Barracuda Web Security Gateway vs pfSense

• Control of domains/sites allowed for access. We can be sure our users are not using their online activity to accidentally, or intentionally, to go to malicious, threatening, intolerance, hate, or pornography.
• Reporting is easy and informative. Reports allow you to summarize for specific time periods, and then drill down to see time spent, or bandwidth used.
• Blocking and/or allowing instantly for a specific user or groups is easily done and takes effect immediately.

Read full review

• pfSense is an excellent firewall - It logs all of your traffic. It has packages you can install to snort bad traffic.
• pfSense has a tool called "p0f" which allows you to see what type of OS is trying to connect to you. You can filter these results and you can also block a specific OS from connecting to you.
• pfSense is an excellent load-balancer: (Multi-WAN and Server Load Balancing) The fail-over/aggregation works very well. This is perfect if your business uses multiple ISP's to ensure your customers are always able to access their data. Also helps with bandwidth distribution as well.
• VPN's - I am not entirely sure if this package was free with pfSense, but it does offer the ability to use OpenVPN which is what I am familiar with.
• They also have IPsec in the settings as well, but I am not familiar with that enough to go into any detail with it.
• As I mentioned I do use OpenVPN the only thing I don't care for with it is I can create OpenVPN configs for each user I want to be able to VPN into the network and I assumed each one would be "unique" but this does not seem to be the case. I could be doing it wrong, but if I create a config for a specific employee I would expect only that employee should be able to use that config, but I have been able to login to everyone that I made using my credentials.
• I mentioned earlier that pfSense had a GUI.
• I personally really think it is cool because it has a bunch of reporting graphs for monitoring your networks. I think when I become the full-time admin at the company I am going to try to talk them into getting me a TV I can mount on the wall and display all the graphs and real-time info pfSense shows so I can monitor what is going on with the network(s) at all times. Plus I think it would look rad.

Read full review

• More configuration in the reporting options would be helpful; there are a number of reports available to run, however more options for customisation would be useful.
• The ability to add a list of domains/URL patterns to whitelist or block would be beneficial; while you can do a bulk edit, you can't just copy and paste the URLs in, you have to modify the line of text so that it matches the format, and adds it to the list. The ability to just import a list of addresses would be a huge time saver.

Read full review

• 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.

Read full review

• I came into the company with Barracuda already implemented so it worked well for a number of years.
• Their support contract was a bit pricey.
• For what the company paid for the system, Barracuda was worth the money over the 10 years it was implemented.

Read full review

• Moving to a FWaaS solution installed on a decent computer the initial investment was moderate to cover 50 to 250 users, but still being cheaper that a Fortinet, Cisco ASA, or a Sophos UTM.
• Paying only for support can be a double edge knife, cause you need to identify what's the goal of the request, or your drown into a an endless list of requirements.
• To stay in the top with the half of a regular investment pFSense gives a wide variety of plugins that will give you a deep knowledge of your security flaws and strong points.

Read full review