Atlassian Crowd vs. pfSense

For companies that are already using other Atlassian systems, then Atlassian Crowd will fit in very well. This is especially the case if the company is not yet big enough to use LDAP for user management, Atlassian Crowd can act as a temporary solution until the company outgrows it, as it is much easier and simpler than LDAP.

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.

• It is very easy for users to create tickets
• Standing up atlassian crowd is a breeze
• Not having to manage any hardware infrastructure is great

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

• Some systems that are not crucial turned into more work than what was originally deemed necessary to successfully deploy Crowd.
• Linux support was there as it was built mostly to support Windows based systems
• Documentation was supported but most issues we had required us to contact Atlassian support.

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

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

Overall, support is good, you get quick responses from Atlassian's official support system, and documentation is decent enough for you to find what you need.

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

These products allow you to install them on your own infrastructure, so you can manage all aspects of them which can prevent you from getting throttled from API calls. When you hit a certain threshold of scale you may need to switch off of Atlassian Cloud to your own hardware. When you are a small startup, however, this product is probably a good starting point.

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.

• New systems are tough when it comes to an ROI, as a dollar amount for saving time on a sign-in can be tough to track. Like most new systems that makes things slightly easier to execute as an end user or manage or support, it really might come down to the existing structure of how a company manages its users.
• The positives are always with the end user, which I have to say, Crowd was able to accomplish.

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