ThreatDown, powered by Malwarebytes vs. pfSense

I think Malwarebytes is the best anti-malware company. I think it is well-suited for any situation and any device. I think Malwarebytes does the best on Windows and on MacOS. Also, Malwarebytes is always improving, and you can tell they are a company that stays on top of cybersecurity trends. If you have a tight budget or looking for the cheapest solution, then Malwarebytes may not be the solution for you. To clarify, I don't think Malwarebytes is that much more expensive compared to its closest competitors.

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.

• Protects against malware - No matter how much training you give end users on social hacking, there is always a breach at some point.
• Protects against ransomware - Ransomware could spell disaster for a company...it could literally shut the doors for good.
• Centralized administration - Without a terrific centralized method to manage all the systems being protected, it would require an extra position just to maintain all endpoints.

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

• poor customer service
• dashboard says product is working EVEN THOUGH IT WAS NOT!
• slow response to concerns that should be easy to remedy
• creates baggage which caused certain computers and the network to run more slowly
• caused 3 computers on our network top have windows errors and network issues

• 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

When I first used the tool in my home systems MANY years ago, I wished for a Business version. I was once at a focus group for a major antivirus company, and one attendee’s feedback to “what could we do better?” was “buy out MalwareBytes and add it to your tool”. I’ve used the Business version since it first became available, and have continued to be a dedicated user through the many iterations and improvements

Incentivized

It simply works. It doesn't require the hand-holding and monitoring that some other solutions do. It's simple to deploy and maintain, and adding custom content such as Exceptions require minimal effort. I’ve had to add a few exceptions for internal-use, in-house-developed tools, but it’s quite simple to do so within the online interface

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

As I mentioned, we have only email support. Their phone support was very expensive. If we ever have any issues, we have to email them and wait for their response. In most cases, I have figured out the issue on my own. The software is very stable so we haven't used their support much.

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

I first implemented this more than 10 years ago, when it required an in-site setup with SQL Server (or SQL Express), and even that was pretty easy. With the move to centralized web management some treats ago, it’s become even easier to deploy

Incentivized

It's no contest. Cisco AMP, Umbrella and Endpoint use vast amounts of resources and provide little protection when compared with Malwarebytes. One client recently replaced Cisco with MWB and found over 7,300 vulnerabilities on 352 endpoints, including 120 listed as Critical and 7,180 listed as High, with CVE's dating back to 2008.

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.

• The ease of remediation has saved our IT team a number of hours manually installing, for example, the free version of Malwarebytes to remove infections, and then cleaning the machine up. Being able to centrally send commands to clean the device is much more efficient.
• The centralised management has also alerted us to infections on machines that we might not otherwise have known about, as the existing AV had not detected them, saving us potential data loss, or system damage.

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