pfSense

pfSense

69 Reviews and Ratings

Overview
Product	Rating	Most Used By	Product Summary	Starting Price
pfSense	Score 9.2 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

pfSense

Editions & Modules

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
pfSense
Free Trial
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No

Entry-level Setup Fee

No setup fee

Additional Details

—

More Pricing Information

Community Pulse
	pfSense
Considered Both Products	pfSense Verified User Engineer 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 … 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 … 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 Technician 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 Engineer 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 Administrator 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? 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? 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? 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? Richard Kiernan CTO and co founder Chose pfSense pfSense was chosen due to its excellent community support and forums Helpful?
Top Pros	Pro Load balancing Pro Firewall rules Pro Set up
Top Cons	Minus Bit complicated Minus Less documentation Minus Documentation available

Features

pfSense

Firewall

Comparison of Firewall features of Product A and Product B
	pfSense 7.6 11 Ratings 11% below category average
Identification Technologies	5.010 Ratings
Visualization Tools	7.08 Ratings
Content Inspection	4.111 Ratings
Policy-based Controls	10.011 Ratings
Active Directory and LDAP	7.09 Ratings
Firewall Management Console	9.510 Ratings
Reporting and Logging	8.011 Ratings
VPN	10.011 Ratings
High Availability	10.011 Ratings
Stateful Inspection	7.011 Ratings
Proxy Server	6.011 Ratings

Best Alternatives
	pfSense
Small Businesses	Sophos UTM Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies	Next-Generation Firewalls - PA Series Score 9.3 out of 10
Enterprises	Next-Generation Firewalls - PA Series Score 9.3 out of 10
All Alternatives	View all alternatives

User Ratings
	pfSense
Likelihood to Recommend	9.7 (24 ratings)
Usability	10.0 (1 ratings)

User Testimonials
	pfSense
Likelihood to Recommend	Netgate (Rubicon Communications, LLC) 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. Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Pros	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 Allan Leung IT & T Manager Read full review
Cons	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 Charles R. Coggins III Technical Support Specialist Read full review
Usability	Netgate (Rubicon Communications, LLC) The interface is simple, has sane defaults, and is consistent throughout. Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Alternatives Considered	Netgate (Rubicon Communications, LLC) 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 Aaron Smith Information Technology Manager Read full review
Return on Investment	Netgate (Rubicon Communications, LLC) 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 Jim Rubenstein Chief Technology Officer Read full review
ScreenShots