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

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

The flexibility is very good.

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

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

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

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

It helps me make more data-driven decisions. 

With pfSense, I can optimize performance. 

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

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

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

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

I haven't had any issues with stability.

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

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

Positive

I've used OPNsense and SonicWall previously. 

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

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

Maintenance is required every few days.

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

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

I use both the paid and community version.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

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

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.

Positive

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.

Negative

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We 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.

Positive

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 use Netgate pfSense as the next-gen firewall because it has a lot of additional capabilities.

The solution's most valuable features are its ease of use and versatility. You can do anything you want with it. We implemented the solution for better security at better prices.

Netgate pfSense is extremely robust and stable compared to other firewalls.

You can use Netgate pfSense as a very basic firewall or with next-generation capabilities and full monitoring. With the command line and the openness of the platform, you can do a lot of things with the tool.

It is extremely easy to add features to the solution and to configure them. We have extensive monitoring capabilities that we have configured into Netgate pfSense so that we can probably monitor any firewall available. We have also utilized the solution's DNS black holes features.

When configured properly, the solution's data loss prevention capability is absolutely top-notch. We use the solution to monitor and detect users' odd or anomalous behaviors on the network, which are usually malware-related. We also use the tool to protect against various blacklists.

We use Netgate on Amazon and have one of their firewalls. Using pfSense Plus on Amazon EC2 has helped simplify our EC2 network. It has definitely helped us with Amazon and tightening things down there.

With the inclusion of firewall, VPN, and router functionalities, Netgate pfSense's total cost of ownership has been very good. For your infrastructure, you're typically looking at five to seven years. Netgate pfSense is definitely punching above its weight in that sense because it comes at a lower cost.

Based on our experience, it lives that long and longer than what you would expect. The solution's ROI and longevity do shine in that sense.

The solution's internal logging could be improved. However, it does have some external logging capabilities. It would be more problematic if you didn't have a very robust environment. We developed our own internal API about five to six years ago, but I hear all the time on newsgroups that one of the solution's biggest problems is API.

I have been using Netgate pfSense for over 15 years.

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

Netgate pfSense is a highly scalable solution. I would say there are at least three of us who are fairly proficient with the solution, almost at an expert level. We have a few others who utilize it, but they're limited in what they can do. Most of our clients for Netgate pfSense are small and medium-sized businesses, but we also have some larger businesses.

I rate the solution’s scalability ten out of ten.

The times I've worked with the solution's technical support, they've been excellent.

I rate the solution’s technical support a ten out of ten.

Positive

We are in the managed IT space and constantly deal with numerous, big name firewall vendors. Aside from the cost alone, Netgate pfSense provides a lot of benefits. Even if Netgate were the same price as the rest of the other vendors, I would still prefer to use Netgate just because of its ease of use.

The solution's initial setup is very straightforward. There's even a built-in wizard that will take you from out of the box to basic firewall setup in about 9 steps.

The solution's deployment time depends on the complexity of the environment that you're going into. On average, the deployment takes probably less than a day. We have a team involved in the solution's deployment.

We have seen a return on investment with Netgate pfSense. We've won some bids for firewall replacement jobs based on the cost alone.

I think Netgate pfSense is very fairly priced. I think it's a great way to get people locked in by being a little bit cheaper than many other solutions. Once they see it, they wonder why they would use anything else.

One of the features of pfSense Plus is backup capabilities, which didn't really help us because we had our own backup solution built in for several years. We also keep additional firewalls available if something like a storm comes through so that we can restore the configuration in five to ten minutes without too much trouble.

pfSense Plus doesn't provide a lot of features and benefits, but we use it because we want to see them continuing to develop the solution.

Netgate pfSense gives us a single pane of glass management, but we don't live in the firewall itself. We monitor it from our single pane of glass, which we're pulling about 20 other security stack solutions into as well. We're pulling in a lot of other enterprise-level solutions, including EDR, vulnerability scans, domain filtering, etc.

