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.
Read full review Hewlett Packard Enterprise
This is well suited when you need to deploy a virtual router to provide SD-WAN services across multiple sites. This works great for small businesses since they added firewall services. The price and feature set are also great for mid-sized enterprises due to the ability to manage multiple appliances with templates, central reporting, and ability to provide high availability of the appliances with VRRP.
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. Read full review Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Great support Software based, not a hardware company Easy to get going Great charts and meta data about traffic 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. Read full review Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Managing more and more routers can add complexity with templates. Documentation around internal routing protocol they use is confusing. Boost add-on was oversold by pre-sales team and not helpful during testing. Read full review Usability Netgate (Rubicon Communications, LLC)
The interface is simple, has sane defaults, and is consistent throughout.
Read full review Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Support Rating Netgate (Rubicon Communications, LLC)
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Support is great and easy to work with. They have local engineers that can help design and walk you through implementations. The engineers are generally committed to your success and very helpful in training. Multiple times we have worked with engineers to help us implement OSPF across sites as well as VRRP to provide high failover options.
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
Read full review Hewlett Packard Enterprise
We currently have almost all Cisco Meraki and would have loved to keep the product portfolio the same. Silver Peak was far cheaper and offered far more features. A lot of our evaluation showed that NGFW offers SD-WAN but it is not a full-featured deployment. Silver Peak is by and large better at being able to use both links at once, offer failover, QoS, and central reporting.
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. Read full review Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Able to get rid of MPLS No more router hardware costs Able to use both WAN links instead of one being only failover Read full review ScreenShots