Opensense vs. pfSense

It is well suited if you have a decent-sized sales team and a more advanced segmentation strategy for your marketing efforts. For example, if you have a wide range of content at your disposal to promote, and you have a sales team working on various different accounts at different sizes and stages in the buying journey. It is less appropriate if you just want to use it to power your email signatures with no efforts towards promoting.

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

• Target domains
• Easy change between departments
• Easy banner swaps

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

• more WYSIWYG interface when designing new templates

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

Overall all useability is great. The tool is dummy-proof, so anyone can use it and run it. No IT knowledge needed besides connecting it to your mail server which their team will walk you through. After that, you can have fun with the tools and create what you want to create for your teams.

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

Opensense customer service is by far the best! I have never had an issue once when calling in or submitting a ticket! They are very kind while working on the phone with them, and they explain everything to you! They will take the time with you to make sure everything gets solved.

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

There are many similar features however Opensense as a standalone tool is more comprehensive and integrates more easily with other tools in our technology stack.

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.

• Pays for its self.
• Drives traffic to our website.

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