Since we have a few hundred clients, we have both cloud and on-premises deployments of Netgate pfSense.

Any product requires some care and feeding. It goes back to our monitoring aspect. As a general rule, you have some firmware updates about every six months. You definitely have a few things to maintain here and there in Netgate pfSense, but it's minimal compared to other solutions.

The solution's cost alone is well worth it. I would recommend it for its adaptability to any complex environment with added security features. You can start off by just doing a standard firewall and then grow from there and really expand on its security features. I really can't think of any reasons why you wouldn't use it. Netgate pfSense is pretty much all we use, and we use a lot of different vendors when we go to different places.

Overall, I rate the solution ten out of ten.

We use the solution as the main firewall and a proxy for load balancing our web servers.

The best feature of the tool is its all-in-one capabilities. It is a firewall with built-in IDS and IPS, load balancing, and VPN connections. The VPN integration, particularly with internal AD environments, provides stable connections. Centralized authentication is a notable benefit as well. We primarily use it for these features on our server level and are planning to expand their use in our complex environment to connect employees and services. 

Netgate pfSense is cost-effective because you can start using it for free. You can research how to install and configure everything, then install it virtually on any device or partition some hardware. This allows you to start using a firewall without any initial cost.

For larger companies, if you have one or two people skilled with the tool, they can design the complete network using it. That's all you need. You don't have to invest in expensive subscriptions or big hardware setups.

My only suggestion is that Netgate pfSense implement more graphical monitoring. While there are accounts with add-ons for graphical monitoring of data networking, IPS, IDS, and firewall-level events, having more graphical representations like blocks would make the tool more capable. Although it has commercial support and a good GUI, it can still be challenging for someone without firewalls, command lines, and networking knowledge.

Adding features to the solution through packages is somewhat limited. The marketplace doesn't have as many options as you might expect.

One example is the IPS/IDS system. Netgate pfSense still uses Snort 2.9, even though version 3.0 has been out for about a year. Version 3.0 offers important improvements like multi-core support, significantly speeding up processing. The solution seems slow to update to newer versions of these third-party packages.

The tool should provide beta versions with the latest package updates sooner so users can benefit from new features and improvements.

Another issue is the lack of a package marketplace. Despite being open source and customized by many developers globally, there isn't a wide selection of community-created packages. The reasons for this aren't clear to me - it could be security concerns or other factors.

Based on my experience using Netgate pfSense for about four years, I can't say the improvements in our environment are solely due to the product. It's a combination of Netgate pfSense and another monitoring tool we use.

Monitoring is crucial. The easier the monitoring and user interface, the simpler our team can work on and investigate issues. Accessing data becomes more difficult when you use commands or other complex methods.

With our third-party tools, log viewing is very straightforward. The tool logs everything important. This was helpful when our site was slow, and we needed to determine why. The logs from Negate pfSense and our IT systems help us identify issues.

However, the solution's combination with a third-party monitoring tool provides a graphical interface. This makes it much easier to review logs and pinpoint problems.

If Netgate pfSense had a better graphical interface, it would be one of the best products available. I think the graphical interface should be much better and easier to monitor. For example, I encountered errors when I installed HAProxy, a load balancer available in the solution. It was difficult to determine the errors because the backend wasn't working properly. It took us a long time to identify the exact issue because more detailed error information isn't directly available in the current interface. You must go through different steps to trace and see what errors are coming up.

If the tool could improve in this area and provide more error details directly in the interface, that would be beneficial. As for packages, if they could update to newer versions of third-party packages more quickly, that would be helpful. I understand they might not be able to use the very latest versions immediately, but if they could provide updates within three to six months of a new package release, users could try new features sooner.

One additional feature that would be helpful is SAML authentication. Many companies now use Azure or AWS; in our case, we use Office 365 for email and authentication. If SAML authentication was available in pfSense, we could have integrated it with Office 365, allowing users to log in directly using their existing credentials.

