LoopNet vs. pfSense vs. Trulia

LoopNet is well suited for many different industries. Obviously it is great for real estate professionals or real estate buyers when researching properties that are available or may become available. The history of the properties provided is excellent and provides details that would be very helpful to the real estate industry. Facility Service companies are also well suited for the use of LoopNet. With the property information it provides it makes it much easier to get to the decision-makers when selling facility services or products. LoopNet may be less appropriate for product sales as these providers may need to be more connected with the occupants of the properties more than the owners.

Incentivized

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.

• Immediate alerts can be set up for new listings that meet your criteria
• You can map an area you are interested in searching
• The report writing has some decent functionality
• You can email prospects about your listing

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

• LoopNet needs to do a better job of sifting through to delete old and stale listings. These listings are inaccurate and clutter a report to lower its credibility.
• I am not a fan of the reporting. As a broker, I can make sense of the reports but the public is not always as savvy.

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

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

LoopNet/CoStar representatives are ready to help and willing to come out to the office to give presentations or meet with the team at any time. They are a valuable resource when you are trying to utilize the program to its fullest advantage.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

LoopNet is the most well known, with the widest audience. This is why I selected it. But, they cannot get the simplest of details correct for the purpose of advertising the listings I have for sale. When they can't get even a unit count correct, why bother? Not to mention that getting those sorts of core details wrong is actually damaging to the marketing efforts.

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.

• Time saved in researching owners has helped our sales and ops teams greatly.
• The ability to research properties from the computer in lieu of in-person is very helpful.
• One person can research as many properties as a team of people in the field in a much quicker time frame.

Incentivized

• 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