pfSense Information Reviews & Insights

I have been using pfSense of over 15 years and have been extremely happy with it. I have use CISCO routers, Fortigate, SonicWAll, Ubiquiti UniFi and others, and the pfSense CE edition has more features and is is much easier to use while providing EXCELLENT protection. I have 18 pfSense CE versions running now on virtual or my on SuperMicro hardware at my hone and my servers at the WOW colocation facility in Tampa, FL and recommend it to all of my clients. I have upgraded many of them to pfSense Pluss which is $129 and fully supported by the Netgate team. (support hours additional $) It has more reliable updates and code than the CE edition. I HIGHLY recommend it.

Already described.

I use it as my primary firewall and router to manage my WAN and multiple LAN/VLANS for my home office. I have been able to use it at low cost, since I am running pfSense on a custom PC build with an extra 4 port NIC installed. It has allowed me to easily segment my home network for better security, as well as host need services (e.g. remote access over VPN).

pfSense is great for homelab, home office, and small business deployments. Once you are able to justify their support package, support is very good. For my own use case, the software has been very reliable and updates were smooth.

For very large deployments, you will likely need to go with a larger and more expensive vendor requiring licensing.

We are one of the only Authorised Netgate Partner in the UK offering access to the Netgate range of products as well as expert support and solutions for complex requirements. We sell Netgate appliances because they run pfSense® that we love and trust. It is reliable and tested specifically on Netgate appliances. We use pfSense® in all our projects and our pfSense® certified staff would be excited to work together with you on your pfSense® project and to help you support your pfSense® setup.

pfSense is the most complete solution in terms of features included even though it currently lack of a centralised management interface. pfSense is the most secure System because it is open source. Its code can be reviewed by anyone so any bugs and especially back doors would not go unnoticed. When it comes to security transparency and openness has been proven to be the most effective model. Many large and well known names in the market have been caught several times using poor security practices. The use of back door or poorly written code was discovered when it was already too late due to the lack of transparency.

The company I currently work for uses pfSense mainly for load balancing and also as a firewall. We have a lot of cloud customers and this software comes in real handy to ensure that if one of our services go down our customers will not experience any outages as pfSense will automatically make our second connection the primary one. I am currently just getting into the system administrator role and I am working under our current sysadmin who is going into development so I have been trying to learn a lot of this software on the fly.

One of the coolest features of pfSense for someone like me who is learning on the fly is the fact it has a GUI version as well as the CLI version. So you can manage your pfSense instances very easily by using drop-down menus.

I can see this being really useful for small to medium size businesses. The software is very scalable and very flexible. It is also open source so there is not a bunch of licenses to purchase. There are a bunch of addon/packages you can install to add features and they also have "commercial" packages which do cost money but can add features some of the really expensive solutions have.

The support for pfSense is pretty great too - they have a huge online manual you can look things up in and the forums/community support is incredible. I had a question a long while back and I remember having an answer just a couple of hours after I asked it. pfSense runs on FreeBSD - The install was straight forward and once it was installed it is really easy to set up so you don't need to know a bunch of commands. The interface is pretty much "press: 1 to set this up."

I would highly recommend giving this software a try even for personal use. I have been considering trying to make a pfSense based router for my own home use.

pfSense is perfect for small-medium businesses (IMO). I also believe it would be a great tool for a home user/IT enthusiast who wants a great high-end firewall solution or someone who just wants to learn, but does not want to buy a bunch of hardware or licenses.

I installed pfSense on my Hyper-V with 5GB of space and 2GB of RAM.

I personally think pfSense is flexible enough for a large business and can probably do most things Cisco hardware and software can do, but I guess depending on how big you are you are probably looking for something more "known" like Cisco so if something goes wrong you can throw someone under the bus lol!

pfSense is open source and your support comes from a community of people who use the software where with Cisco if something goes wrong you are contacting another large business.

We use pfSense as our primary firewalls on two fiber connections into our organization. We also utilize pfSense for load balancing and fail over of incoming requests for our software and service hosting.

We needed something easy to setup and manage on a day to day basis that didn't come with expensive fees or recurring costs to reduce our financial exposure. As time marches on, we've definitely made the best choice in choosing pfSense as it fits our needs extremely well.

pfSense is well suited for many environments as a primary firewall, VPN server, and proxy server. For small to medium offices, it offers dead simple configuration and management. Large corporate environments may look to other big name providers, however pfSense can easily compete with those in performance and reliability. Hardware devices can also be purchased making pfSense an all-in-one solution for even the largest of environments.

pfSense is less well suited for home or home-office environments as it's a little over kill and with high bandwidth home connections, a larger device will be needed for throughput.

It's a firewall that will compete with any "enterprise" firewall solution and often kicks the paid-for competition into touch. The fact that it is community supported is a big advantage as it is always at the cutting edge of security and support. It's a firewall for technologists first but once installed even the non-technically minded can take advantage of an outstanding network security solution. The latest version of pfSense provides a much improved GUI that will appeal to the less technically minded but it still retains the same level of rich functionality.

pfSense may be deemed too risky an investment for larger organisations as their perceptions that they need to purchase an "enterprise appliance" will carry more gravitas with a CTO or IT head but it's important that potential users understand that most firewall solutions are built off the same Unix derived core code and as such you're paying over the odds for the name not better technology.