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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Cloudflare

    Score8.9 out of 10
    N/ACloudflare’s connectivity cloud is a unified platform of cloud-native services designed to help enterprises regain control over their IT environments. Powered by an intelligent, programmable global cloud network, it is built to offer security, performance, visibility, and reliability.

    $20

    per month

    pfSense

    Score8.5 out of 10
    N/ApfSense 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
    CloudflarepfSense
    Editions & Modules
    Pro
    $20
    per month
    Business
    $200
    per month
    Free
    Free
    Enterprise
    Contact sales team
    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
    CloudflarepfSense
    Free Trial
    NoNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details——
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    CloudflarepfSense
    Considered Both Products
    Cloudflare
    Chose Cloudflare
    We're working with CloudFlare for the balance of simplicity of configuration, cost and robustness. Our experiences of other software have been far too fiddly with pages of buried controls, far too simplistic, or full of scaling costs that make them prohibitive.
    Incentivized
    Netgate (Rubicon Communications, LLC)
    Chose pfSense
    Both products listed above, are very great solutions, but payed ones. If you are looking for open source firewall solution, pfSense is the one. Based on FreeBSD, it has strong security features and is very easy to deploy, configure and manage. pfSense also plays network simple …
    Incentivized
    Chose pfSense
    pfSense is a lot cheaper and has higher firewall throughput per dollar than "enterprise" network appliances. It's also significantly easier to configure and learn. It may not have some of the "enterprise" features or the support level that someone like Cisco has, but for small …
    Incentivized
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    98%
    Would buy again
    171 Answers
    94%
    Would buy again
    16 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    97%
    Delivers good value for the price
    165 Answers
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    17 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    98%
    Happy with the feature set
    171 Answers
    94%
    Happy with the feature set
    16 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    96%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    144 Answers
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    14 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    96%
    Implementation went as expected
    154 Answers
    94%
    Implementation went as expected
    16 Answers
    Features
    CloudflarepfSense
    DDoS Protection
    Comparison of DDoS Protection features of Cloudflare and pfSense
    Feature
    Cloudflare
    8.4
    6 Ratings
    4% below category average
    pfSense
    -
    Ratings
    Automatic Scalability9.47 Ratings00 Ratings
    Mitigation SLA8.87 Ratings00 Ratings
    Security policy management8.67 Ratings00 Ratings
    WAF capabilities8.67 Ratings00 Ratings
    Request rate limiting7.87 Ratings00 Ratings
    Traffic filtering7.67 Ratings00 Ratings
    Bot detection8.07 Ratings00 Ratings
    Global threat intelligence8.87 Ratings00 Ratings
    Real-time analytics and reporting7.87 Ratings00 Ratings
    Firewall
    Comparison of Firewall features of Cloudflare and pfSense
    Feature
    Cloudflare
    -
    Ratings
    pfSense
    8.9
    17 Ratings
    4% above category average
    Identification Technologies00 Ratings8.714 Ratings
    Visualization Tools00 Ratings8.714 Ratings
    Content Inspection00 Ratings9.216 Ratings
    Policy-based Controls00 Ratings8.717 Ratings
    Active Directory and LDAP00 Ratings7.913 Ratings
    Firewall Management Console00 Ratings9.516 Ratings
    Reporting and Logging00 Ratings8.417 Ratings
    VPN00 Ratings9.117 Ratings
    High Availability00 Ratings9.416 Ratings
    Stateful Inspection00 Ratings10.015 Ratings
    Proxy Server00 Ratings8.415 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    CloudflarepfSense
    Small Businesses
    No answers on this topic
    SonicWall NSA Series
    Score8.3 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    No answers on this topic
    Barracuda CloudGen Firewall
    Score9.6 out of 10
    Enterprises
    No answers on this topic
    Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software
    Score9 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    CloudflarepfSense
    Likelihood to Recommend
    9.1
    (192 ratings)
    9.3
    (30 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    8.2
    (4 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Usability
    8.6
    (8 ratings)
    9.7
    (8 ratings)
    Availability
    9.1
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Performance
    9.1
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Support Rating
    6.6
    (154 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    8.6
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Configurability
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    9.0
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    9.1
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Vendor post-sale
    7.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Vendor pre-sale
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    CloudflarepfSense
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Cloudflare
    Cloudflare has features as a CDN/Gateway/Reverse Proxy that simply don't exist in other solutions. Having so many capabilities under a single platform, with solid support and high uptime, has been essential. I would recommend it for hobby projects all the way to enterprise scale. There's a lot of push around AI and workers. Some feel like Cloudflare is following the hype. But after reading a lot about the new features, a decent amount of them has real value.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Netgate (Rubicon Communications, LLC)
