NETGEAR Ethernet Switches vs. pfSense

NETGEAR Ethernet Switches

NETGEAR Ethernet Switches

17 Reviews and Ratings

pfSense

pfSense

82 Reviews and Ratings

Overview
Product	Rating	Most Used By	Product Summary	Starting Price
NETGEAR Ethernet Switches	Score 9.0 out of 10	N/A	NETGEAR offers Ethernet Switches.	N/A
pfSense	Score 8.5 out of 10	N/A	pfSense 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

NETGEAR Ethernet Switches

pfSense

Editions & Modules

No answers on this topic

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
NETGEAR Ethernet Switches	pfSense
Free Trial
No	No
Free/Freemium Version
No	No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No	No

Entry-level Setup Fee

No setup fee

No setup fee

Additional Details

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More Pricing Information

Community Pulse
	NETGEAR Ethernet Switches	pfSense
Considered Both Products	NETGEAR Ethernet Switches Verified User Anonymous Chose NETGEAR Ethernet Switches Many different brands have their pros and cons; it depends on the use case and the budget constraints of the project, and also the location. Determining the scope of the project and all the variables is crucial when evaluating which product to use and where. There is so much … Incentivized Helpful? Brian Cook Information Security Officer Chose NETGEAR Ethernet Switches While the Ubiquiti are much easier to manage remotely through their cloud controllers, the Netgear is much more reliable in harsh environments than the other simple switches we use, as they seem less susceptive to high temperatures and humidity. (TP-Link and Zycel are the other … Incentivized Helpful? Kevin Ray Director Of Information Technology Chose NETGEAR Ethernet Switches Better quality and management features than Linksys devices and much cheaper than Aruba. Incentivized Helpful? MG Matthew Goodhall Infrastructure consultant Chose NETGEAR Ethernet Switches We made use of the NETGEAR switches, as we did not need ongoing support for the service as required by Cisco and Unifi at the time. Other benefits were the cost against the Cisco switches and the reliability against unifi Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose NETGEAR Ethernet Switches Cisco 350X Series Stackable Managed Switches Incentivized Helpful? Steve Davis Network Engineer Chose NETGEAR Ethernet Switches Netgear stacks up fairly well against Linksys in terms of the SOHO switches. Easy to install, clean look, and solid functionality. Incentivized Helpful?	pfSense Luiz Eduardo Garcia System Administrator 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 Helpful? Pablo Mojica Systems Administrator Chose pfSense PFSense is not a fully featured and supported enterprise-grade solution; however, it does offer a lot of similar functionality at a fraction of the cost for more minor requirements. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose pfSense Fortigate offers an extensive set of features including the Unified Threat Management and a lot of FortiGuard services . pfSense is extremely modular, probably because of its open source "flavour"m but relies on community support. Fortinet ROI depends on the reduced … Incentivized Helpful? Jerry Riggin President Chose pfSense Cisco is too complex to configure unless you are a security guru. Seme with Fortinet Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose pfSense pfSense always wins in the licensing realm. It requires little or no licensing to run and run forever. No ids/ips licensing, no advanced feature license, no remote access licensing. Download the community edition or buy the Netgate hardware and you are set going forward. There … Incentivized Helpful? AB Ansley Barnes Lead Network Engineer Chose pfSense PfSense beats all other solutions at its price point, hands-down. You can get more features with far less performance, or same performance for much higher cost. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose pfSense pfSense does almost all what the other brands do and the CE Edition is free even if complete. