The benefits I have seen in my organization from the use of Netgate pfSense rewards around the fact of how quickly we can implement changes that are needed with the tool are definitely one of the main things. Overall, we have experienced less downtime with the tool. In my organization, we have had downtime with Cisco. Overall, we have noticed some performance increases as well with the use of Netgate pfSense.

The solution's most valuable feature is that I really like the third-party add-ons, as they give the firewall a ton of flexibility and extra functionalities.

My organization plans to solve costs-related problems by using Netgate pfSense. We were using Cisco's firewall products, and the license and hardware costs were just too high. With Netgate pfSense, I think we can get a full firewall tool with support and no need for licensing for under 5,000 USD, saving a ton of money.

There were no specific security issues or challenges I was trying to address using Netgate pfSense.

In terms of the overall flexibility offered by the product, I would say that it is very easy to implement, make changes, and adapt to different challenges that we may have with it. It offers a lot of different options, including VPN options for site-to-site client VPNs. Overall, it is a great tool. It is a highly adaptable solution that is, most importantly, very easy to implement.

It is extremely easy to add features to Netgate pfSense and configure them. If you are talking about third-party stuff, it is something that is within the firewall itself. You can go into the Package Manager and install it.

From a configuration point of view, it is extremely easy to use the tool. With third-party stuff, it can be a pain, but overall, it is extremely easy to manage Netgate pfSense since it is mainly a GUI-driven tool. It is super easy to configure overall.

If I assess the solution for helping our organization prevent data loss, I think it has been great for us. Everything has room for improvement, but it has been great right now.

Netgate pfSense provides our organization with a single pane of glass management. The tool offers great flexibility and is awesome. In our organization, we haven't had any issues with it. It just makes changes that need to be done extremely quickly and efficiently by the end of the day.

I have worked with Netgate pfSense Plus. I buy the hardware from Netgate, and it comes with pfSense Plus.

Netgate pfSense Plus provides 100 percent features that help minimize downtime. In extreme situations, implementing connections that were super helpful in the past and just the ease of deployment, the product offers is helpful since even if something happens to the firewall itself, I can have a virtualized firewall doing the same thing within less than an hour. It can help with that downtime. I know that Netgate pfSense is extremely reliable and a great tool.

Netgate pfSense provides 100 percent visibility, enabling my organization to make data-driven decisions. Netgate pfSense is very much configurable. It gives you 100 percent of everything you need to make decisions. It gives you details of all kinds of different graphs, traffic, and firewall rules, along with the things that you definitely need in the form of the data that you need to be able to just make quick data-driven decisions.

Netgate pfSense visibility helps me optimize performance. The data is just so easily accessible that you can make decisions very quickly. It also helps improve performance. In our organization, we have noticed a very noticeable performance increase since we shifted from the old firewall from Cisco to Netgate pfSense.

If I were to assess the total cost of ownership of Netgate pfSense, I would say it is extremely low and affordable. I think it is a really very simple and extremely budget-friendly tool.

In our organization, we have had such a good experience with Netgate pfSense over the last four years. In terms of improvements, I have not really thought much, to be quite honest. Maybe faster releases for the software or the firewall itself can be areas where improvements are possible. The tool is just a little bit slow to release patches, so it is probably one of the things where the tool can improve. In general, the tool is not bad at all at the end of the day.

Speaking about whether any enhancements are required in the tool, I would say that the tool has everything that we need for our usage. We have an extremely complex environment, the most complex of which is how we use Netgate's BGP to connect to our ISP. Netgate pfSense is extremely feature-rich for our specific use scenarios, and we have not encountered any shortcomings in the solution.

I have been using Netgate pfSense for around four years. The box itself says Netgate pfSense XG-1540. I don't remember the software version we are using right now, but all I know is that I keep it up to date. In my organization, it will be the latest version of the product.

I have not faced any issues with the stability of the product. I have one firewall in a very bad physical environment. It was very dusty, but it has been 100 percent reliable.

It is an extremely scalable solution.

In our school, we have close to 1,800 students and 210 teaching staff overall. With administrative staff, I think there are about 50 people.

I have the tool in different locations and on different campuses.

If I can call someone from the product's technical support team, l can have a technical person on the phone with me in less than five minutes. If you have any questions for them, they will come and try to give you the answer as quickly as they can, and if they don't have a reply, they will reply to you later via email. For the amount that it costs per year, the level of service that you get is unbeatable, honestly. I rate the technical support a ten out of ten.

