Ipanema SD-WAN (discontinued) vs. pfSense

Ipanema WAN Optimization solution is best suited for organizations where poor application performance and application visibility are the key challenges. It is effective where most of the customer sites are in areas where bandwidth upgrade is a challenge. Centralised management of devices through Web Server makes it easy to manage & control them.

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

• Dynamic WAN selection.
• Application monitoring.
• WAN optimization.
• Application performance management.
• Performance improvement.

Incentivized

• 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

• SaaS Applications.
• Knowledge base on support portal.

Incentivized

• 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

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

Some of the problem areas where I feel it wasn't easy enough like troubleshooting, digging deep with packet inspection, security. But Dynamic WAN Selection based on the AQS parameters give this solution an advantage on the other products. Newly added features like cloud application performance monitoring is simplified now.

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

Customer went through multiple vendors to address their issue related to application performance and WAN performance improvement. We went into discussion with Riverbed and Ipanema. Ipanema WAN Optimization solution fulfilled their requirements as some of the features like teleengine, virtual ipbox extra are an advantage over the Riverbed solution.

Incentivized

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.

• This can improve end user experience, which leads to reduced operational cost.
• Return on Investment in 24 months.
• Centralised management of devices can ease in management of devices.

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