Android vs. pfSense

Android is great if you are on a budget and can't purchase other operating systems for mobile devices. It is also great for installing third-party apps if you find one you like. Although there is a lot of customization options available, this may cause some users to become frustrated if they are unfamiliar with this system.

Incentivized

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.

• Affordable and available on many types of devices.
• Development and release is very convenient than other mobile platform.
• Cost to enter is low especially when considering the hardware side.

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

• Quick changes is little bit dificult to adapt as a developer
• There are no rstrictions on the notification, Every user is getting too much notifications
• Too much fake apps on the platefarm need to remove from playstore, Can improve the quality checks
• Therer are too much settings, and different on every brand its very confusing if changing the brand

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

It is very easy to use and the customer user interface is very smooth and logical. Rarely do applications crash and need reinstallation. The app store is secure enough to prevent malicious software from being advertised and potentially downloaded. Rebooting devices does not have to be a regular occurrence so this allows for high availability.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

There have been only two times that I have needed to contact Android support for technical issues and both times I received some support. I received more helpful tips from Youtube, so I now bypass support and try to do most of our troubleshooting on my own with these support videos online.

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

Android allows users to customize their systems. It is very simple to use and there are a lot of devices running it. The interface has been improving a lot since Android Lollipop and it has been becoming more useful. For developers, Android gives more possibilities and the license for distributing your app is cheaper than the Apple Software Developer Program.

Incentivized

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.

• We have an Android mobile app and our customers have downloaded more than 5.000 instances in less than two months.
• With the app our customers don't need to go to our offices to get a support or service.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized