Barracuda Web Application Firewall vs. pfSense

Easy to use and reliable, with very little maintenance required and zero downtime to date. For the education sector, ease of use is hugely important as IT Managers/Technicians are often "Jack of all trades" with a good, broad general knowledge but perhaps lacking specific expertise in certain aspects. Being provided with easy-to-follow tutorials and instructions has been very useful in setting up and configuring the firewall, especially as my background is more in desktop support.

Incentivized

pfSense is incredibly budget friendly and capable for organizations of all sizes. My specific scenario, working for a non-profit organization, requires budget consciences decisions without compromising security and function. pfSense has helped tremendously in accomplishing this. It specifically tackles advanced routing, static routing, remote access, intrusion prevention, in a single platform, mostly available for free.

Incentivized

• Attack patterns are regularly updates through contents via Barracuda Web Application Firewall update servers
• Bot Protection has a good line feature to verify between the genuine clients like browsers and bots
• Dos Protection also good level of protection to mitigate Layer 7 attacks
• Allow Deny Rules provides a lot of granular controls to allow and deny the traffic
• URL profiles has a very granular control to mitigate false positives
• Parameter profiles has a very granular control to mitigate false positives
• Risk score feature for the clients to mitigate attacks is also very good feature
• Client fingerprint module can be used against malicious user to enhance security
• Separate XML and JSOn profile for all the URL profiles of the application is plus
• API security is very much effective and shadow API can also be identified

• Easy to use. Good user interface design! Easy to understand and easy to set up.
• Lower hardware requirement. 3 years ago, we used an old PC to run it. Now, we have changed to a router device with Celeron CPU and 8GB RAM. It runs smoothly with a 1000G commercial broadband.

Incentivized

• STM crashes sometimes happen due to unusual traffic pattern
• Obfuscation on the client side user credentials which appears in the developer tools of browser
• URL Profiles redundancy during the learning of traffic needs to be fixed
• Dos Protection should be more granular like escalation period to throw JS challenge, Captcha and rate limit when escalation period hits until the WAF stops the attack
• Client Fingerprinting should work as expected when verifying the clients as in rare some scenarios, it creates issues

• There is no API for making changes. This can be a hindrance in environments where auto-deploying something needs firewall rules or HAProxy configs updated. Since all settings are stored in an XML file and then configs are generated from that, even manually updating config files cannot be done.
• Beware that some network cards can have issues. pfSense is based on FreeBSD, so it's best to look on their compatibility list before deploying.

Incentivized

-User friendly interface for quick learning -Quick deployment for deploying applications -Easy to manage for naive -System components and upgradation of the WAF is very easy go with -Back restoration is very to make it up and ready anytime -Seperate JSON and XmL profiles for each URLs of the application is plus -Amazing and world class support engineer in comparison other vendors and always available to support -Quick resolution on bugs with their patch applying process

pfSense can be a very elementary firewall but can also be as comples as you want, according your needs. I'd always reccomend a HA solution when used in a company and, for bigger companies, commercial license is recommended. It's also very adptable to everyone's needs.

Incentivized

The Barracuda Web Application Firewall is easy to use. Support from Barracuda is great also. Load Balancing of the Web Application Firewall is also nice. This allows you to do maintenance or have large loads for the end-user. Threat monitoring of our network and traffic coming into our services within our cloud solution.

Incentivized

pfSense+ basic provides "As Available" email support. pfSense+ Pro offers 24 hr turn around email support. pfSense+ Enterprise offers 24/7 phone support.

Incentivized

We have been using their Backup products especially Backup Appliances and legacy products like Intronis. We are also using their Cloud Backup Solutions for O365. This is the reason we opted for this product.

PFSense is not a fully featured and supported enterprise-grade solution; however, it does offer a lot of similar functionality at a fraction of the cost for more minor requirements.

• Easy for our IT team to use.
• We just ran it as a pilot for a few months but it was the cheapest solution at the time.

Incentivized

• pfSense has only had positive impacts on our company. We are not a huge company so not having to buy licenses to get all these features have been excellent.
• I was not around when our current sysadmin decided to use pfSense, but I am assuming from day one it was probably a 100% return on investment since it does everything we need it to and it was open source software.

Incentivized