Bigleaf Networks in Beaverton offers their cloud-first SD-WAN, providing enterprise-grade Internet connectivity for business’ critical Cloud technologies.
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pfSense
Score 8.5 out of 10
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pfSense is a firewall and load management product available through the open source pfSense Community Edition, as well as a the licensed edition, pfSense Plus (formerly known as pfSense Enterprise). The solution provides combined firewall, VPN, and router functionality, and can be deployed through the cloud (AWS or Azure), or on-premises with a Netgate appliance. It as scalable capacities, with functionality for SMBs. As a firewall, pfSense offers Stateful packet inspection, concurrent…
$179
per appliance
Pricing
Bigleaf
pfSense
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
SG-1100
$179
per appliance
SG-2100
$229
per appliance
SG-3100
$399
per appliance
SG-5100
$699
per appliance
XG-7100-DT
$899
per appliance
XG-7100-1U
$999
per appliance
XG-1537
$1,949
per appliance
XG-1541
$2,649
per appliance
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Bigleaf
pfSense
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Bigleaf
pfSense
Features
Bigleaf
pfSense
Firewall
Comparison of Firewall features of Product A and Product B
Bigleaf
-
Ratings
pfSense
8.9
17 Ratings
4% above category average
Identification Technologies
00 Ratings
8.714 Ratings
Visualization Tools
00 Ratings
8.714 Ratings
Content Inspection
00 Ratings
9.216 Ratings
Policy-based Controls
00 Ratings
8.617 Ratings
Active Directory and LDAP
00 Ratings
7.813 Ratings
Firewall Management Console
00 Ratings
9.516 Ratings
Reporting and Logging
00 Ratings
8.417 Ratings
VPN
00 Ratings
9.117 Ratings
High Availability
00 Ratings
9.416 Ratings
Stateful Inspection
00 Ratings
10.015 Ratings
Proxy Server
00 Ratings
8.415 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Bigleaf
pfSense
Small Businesses
No answers on this topic
SonicWall NSA Series
Score 8.4 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Cisco Routers
Score 9.1 out of 10
Quantum Firewalls and Security Gateways
Score 9.1 out of 10
Enterprises
Cisco Routers
Score 9.1 out of 10
Palo Alto Networks Virtualized Next-Generation Firewalls - VM Series
Bigleaf is great for getting good performance out of two mediocre ISPs. Bigleaf is great for getting the combined bandwidth of two or more ISPs without having to subscribe to higher tiers with the ISP. I can't imagine Bigleaf would do much good for a business with only one ISP. Reporting with Bigleaf is helpful in documenting any issues with an ISP - I can show an ISP performance history if we experience a problem.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Any time we've had a problem, Bigleaf support has been readily available in English. Support seems competent, and when one hardware device failed we were quickly provided with a replacement
Bigleaf doesn't add a security layer. Competitors we looked at all bundled in security from Cisco or Fortinet, and we didn't want to learn another product and have a competing security layer. With Bigleaf we are able to leverage our existing security solution.
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.
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.