The product's initial setup phase was extremely straightforward.

When we deployed the product for the first time, we went through its documentation and how to do things. Otherwise, the strategy is usually based on the fact that we have four campuses, and they run in a similar manner. At least for us, we have a master configuration sort of thing, which we can kind of load into Netgate pfSense and make the small changes that we need, like VLAN changes and small things that apply to the location that the device will be deployed to, and it takes less than probably an hour or two to kind of have a firewall deployed working with the bare minimum, which is extremely fast compared to what it takes with Cisco.

In terms of maintenance, it has been pretty much like we do the setup and then forget it. The firmware updates, or physical maintenance, like cleaning the device, are there. From a greater overview, it is just kind of a set-it-up-and-forget kind of solution for us.

The product's deployment was done in-house, and it involved just me. The enterprise-level support from Netgate helped my organization a lot, especially during the first two deployments, but after that, it was easy.

Personally, I do not have any metrics or data points associated with the ROI that I can share with anyone. My CFO is the person who has information related to ROI.

In our organization, the whole point of moving to Netgate pfSense was that we wanted something that wasn't hard to use or where the licensing wasn't so expensive. We looked at different open-source options, but I can't remember their names. We also looked at UniFi's firewall, but Netgate pfSense came on top for us, considering the support provided and the fact that Netgate's team is the main set of people that keep up with pfSense's open-source project. With Netgate, we work directly with people who use Netgate pfSense, and it is great. We did look at other options, one of which was UniFi, but I cannot remember the name of the other alternative to Netgate pfSense. I think it is called OPNsense.

Suppose I compare the other tools I evaluated with Netgate pfSense, and I feel that the pros of pfSense revolve around the area associated with the product's cost in terms of hardware requirements and licensing. There are no existing costs for the licensing or the hardware. You can deal with the licensing part yourself and get it at a cheap rate from elsewhere or buy it from Netgate's boxes directly from the solution company. Another pro would be the ease of management the tool offers since it is possible to have everything that you need in the GUI, which is a little bit controversial because a lot of people like CLI, but sometimes you need to get something quickly without having to have hundreds of different things.

I haven't come across any cons in the product since most of our company's scenarios are simple and small since we are just a school compared to what other big companies have. Everything that Cisco's firewall was doing for us, Netgate pfSense's firewall does for us for a fraction of the cost and even offers a better performance. I would not know the tool's cons since I do not have anything on my mind right now.

I do not use Negate pfSense Plus on Amazon EC2 VMs. In our organization, we are using Negate pfSense Plus on Netgate's hardware. We use Netgate pfSense XG-1540.

To others who plan to use the solution, I would say that the support offered by the product is 100 percent worth it. The enterprise support is also extremely worth it. In a general sense, if people don't know much about implementation, they just need to read the documentation because many things, like the GUI part, could throw some people off. If you come from a CLI-based tool, the GUI aspect can throw you off, and I know it since it threw me off a little bit initially, but we were able to get through the implementation phase very thoroughly as the tool offers great documentation. By thoroughly going through the documentation, you will have a fairly easy time configuring the tool very methodologically. I really don't think I would recommend anything else apart from the fact that others need to read the documentation and take their time.

I rate the tool a nine out of ten.

It's a straight-up front edge router used in various scenarios for front-ending multiple websites and multiple web applications for various marketing scenarios which require certain back-end firewalling that you would need to utilize. We found that it works much better than others. It's not like the Ciscos, which, at the time, were incredibly expensive and difficult to work with unless you had a CCNA who was programming it for you.

I was looking for routers that were capable of doing multiple firewalling, which it does. We wanted it for setting up demilitarized zones and setting up some failover for WAN for the internet. We looked at that, and we played around a little bit with Untangle. pfSense was just far easier to get configured and working, and there were no hidden costs or fees involved, which made it very nice to use.

They have a whole section of package management that you can add stuff to. We use pfSense to do a little bit more than what we would or what I would normally do today in a medium to large enterprise.

The flexibility of pfSense is fantastic. You can use it in a number of situations. I have it running on my home Netgate. At the same time, I can just put it on a slightly larger machine and run a massive, highly trafficked web environment. It will run anywhere.

