Citrix Gateway vs. pfSense

Citrix Gateway is a reliable remote access and remote desktop solution. It comes with some amazing security features and enables teams to work remotely. In addition, it guarantees easy, secure access to business apps and desktops through features such as SSO and MFA. It is an ideal tool to have if your business has remote teams.

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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 simplifies IT management - has greatly reduced our IT administrative burden.
• It enhances contextual access and security. Policy-based access helps improve security by considering location, device, and user identity.
• Unified access and performance. The tool ensures a single point of entry for all applications.

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• 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.

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• Opening of apps - it often crashes. My coworker even told me a trick to 'spam click' the app when it shows a certain error to be able to bypass it to get the app open.
• Ability to customize from a user point of view - hiding apps, customizing visual, etc.
• Desktop version never remaining signed in (MacBook) - much easier to just access via web.
• After new laptop/new hire logs into the web version of Citrix and downloads the launcher, the launcher should then auto-fill the URL rather than requesting it again.
• Citrix seems to reset at 12:00pm EST every day, given 15 minute reminder before shutting down the app. It would be great if this timer could be visible in the corner, or simply scheduled for different times depending on regions as it's quite disruptive.
• Citrix seems to reset at 12:00pm EST every day, given 15 minute reminder before shutting down the app. It would be great if this timer could be visible in the corner, or simply scheduled for different times depending on regions as it's quite disruptive.

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• 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.

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A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info

Citrix is a visually very clean platform, allowing for ease of use from even the least tech-savvy. That being said, the apps crashes a lot (scheduled or otherwise), and apps very often refuse to open from the dashboard, making for a frustrating/confusing experience from those who have not yet experienced these same issues daily for years now. The launcher app (for MacBook) leaves a lot to be desired in terms of both setup and daily use, making the web version more viable. First-time users are also often confused on what Citrix is - and how each app connects in order to open a program (explaining "log into Citrix on the web, then download the launcher app, then launch the Spectra app via Citrix web, which will open in the Citrix launcher app on your laptop to launch the app, but you have to paste in the URL again and log in again to access" is a handful)

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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.

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Support is pretty good and pretty fast to respond. I can't say I can really complain about the support experience I've had with them, as they've resolved issues within a reasonable time-frame. Of course, they could always be faster and better, but I think for what we pay, it's well worth the money.

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pfSense+ basic provides "As Available" email support. pfSense+ Pro offers 24 hr turn around email support. pfSense+ Enterprise offers 24/7 phone support.

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We chose Citrix Netscaler Gateway for its wide market presence and its great experience over time. Although the implementation time may be longer than in the other solutions, I think the results are better and it allows configuration with greater capacity than the others. The cost is similar in all the solutions seen.

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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 use Citrix Gateway as booking tool which is important to us.
• We check our metrics using Citrix which is also important to the company as our performance.
• We can see also comments and opinions of the customers using this tool.

• 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

Independently Invited by TrustRadius

A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info