Cisco Meraki Z3 Teleworker (discontinued) vs. pfSense

The Cisco Meraki Z3 Teleworker appliance was ideal for scenarios where the remote worker spent the majority of their time remote. It alleviates the need for VPN software and gives the IT staff additional visibility into the connectivity of the user. We often encountered scenarios where the users broadband was having issues vs the Meraki network and the tools Meraki provides help to work through these scenarios. The case for the Meraki devices is not as strong for occasional users who cannot justify the cost of the appliance vs just logging in via VPN.

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I believe PFSense is well suited for both home lab environments as well as up to small to mid-size business environments on a tight budget. However, I would implore that anything in production requires the use of the authorized hardware that PFSense sells to receive support. However, in my experience, PFSense is a solid set-and-forget firewall solution.

• Easy setup for remote worker
• Versatility with WiFi and cable connections
• Safe to outages with dual wan setup

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• 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.

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• When Internet is lost and come back we need to reset the Z3 device from the dashboard in order to register the IP Phone to CUCM
• It would be nice to manage the Z3 device to a local web portal just for TS
• Max Speed 100Mbps. It would be nice if it could run up to 1GB

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• I did kind of mention a Con in the Pro section with OpenVPN.
• When I create a config for an employee other employees are able to login to that config.
• I could be doing something wrong when I am making it - I am not afraid to admit that as I am pretty new to all of this, but it seems like it builds a key and I would think the key would be unique in some way to each employee, but I could be wrong.
• I actually do not have a lot of Con's for this software - I did not get to set this up on our work network so I am not sure of any downfalls when installing.
• I installed this on my personal machine in a Hyper-V environment to get a feel for it before I started working on it at work and it seemed pretty smooth. I didn't run into any issues.

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The pfSense UI is easy to navigate and pretty go look at. It is much better than some high dollar firewalls that just throw menus you you. The pfSense UI is quick and responsive and makes sense 99% of the time. Changes are committed quickly and the hardware rarely requires a reboot. It just runs.

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

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At the time of implementation, we were not aware of a comparable product from Cisco or comparative vendor. We had initially deployed the Z1 appliance and had so much success that the transition to the Cisco Meraki Z3 Teleworker was a quick and easy fit for us. The device is easy to deploy and just works.

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Meraki has a unified management login for all devices, which is nice. It also has decent content filtering, both areas where pfSense is weaker. Where pfSense far ouclasses Meraki is in the ease of use and the other width of features. These include features such as better VPN interoperability, non-subscription based pricing, auditability, not relying on the infrastructure of a third party, more transparency of what's actually going on, easier to deploy replacements if hardware fails. Additionally, the NAT management for pfSense seems to be a bit better, as you can NAT between any network segment and not just the LAN segments out the WAN interfaces.

The product is very scalable due to its implementation to the Meraki cloud and SD-WAN capabilities.

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• Good visibility for IT team so we can monitor and validate the teleworker traffic
• Zero Touch Provisioning so we do not need to send a Engineer to configure it.
• Consumer-grade network security

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• pfSense can be installed on commodity hardware with no licensing fees. With a simple less than 10 minute restore time, on most hardware, it's an extremely inexpensive way to achieve the same results that some of the more expensive vendors provide.
• The easy to use interface has allowed configuration management to be preformed by lower level technicians with quick and easy training.

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