It's easy to add features to pfSense and configure them assuming about web networking and routing and traffic through an edge router scenario. For a home user, it's probably a lot more than they would get through, but they wouldn't need to since you can just install it, and it just works right out of the box. Just about everything is easy. It's extremely well documented, and the amount of help that's available is fantastic.

I saw the benefits of pfSense immediately. When you need your router to do something more than, for example, a store-bought router for home, you immediately see it since now I can do things. I can set up multiple LANs. I can create a firewall between the LANs. I can open up a full demilitarized zone or just port forward into specific LANs and have the LANs porting between themselves in various ways. You don't get that stuff in your normal consumer-grade solution. You have to spend a lot of money to get a serious data center router - and on top of that, you need to get somebody to program that from the command line, which is very expensive. In contrast, pfSense has a graphical user interface, which makes it all very straightforward and easy to use to set up some pretty sophisticated routing scenarios.

I don't use pfSense to prevent data loss as I have backups, both on-site and off-site backups. It's effective for preventing data breaches.

pfSense gives users a single pane of glass as a type of management. There is everything in one instance. It has a graphical user interface. It'll come up with a dashboard that you can customize to put whatever you need to see up on there. I can customize the dashboard to show me the most important things to me. It's incredibly intuitive.

Managing multiple devices is easy enough. You just log in remotely to the device, and it's all connected through the IP. It's really quite simple.

There are two versions of pfSense: the community edition, which is free, and the plus version, which is paid. I'm using the paid one presently.

The solution minimizes downtime. Once it's configured, it works. I don't have to worry about it. I fully know it backwards and forwards since I've been using it for 15 years now and it pretty much just works. I have certain instances of pfSense that haven't even been rebooted in years since it's up and running and it keeps running, and it runs well. I rarely need to touch certain my installs after they've been set and configured.

The solution provides visibility that enables data-driven decisions. It has logging. It has intrusion detection systems, which will give you a whole lot of data that you can make decisions on. For example: Who do I need to block? Is somebody trying to attack me? It'll allow me to collect all that information to make critical decisions regarding exposing certain resources to the internet.

pfSense helps optimize performance in combination with the hardware that it's running on. That will determine what kind of performance you're going to be getting out of the box. It's a very lightweight software package. Depending on the hardware, you can hit it with lots of traffic, and it won't even hiccup.

I would like to see more active updates coming out of the developers. I like the FreeBSD. That said, the developers in FreeBSD are less productive than what you see out of the Linux community, where there are millions and millions of developers. Being FreeBSD-bound, it seems they're short of developers who have to specialize in that operating system.

I've used the solution since 2009.

The solution never crashes and never lags. It works. You fire it up, and it will work for the next 50 years. As long as the hardware is working, pfSense will just go on and do its thing.

Scalability all comes down to hardware. When you put pfSense on more robust hardware, it performs pretty well.

For the paid version, if I have an issue, I need to open a ticket. Before I had my business going, I used the community, and it worked it worked just as well. I haven't had a need to call support. However, I pay for pfSense Plus support in case something happens that's over my head that I need to speak to an expert about.

I contacted them when I had a question about a Snort setup, which is for intrusion detection and prevention. It turns out you have to contact their specialist, and that Snort requires you to pay extra for that help. It's a third-party plugin for pfSense. However, in relation to pfSense, issues, I have not needed help.

I've used Untangle and Cisco routers, and I've tried OPNsense.

I prefer pfSense. I'm comfortable with it. It's rock solid. I've never had an issue with it. I tell it to do something, and it does exactly what I tell it to do.

I have purchased NetGate appliances for customers. For my business, I have hardware that I've repurposed for pfSense.

The initial deployment, either way, is very easy. It would probably be easier than most commercial routers that people buy.

A simple instance where you're just using a firewall router with one LAN can take less than five minutes. You just install the software. It picks up the WAN IP and gives you a LAN IP, and it's up and working as quickly as the software will install, which is usually less than five minutes on most devices and most hardware.

I do the deployments myself. I don't see where a team would be required for this. It's just a firewall router. If you need a complicated setup, it might take one person, a couple of days of planning, and then implementation. That said, I don't see where you would need a team to do that unless you're installing a bunch of other network hardware at the same time, multiple switches, or a ten-gig, one-gig type of scenario. However, that's not a pfSense issue.

In terms of maintenance, generally, there is none. It will update itself. I see very few critical security updates. Most of them are our feature updates. I have certain installs that have been running without rebooting for five years, and it just installed them. Mostly, I'm leaving it alone.