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose pfSense 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 … Incentivized Helpful? Mario Matinelli Director Chose pfSense Overall, pfSense is the most complete solution in terms of features included even though it currently lack of a centralised management interface.The Ubiquiti firewall offering is often appealing being well integrated within the Ubiquiti dashboard and it is often a solution of … Incentivized Helpful? Pretty Varughese IT Executive Chose pfSense We were using Sophos XG Firewall in our environment before but we need a product that is customizable & provides low cost high security features. pfSense provided us high security features with customizable options as it's kernel is based on freeBSD. Incentivized Helpful? Chirag Deol Chief Marketing Officer Chose pfSense We were using Sophos XG firewall in our environment but when it comes to cost it's more expensive with limited features. After using [pfSense] we are getting more security features at less cost. After pfSense provides a bundle of security features such as anti-spamming, … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose pfSense pfSense offers more options and scales very easily. Incentivized Helpful? James Freeman IT Consultant Chose pfSense pfSense is just a more flexible, lower-cost solution—it can be installed (if you wish) on just about any x86 hardware or even virtual machines - the community edition is free and so enables rapid prototyping and low-cost prototyping and lab build out—something that isn't … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous 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 Helpful? Christian Shaheen Owner Chose pfSense pfSense itself is free and can be installed on just about any hardware so from a hardware cost perspective it can beat out anybody. In terms of features it's above many pro-sumer/small business solutions like Ubiquiti. It can't really stand against high-end gear like Cisco but … Incentivized Helpful? Allan Leung IT & T Manager Chose pfSense First of all, I don't need to be a Cisco professional to manage VPN, load balance, multiple WAN/LAN, Firewall and etc. pfSense has an easy-to-use web interface and I can do everything and add packaged add-on services. Moreover, for Small & Medium Enterprise, IT budget is … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose pfSense Pfsense seemed to always be cheaper and just as good as its competitors. Incentivized Helpful? Jay Moore CIO Chose pfSense I have not seen a single thing that these other products do that pfSense does not. In fact, the performance/throughput of pfSense is better in my opinion. Incentivized Helpful? Aaron Smith Information Technology Manager Chose pfSense 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 … Incentivized Helpful? germary zambrano jefe del departamento de informatica Chose pfSense pfSense is a new and innovative platform that has learned from the errors of older systems, which helps it cover the needs that aren't covered by Smoothwall. Incentivized Helpful? Jim Rubenstein Chief Technology Officer Chose pfSense Before pfSense we were using consumer and small business rated network appliances from Linksys, Cisco, Buffalo and Netgear. We were replacing them on average of every 6-12 months because they'd fail or would offer poor wifi availability. Switching to pfSense allowed us to use … Incentivized Helpful? Victor Arana IT Manager Chose pfSense It's an open source solution can support from 50 to 700 user without sweating and with the half of the standard bundle investment that will take to deploy a Fortigate UTM, or a Cisco ASA, also a Sophos UTM that are quite remarkable units but to pFSense saves you money and will … Incentivized Helpful? Paolo Daniele Senior Network Engineer Chose pfSense Real competition was between Pfsense and OpnSense that integrates first the bootstrap Twitter framework. But with OpSense there are configurations that create some problems with a specific client (we've experienced that by creating an IPSec tunnel both with OpSense and … Incentivized Helpful? Rikia Kosaka Senior Systems Engineer Chose pfSense I've used a number of routers like Cisco, Sonicwall, Juniper, Home based routers, etc. pfSense is like most routers but with the benefit of load balancing and multi-wan. Well many support multi-wan but load balancing is usually a separate device like an BIGiP F5 or Cisco CSS. Incentivized Helpful? Jim Nitterauer Senior Systems Administrator Chose pfSense Neither of the Cisco devices are designed to compete. pfSense does tons more. Incentivized Helpful?

Features

NETGEAR Ethernet Switches

pfSense

Firewall

Comparison of Firewall features of Product A and Product B
	NETGEAR Ethernet Switches - Ratings	pfSense 8.9 Ratings 3% above category average
Identification Technologies	00 Ratings	8.70 Ratings
Visualization Tools	00 Ratings	8.70 Ratings
Content Inspection	00 Ratings	9.20 Ratings
Policy-based Controls	00 Ratings	8.60 Ratings
Active Directory and LDAP	00 Ratings	7.70 Ratings
Firewall Management Console	00 Ratings	9.50 Ratings
Reporting and Logging	00 Ratings	8.40 Ratings
VPN	00 Ratings	9.10 Ratings
High Availability	00 Ratings	9.40 Ratings
Stateful Inspection	00 Ratings	10.00 Ratings
Proxy Server	00 Ratings	8.30 Ratings

