense is pfSense. I think it is better; it is stable.

The difference is that OPNsense has more features, but also has more bugs.

For me, pfSense is stable. It's better for my use case.

The deployment process is very good. For example, I can set up a new appliance and boot directly from a config file. This is very good.

It's very simple. I download new images, and during the boot process, if you make an image, you have a directory. In the directory, you make the config file, and then you can directly boot with the setup. You can boot a finished version. It's a good thing.

I use it on-premises. The on-prem version is very good. The software is good.

Maintenance depends on the features you use. If you have a proxy server with SSL introspection, sometimes it creates a small firewall size. If you have an easy firewall setup, then it's not so complicated. It depends on your environment and feature settings.

I did the deployment myself without the help of third parties or anything like that. It's very simple. I have enough skills because I studied computer science and work in the network sector. It's not a problem for me.

It took me ten minutes to deploy it. 

The ROI is good. pfSense is a very good solution, not only for home use, but also for middle-sized or larger companies.

In comparison with pfSense CE (Community Edition), pfSense Plus is a little bit too expensive. The pricing is a little bit high for private users. 

With the inclusion of the firewall, VPN, and router functionalities, the total cost of ownership of the pfSense Plus solution is very good because pfSense Plus has a lot of features. For the VPN features, it is good for the total cost of ownership.

I can recommend it if you are a professional or if you know what a firewall is.

It is a very good solution for the home sector, for companies, and for larger companies. I would recommend it to a lot of companies.

Overall, I would rate it an eight out of ten.