The pricing is reasonable for what it is. I usually put it on my own hardware. The licensing for me is relatively inexpensive for what I'm getting out of it.

The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is fantastic. You can use the community edition and get expertise from the manufacturer. It's quite reasonable. It's quite a good setup.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

I'd advise potential new users to install it, plug it in, get to know it, log into it, and you'll start to see how easy and robust it is. The more you use it, the more you learn, and you'll like it as much as I do.

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.

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.

I use it as a firewall and router. I use it in a few locations. I have three pfSense products.

I like that I can geofence and block different countries from accessing my network.

The flexibility is very good.

I noted the benefits of pfSense within a year. I had it on my VM for a year and then put it into production.

It's good at blocking malware and DNS attacks. I don't use it for data loss prevention.

The solution gives me a single pane of management. Everything is accessible from the dashboard.

It provides features that help me minimize downtime. I have a WAN, and if any of my WANs go down, it's okay; I have them connected to pfSense.

It helps me make more data-driven decisions.

With pfSense, I can optimize performance.

I don't really need too many features. I just use it as a plain firewall. I like to keep it clean. I don't like to run too many things on it.

The configuration can be a little difficult. You need to know the system a little bit. Even now, I do have one in a VM where I test my stuff, and then implement it into production.

They could make it easier to configure packages. They could have a wizard that helps you out a bit more.

I've used the solution for more than five years.

I haven't had any issues with stability.

I haven't had issues with scalability. It's easy to back it up and load the backup.

Technical support is fast to respond. However, I did have to eventually pay for them to help me out. I had some problems with the firmware. Someone remote into my appliance and fixed it. They patched it up and now it's working fine.

I've used OPNsense and SonicWall previously.

While pfSense has more features, OPNsense is a lot easier to use.

I have the solution as an appliance. Deployment for a device is a little bit hard, so it can take a few days.

Maintenance is required every few days.

I did not have any help from outside consultants. I manage the deployment myself. I was able to eventually figure it out myself via forums.

I like the fact that there is a free version. I'd like the entire offering to be free. That said, it's 100% worth the cost of ownership.

I use both the paid and community version.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

I would advise new users to test it before implementing it in their environment.

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 USE Netgate pfSense for home networks, lab environments, and R&D. In production, professional career-wise, I have built pfSense production firewalls that run in various configurations and high availability for different organizations serving a different number of clients and servicing any amount of requests throughout any given day.

It also serves thousands to tens of millions of requests a second a day from small to large deployments.

Netgate pfSense is an extremely flexible solution. It is an open-source tool that has a very large community of professionals, enthusiasts, and hobbyists alike. There is a lot of flexibility in doing whatever you want with it. It also offers enterprise-grade support so that you can have something equivalent to the Cisco enterprise-grade data center firewall product. You could build that with pfSense or OpenSense, which is a derivative of pfSense.

The initial benefit I saw of pfSense was way before I ever used it professionally. It is a robust tool that can replace your consumer-grade firewall router solution. I also saw immediate benefits in my professional career as it is a powerful solution that can be compared to other solutions like Palo Alto or Meraki today.

Netgate pfSense can be a fully functional L7 firewall. You can not only have the base Layer 3 functionality of the firewall, but you can add things like Snort and pfBlockerNG to build out and become an L7 firewall doing actual inspection and security analysis.

It is very easy to add and configure features to Netgate pfSense.

pfSense has a built-in auto-configuration backup. While that is technically data loss from the sense of protecting the firewall, it is a feature Netgate offers to every pfSense user, licensed or not. You get this feature if you have a Netgate appliance. Just using pfSense won't get you that. There are third-party packages you can use to set up pfSense configuration backups if you don't have pfSense Plus.

In terms of data loss outside of that, you configure it in a way that puts it as a security device. By default, pfSense is not inherently a security device. It is a Layer 3 filtering firewall. If you want it to be a security appliance beyond basic TCP/IP Layer 3 filtering, you can run Snort or pfBlockerNG to turn it into a security appliance. Doing so can aid in data loss prevention by using the tool for basic intrusion detection prevention.

Netgate pfSense provides a single-pane-of-glass management capability. Its dashboard has a lot of prebuilt functionality, allowing you to have a single-page view of the firewall's status and everything going on with it.

pfSense Plus provides features that help us minimize downtime as a supporting part of the infrastructure.

pfSense Plus provides visibility that enables us to make data-driven decisions. The kind of data-driven decisions that could be made with information from pfSense are things like how much bandwidth I am using and what is the throughput of all my band connectivity.