    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.
    Read full review
    Pros
    Cloudflare
    • The best part is the content delivery network. Cloudflare has a large network of data centres around the world that helps cache and delivers content quickly to our customers.
    • Cloudflare offers us with a fast and reliable DNS service and with the world class features such as Cloudflare workers, SSL verification, certificate management and web application firewall. When all of these are combined together, it provides very strict security for our organization.
    • One of the most important feature that we use is the analytics and threat detection. It provides us with the real time insights of all the threats originating from multiple locations and landing on our websites.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Netgate (Rubicon Communications, LLC)
    • 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
    Read full review
    Cons
    Cloudflare
    • In some cases, using Cloudflare can actually lead to slower website speeds if the network is congested or if the website's traffic is particularly heavy.
    • Some website owners may find that the level of customization offered by Cloudflare is limited, especially in comparison to other solutions.
    • While Cloudflare is easy to set up and manage, it may be too complex for users who are not familiar with web technologies.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Netgate (Rubicon Communications, LLC)
    • 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
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    Cloudflare
    lower cost
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Netgate (Rubicon Communications, LLC)
    No answers on this topic
    Usability
    Cloudflare
    Everything is extremely concise and all settings apply immediately and take effect globally. There is no reason to explicitly plan/think in terms of individual regions as one would have to traditional cloud offerings (AWS, OCI, Azure). All Cloudflare products integrate seamless as part of a single pipeline that executes from request to response.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Netgate (Rubicon Communications, LLC)
    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
    Read full review
    Reliability and Availability
    Cloudflare
    In 6+ years of relying on Cloudflare, I think we experienced one or two brief outages that were Cloudflare's fault.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Netgate (Rubicon Communications, LLC)
    No answers on this topic
    Performance
    Cloudflare
    Their Argo for the global network is the core feature we love.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Netgate (Rubicon Communications, LLC)
    No answers on this topic
    Support Rating
    Cloudflare
    While I have had good support in the past from Cloudflare's technical support team, I have had some terrible experiences with billing support. I have had multiple tickets sent to their billing support that I will never receive a reply to for over a month. When I finally do get a reply, it has been an automated email that never gives me an answer to my question.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Netgate (Rubicon Communications, LLC)
    pfSense+ basic provides "As Available" email support. pfSense+ Pro offers 24 hr turn around email support. pfSense+ Enterprise offers 24/7 phone support.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Implementation Rating
    Cloudflare
    Very well executed implementation where our team was able to handle the implementation with guidance.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Netgate (Rubicon Communications, LLC)
    No answers on this topic
    Alternatives Considered
    Cloudflare
    Nothing like it. Organizations can utilize these Cloudflare products to enhance their online presence by improving security, performance, reliability, and developer efficiency. Cloudflare is an American company that delivers services such as DNS, a content delivery network (CDN), and various other additional services to make websites faster and more secure. Cloudflare is used by over 26 million sites, resulting in the processing of more than 1 billion IP addresses each day.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Netgate (Rubicon Communications, LLC)
    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.
    Read full review
    Scalability
    Cloudflare
    They are built for scale and have the capacity to handle all the traffic we could ever expect to get.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Netgate (Rubicon Communications, LLC)
    No answers on this topic
    Return on Investment
    Cloudflare
    • Immediate ROI on Registrar and DNS hosting while giving a single plane of glass to managing both with domain registrations at cost, and no cost DNS hosting
    • WAF helped us move at risk servers/applications into a protected state allowing us to perform remediations at a measured pace and get them done right instead of band aide solutions.
    • CDN proxying increase the speed of our website while simultaneously reducing server load.
    • DMARC management and report interpretation allow use to identify weak points in our email systems, remediate and move to stricter policies without significantly increasing staff time spent managing it.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Netgate (Rubicon Communications, LLC)
    • 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
    Read full review
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