Best Alternatives
	NETGEAR Ethernet Switches	pfSense
Small Businesses	No answers on this topic	Sophos UTM Score 8.5 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies	Extreme Networks Wired Access - Switches Score 9.0 out of 10	Quantum Firewalls and Security Gateways Score 9.1 out of 10
Enterprises	Cisco Ethernet Switches Score 9.1 out of 10	Palo Alto Networks Virtualized Next-Generation Firewalls - VM Series Score 9.1 out of 10
All Alternatives	View all alternatives	View all alternatives

User Ratings
	NETGEAR Ethernet Switches	pfSense
Likelihood to Recommend	8.5 (0 ratings)	9.3 (0 ratings)
Usability	- (0 ratings)	9.7 (0 ratings)
Support Rating	- (0 ratings)	10.0 (0 ratings)

User Testimonials
	NETGEAR Ethernet Switches	pfSense
Likelihood to Recommend	We have had a multitude of different back-end network switch equipment and the Netgear switches always are compatible in the traffic pattern and packet transmission with the back-end gear. Kevin Ray Director Of Information Technology Read full review	pfSense is incredibly budget friendly and capable for organizations of all sizes. My specific scenario, working for a non-profit organization, requires budget consciences decisions without compromising security and function. pfSense has helped tremendously in accomplishing this. It specifically tackles advanced routing, static routing, remote access, intrusion prevention, in a single platform, mostly available for free. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Pros	Reliable in nonoptimal environments such as those that are not climate controlled. Easy to set up and use. Solid mounting options. Incentivized Brian Cook Information Security Officer Read full review	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 Allan Leung IT & T Manager Read full review
Cons	Better advertisement about advanced enterprise features. My experience is with smaller switches and not with the fully managed switches. Additional management tools to monitor multiple switches in the environment. Similar to Cisco Network Assistant. Incentivized Steve Davis Network Engineer Read full review	There is no API for making changes. This can be a hindrance in environments where auto-deploying something needs firewall rules or HAProxy configs updated. Since all settings are stored in an XML file and then configs are generated from that, even manually updating config files cannot be done. Beware that some network cards can have issues. pfSense is based on FreeBSD, so it's best to look on their compatibility list before deploying. Incentivized Aaron Smith Information Technology Manager Read full review
Usability	No answers on this topic	pfSense can be a very elementary firewall but can also be as comples as you want, according your needs. I'd always reccomend a HA solution when used in a company and, for bigger companies, commercial license is recommended. It's also very adptable to everyone's needs. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Support Rating	No answers on this topic	pfSense+ basic provides "As Available" email support. pfSense+ Pro offers 24 hr turn around email support. pfSense+ Enterprise offers 24/7 phone support. Incentivized Jerry Riggin President Read full review
Alternatives Considered	Many different brands have their pros and cons; it depends on the use case and the budget constraints of the project, and also the location. Determining the scope of the project and all the variables is crucial when evaluating which product to use and where. There is so much competition in this sector, and you make the best decision based on crunching all the data. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	PFSense is not a fully featured and supported enterprise-grade solution; however, it does offer a lot of similar functionality at a fraction of the cost for more minor requirements. Pablo Mojica Systems Administrator Read full review
Return on Investment	Rarely need to reboot or troubleshoot the SOHO switches. Low cost for the functionality. For example, 8 port GB switches for $20 is a no brainer for a home environment that doesn't need vlans or more enterprise type features. No negative impact on any environment I am aware of, however have not tested in a larger environment with multiple switches. Incentivized Steve Davis Network Engineer Read full review	pfSense has only had positive impacts on our company. We are not a huge company so not having to buy licenses to get all these features have been excellent. I was not around when our current sysadmin decided to use pfSense, but I am assuming from day one it was probably a 100% return on investment since it does everything we need it to and it was open source software. Incentivized Charles R. Coggins III Technical Support Specialist Read full review
ScreenShots