I can also decide whether I need to go from a 1 Gig network to a 10 Gig network or a 2.5 Gig network and whether I need to increase my commit for my WAN circuit because we see that we are averaging above 99%, etc. The kind of decisions that it can help you make are related to your network and your connectivity.

The visibility that pfSense Plus provides helps us to optimize performance. It could help you to improve performance on the network side. It is, after all, a firewall router, so it is a network piece of equipment. It could help improve performance in that if you are actively monitoring, pulling data from pfSense, or actively reviewing the different types of information and graphs that pfSense provides, you could make decisions to see that a machine is consistently using lots of network traffic.

I have been using Netgate pfSense for 15 years.

I have pfSense Plus in production. I have both pfSense Plus and pfSense Community Edition (CE) running at home. They are essentially the same, and the only difference between them is the support and auto-configuration backup.

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

I use the solution in two of my homes. I have a home in the UK and one more in the US. I have two firewall tools running with a VPN link between them, and it allows me to easily administer and protect both networks, one in the UK and the other in the US.

I can discuss the product's most valuable features if you have a playbook for some of the things you want to hear about or expect me to touch upon.

The tool's most valuable features revolve around its ease of use. It is a resilient product with a very easy-to-use interface. The learning curve for the product is very simple. I also like the core packages included in the tool, making my firewall a one-stop shop for stuff like DNS and VPN usage. The tool has a lot of packages available. I like the product's in-built packages. I use WireGuard VPN, and it is very good. I use IPSec, the built-in DNS product in the tool. I can also link the tool with my UPS if the UPS has an outage in the northeast region where people experience electricity cuts. The software I use on Netgate pfSense acts as a kind of choke point and sends messages throughout my network to start shutting down during electricity cuts. My firewall is a ground zero area for me on my edge. All the packages in the tool allow me to protect my network. It serves as a Layer 4 product since Netgate pfSense doesn't do anything like other products offering Layer 7. As a Layer 4 product, Netgate pfSense is very strong since I can easily create very advanced firewall rules, which I wouldn't be able to create as easily with other solutions, especially if they don't come with more than 10,000 or 20,000 USD as the price tag. Palo Alto, Check Point, or FortiGate are expensive firewall products compared to Netgate pfSense. I don't think Netgate pfSense really competes with Palo Alto, Check Point, or FortiGate, but the latter set of tools may make it feel like Netgate is trying to compete with them. I work for a major security firewall vendor, and I don't think Netgate pfSense competes with it. Netgate pfSense provides SMEs with a significant amount of value for not a lot of cash.

It is very easy to add features to Netgate pfSense. Now remember that Netgate pfSense does not attract an average IT person. The tool attracts people with two profiles, including CCNA-certified or very sophisticated firewall administrators, hoping they can help use some of the pretty advanced features in the product. The second profile of the tool's users would consist of those who are getting started or want a better firewall than what their carriers or the provider provides them with so that they can learn about firewall devices. They want to learn about networking by using Netgate pfSense. For both profiles, the tool offers a very linear learning curve. The documentation in Netgate pfSense is very strong.

The benefits related to the product can be experienced immediately after the product is deployed. I wanted to replace EdgeRouters from Ubiquiti for my use cases, which have now gone into a deprecated mode. I wanted a tool that could offer me the functionality of EdgeRouter, and I was happy to pay more for a product that could provide such features. Compared to EdgeRouter, I had to spend 700 to 800 USD on both the final units from Netgate pfSense for both of my homes. I chose Netgate pfSense since I wanted a tool with a set of more updated functionalities and a solution that can be considered an easy replacement product for EdgeRouter. I saw immediate value in Netgate pfSense from day one.

A single pane of glass is a vast term. If I were to define a single pane of glass, I would say that it is something from which you can see everything from everywhere in a single dashboard. The single-pane-of-glass feature within the tool's user interface is one of the core aspects of the product. In my opinion, the tool has a very strong dashboard.

Netgate pfSense can minimize downtime easily since it is easy to put it in a high-availability configuration.

