GFI KerioControl vs. pfSense

IT works very well in the non-profit and small business space when there is a need for remote access or connecting several sites in a point to point VPN, user management and rule creation are very easy. The use of the MyKerio website for remote management also makes it easy to troubleshoot problems and make changes if technical staff are not onsite.

Incentivized

Because pfSense is built around open source software, it is very convenient to be able to deploy in the event of hardware failure. We once had a client with a proprietary router that failed. While the router was under warranty, the expected time for the new router to arrive was about 2 weeks. We decided to implement pfSense for the client as a stop gap and ultimately ended up deploying the full enterprise appliance. Being able to get up and running using commodity hardware was a huge win for the client. We've also had a great amount of success deploying pfSense hardware at apartment complexes. The DNS resolver works great and we've had no issues handling multiple VLANs with various DHCP scopes on it. Finally, we've had clients that require having a failover cluster. Utilizing the built in CARP capabilities, we've been able to provide a very robust failover system that requires little maintenance and no downtime in the event of equipment failure.

• VPN for Remote Employees
• Point to point VPNs
• Scanning of traffic
• Ease of management
• Website filtering by both sites and key words

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

• Support can take longer to respond that it should
• Could work better with resellers
• Spend more effort on adding new features

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

Very easy to use and manage, user training takes less then 10 minutes. Technicians can perform basic tasks with less then an hour of training and can master it in under a year.

Incentivized

The interface is simple, has sane defaults, and is consistent throughout.

Support is very slow to respond and it takes a long time to convince level 1 techs that you need to be moved up to someone more senior. I believe support is outsourced and they are graded on how few tickets they need to escalate to higher tiers so they will try to figure out a solution even if it is detrimental to the overall support experience.

Incentivized

We found Kerio Control to provide the most features and easiest management of all the solutions we looked at, while cost was not the lowest the value was by far the best when you considered all the factors, costs, and manhours involved in deployment and management.

Incentivized

While you can get the performance out of other products, pfSense offers the unique ability to put other services on the same device. Products such as Untagle's NG Firewall and SonicWall's TZ series offer cost effective options for firewall and VPN services, having incoming load balancing and connection proxies on the same device as the firewall offers extremely easy configuration and day to day management of network services

Incentivized

• Easy to use makes it easy to train, reducing employee time and IT staff costs.
• Statefull inspection and web filtering greatly reduce malware incursions.
• Fact it can run on standard PC hardware greatly reduces cost to implement and makes scaling much less expensive.

Incentivized

• Using pfSense has allowed us to build a professional network in our small office without needing a lot of proprietary hardware, saving thousands of dollars in IT infrastructure investment.
• The cost for using pfSense is free, so it's a great option for those who don't have a large IT budget
• pfSense utilizes all of the industry standard services to provide all of it's functionality, so support for service-level issues is readily available
• Because of how much work has been put into pfSense to make it rock solid and reliable, we're able to support our network with minimal IT staffing, saving us thousands of dollars/year in personnel alone.

Incentivized