The tool can integrate with Azure AD internally, but SAML or two-factor authentication, such as SMS, would provide better security. Firewalls are usually kept behind the scenes and not exposed, but this feature would be useful in some cases.

We've offered Netgate pfSense to many clients, managing it for them and migrating them from existing firewalls. They're generally happy with the change. However, some clients were looking for these additional authentication features. While we can integrate with Office 365, a direct connection option would be beneficial.

I have been working with the product for four years. 

I use Netgate pfSense Plus. We mainly chose it for early updates and commercial support, as advertised on their site. I've only used the support once, though. We started with the free version, which worked fine without issues. After three to four months, we upgraded to the Netgate pfSense Plus environment. Since then, it's been very stable. We've never had problems that required rolling back changes after updates. The updates are very stable - we don't have issues when we update the firewall. So overall, it's been quite stable for us.

I rate the solution's stability a ten out of ten. 

My company has five users using the solution in two locations. The solution's documentation shows that it is scalable. 

There is a lot of support material available on the Internet. You need to do some research. In my experience, I've only had to contact Netgate pfSense support once in the last four years, and that was because I messed up the operating system in our virtualized environment. 

We were previously using Cisco ASA 5500. After three years, we needed to upgrade the hardware and the subscription. At that time, we were moving from an on-premise solution to the cloud, so we decided to try Netgate pfSense. Our vendor recommended it. We wanted to get at least six months of experience with it to ensure its features were stable and it could handle higher loads without breaking. That was one of the main reasons we chose the solution.

The solution's deployment is straightforward. The basic setup took us just about two to three hours. However, designing our custom network configuration took a bit longer. Overall, we got the tool up and running in about three to four days in my environment. There were three people involved in the deployment process: myself and two other team members.

Netgate pfSense doesn't require much maintenance on our end. It's pretty smooth. We monitor alerts. When there's a new update, we test it in our staging environment to see if it affects anything. If it's smooth, we upgrade.

The tool has helped us save money. 

The tool is flexible; even the free, open-source version offers many features. From a cost perspective, even the subscription model for commercial support isn't too costly. However, it's important to have someone knowledgeable about Netgate pfSense to take advantage of it. While there are online resources, a professional or someone experienced can get much more out of the solution. I've heard that the IPS/IDS licenses and other features can be costly.

The solution is very cheap. It's so affordable that even students can use it on their laptops. It's a good, cost-effective product.

The solution has a single web interface, which you could consider a container. Within this container, there are multiple interfaces or sections. You must navigate to different settings to manage different aspects of the system.

So, while it's all contained within one web interface, you can't see or manage everything from a single screen.

I recommend the tool to our clients. We help them implement and support it. I rate it an eight out of ten. 

We use it for home solutions and 200+ enterprises. We use it to address routing issues (NATing issues through VPNs).

Our environment consists of many enterprises with many subnets.

pfSense makes everything easier compared to Cisco or Fortinet.

Policy-based firewall rules are the most valuable feature because every other brand it is 200% more complicated to accomplish the same operation.

The flexibility is easy. We can implant in small businesses for less than 500 CAD and in 5k users enterprises. The only part that needs to be improved is the hardware, everything else is out of the box.

I would rate the ease of adding features a ten out of ten. With telecom knowledge, the product is crystal clear easy.

Evaluation and contracting could be improved. 

I have been using pfSense since 2016.

The scalability is good, they should offer filtration or a next-gen firewall.

From my experience, their support is very quick. 

Positive

I haven't evaluated any solutions since 2016. With pfSense you get the bang for your buck. pfSense routing, VPN, policy rules, NAT forwarding, everything is better.

The initial setup is straightforward. It was easy. We have 16 years of experience. I did the deployment, it only required one person. 

It is cheaper than other options. 

I would rate it a 9.5 out of 10. My advice would be to take the time to do an online course if you find using the solution a bit hard. It is worth it.