Considering that the tool offers a Layer 4 firewall's functionalities, I can say that Netgate pfSense provides visibility that enables me to make data-driven decisions. For example, the firewall fits into two markets. The north-to-south market is where Netgate fits in with Palo Alto, Check Point, Sophos, and Cisco. There is also the east-to-west market where I work since it is where my employer is currently. When you talk about the visibility of data, you are looking for either north to south or east to west. In terms of the visibility from east to west, which is based on application to application or data center within a data center, Netgate pfSense will not be helpful at all. From north to south, I get visibility over what is coming into my network. For example, I can easily capture dump traffic using the in-built features in the tool and run an SNIP on the traffic. I can see what's coming in and inspect those packets, and I can do that all within the user interface, which is a new feature in the tool that is very strong. I like the tool's new feature. The tool has very easy-to-consume logs, and it is very easy for me to export them into a SIEM server if I want to do some kind of mass data warehousing and sorting.

With the inclusion of firewall, VPN, and router functionalities, if I assess the total cost of ownership of Netgate pfSense, I would say it is very large.

I think the tool requires more strategic improvements than we need it to be in the present. With Netgate, considering that I work in a firewall market, I know that its problem is not just in its features. It needs improvements in terms of the strategic vision, where the product should go, and what market it should be for in the future. Netgate needs to figure out if they want to strive for the SMB business and the home market or if they want to attempt to reach out at an enterprise level.

I don't think Netgate knows where they want to go with or without a plan. I think Netgate is still trying to devise a plan by itself as to which market it wants to fall into, which can make it more profitable for the tool. There is nothing that Netgate pfSense could do to make me feel any better about the product. I love the product, and I will use it until I die. It is a really good product. Improvements are needed in the area of the company's strategic vision and based on where the solution needs to go in the future. I spoke about north to south and east to west since the world is moving towards the concept of zero trust. If you are a CISO or a CIO and you are trying to achieve a zero-trust architecture, you need to check if Netgate is on your list of companies that would help you achieve it. If I consider the CIOs I speak to, Netgate doesn't even get mentioned in our talks.

I do not require improvements in the product. It is feature-complete. As a firewall, Netgate pfSense can be described as a very feature-complete product for the market space in which it currently operates.

Strategy and vision of the product are the areas with shortcomings where improvements can be made so that Netgate pfSense can figure out where the product should go in the future. It will provide Netgate with choices like whether it wants to go towards a zero trust architecture if it wants to go towards the east-to-west direction if it wants to go towards big enterprise or go into Layer 7 traffic. My answer regarding the need for improvement in the product is going to be more of a strategic-based one rather than from a technical point of view because the product is excellent.

I have been using Netgate pfSense for five years. I am an end user of the solution.

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

The solution's scalability is tricky, and it all depends on the context. It is infinitely scalable for me, and my company has 150 devices in my network, which may be nothing. Suppose a company like J.P. Morgan says they want to use Netgate Netgate as their north-to-south firewall. In that case, you may face big scalability problems because, at such a level, tools like Check Point or Cisco have custom silicon chip designs to support their workloads. For SMBs, the scalability part is not an issue. I don't think Netgate pfSense can offer much scalability for big enterprises.

I have contacted the solution's technical support team. The quality of the answers provided by the technical support team is good, and the responsiveness is exceptional. I rate the technical support a ten out of ten.

I have used many solutions that can be considered alternatives to Netgate pfSense. I can compare Netgate pfSense with FortiGate since Netgate is priced similarly but falls at a lower end when compared to Fortinet FortiGate. FortiGate is a better product for an enterprise. For home usage and small and medium-sized enterprises, Netgate pfSense can be a stronger choice than FortiGate. For home use, Netgate pfSense is very much preferable.

Even for an unskilled person, the tool's deployment phase would be easy to manage. It is a very easy product to consume because it has a lot of WYSIWYG and built-in wizards, along with a very easy graphical user interface.

Deploying one instance of Netgate pfSense can take around five minutes, and only one person does it. Regarding the other tasks, our company has firewall products that handle more than 100 or 1,000 workloads, and two to three people manage them.

A limited amount of maintenance is required from the end of the tool's users. It is just to adjust the firewall rules as and when necessary to meet the business needs, like in patching, where Netgate pfSense does a very good job while also being very responsible and quick to respond to zero day and CVE alerts. The tool is superb and very impressive, but it can be described as a very low-overhead product because, by nature, firewalls under the north-to-south are for static workloads, which is where Netgate's market is currently. Those workloads are not changing for now. You put Negate pfSense into your system and forget about it, which can be considered as a whole other problem in firewall products, but I won't go too deep into it because that is why there are 20 years of rules in firewalls and no one maintains it because you just set it up and forget it.

I bought Netgate pfSense Plus since I have to use the firewall in both my houses, so I have four solutions. I have made certain payments using a subscription-based model to use Netgate pfSense Plus.

If I were a part of Netgate leadership or running the company, I would clear out a few areas on the strategy side of the business. I work for a major enterprise where an SME or the tool is needed. Netgate's strategy regarding Netgate pfSense Plus for home users or labs was very misleading in nature and handled very badly. I have opted for the tool's subscription-based pricing model. a subscription, and I am very happy to pay the money money, which comes to around 130 USD for two years, which is nothing for me. Netgate handles the tool's subscription-based pricing model very badly.

I think Netgate pfSense's pricing or licensing models are fair enough. I think the way Netgate pfSense handled its previous pricing model with regards to Netgate pfSense Plus was an area that was misleading for users. Overall, what I pay for the product is very reasonable.

There are no features in Netgate pfSense that help prevent data loss. One can use a DLP tool to manage data loss.

The visibility in Netgate pfSense does not help me optimize performance, and I think it is because I am a pretty advanced user on the command line. I wouldn't rely on the visualization part for any advanced performance.

I have never used Netgate pfSense on Amazon EC2 virtual machines.

My suggestion to those who plan to use the product would be that they need to read the solution's documentation, utilize the community forums and shouldn't be afraid to fail. It is easy to recover from failure with Netgate pfSense since it has configuration change logs along with very easy rollback abilities. In the newest version, if you make a change and you reboot, it just snapshots you back to the new change, which is excellent.

I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

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.

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 use Netgate pfSense to deploy to our customers.

Netgate pfSense has a lot of different applications you can use for VPN and multi-way traffic. It's very simple as far as firewall rules and NAT rules go. It's an overall solid application and product. We don't really have too many RMAs, and there are no monthly fees associated with it.

Netgate pfSense is extremely flexible due to the nature of the multi packages that you can use for different VPNs. You can do the same thing in multiple different ways, and it's very handy when you're trying to troubleshoot problems.

You can add packages to pfSense with Snort and pfBlocker to keep hackers out. We've been using pfSense by creating rules that only allow our IP addresses into those devices. That way, they are never open to the outside world, and we've been doing that for almost 20 years.

Netgate pfSense has a high-availability application called CARP that allows you to put two devices in failover mode.

The visibility that pfSense Plus provides helps us optimize performance because that's all in the updates they push out.

We use pfSense Plus on Amazon EC2 VMs, and it's been pretty good and fairly quick in testing.

The solution should provide a single pane of glass and a management console for all devices.

I have been using Netgate pfSense for 20 years.

The solution is fairly stable unless there's an environmental issue.

I rate the solution's stability an eight out of ten.

I rate the solution a nine out of ten for scalability.

We have previously used SonicWall. SonicWall has all the packages prebuilt. With Netgate pfSense, you have to download and install the packages and then configure everything. These include antivirus and anti-spam, which you have to turn on, but they cost money.

It's really just a configuration setup. SonicWall and Netgate pfSense are two very different firewalls. It's very difficult to compare them other than monthly and yearly licensing versus buying at once.

The solution's initial setup is super easy. I've taught several people with little knowledge of how to do it, and it's been very simple to explain and set up.

From start to finish, the solution's deployment can be done by one person in probably an hour.

I think Netgate needs to charge a nominal fee for the actual software so that it gets paid for because a lot of people skirt the licensing and use the community edition. Netgate should charge something nominal like $50 a year for the community edition to deter people from using it for everything.

Depending on the specifics, adding and configuring features to pfSense could take three or four hours for a RADIUS server with a VPN or less than two minutes to set up a NAT rule.

We were embedded with pfSense in 2023. It took us some time after we deployed the solution to see the benefits.

I have 236 devices in production. Some of the cheaper models are more susceptible to power outages, which cause them to fail. However, some of the more robust models are expensive, but they last for many, many years, and there's very little interaction that we have to do with them.

The only maintenance the solution needs is just updates to the device as required.

New users should do some basic research before configuring Netgate pfSense. There's lots of information about the tool on the web, and it's very easy to get the answers to your questions because somebody's already probably run into that issue. There are tutorials on basic configuration on YouTube.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

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.