pfSense vs. SonicWall Secure Mobile Access (SMA)

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.

SonicWall Secure Mobile Access (SMA) is well suited as a solution for VPN on your phone. It allows our agency's employees to access our data and system from almost any device at any time. SonicWall Secure Mobile Access (SMA) is less appropriate if you need to implement the product in a very short time frame, as it took longer than expected for rollout to staff.

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• 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.

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• Secure remote access
• Control what access users can have
• Protect from harmful sites and downloads

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• 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.

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• SMA is limited to only SSL VPN , it should have support for hybrid VPN (SSL + IPSEC)
• There are different specs and features for Enterprise and SMB. Features should be same for all devices.
• It does not have URL filtering, content filtering, AV/IPS and Threat Prevention features. For achieving the same, we need to deploy another product like firewall or proxy.

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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.

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

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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.

Both Citrix Gateway and Sonic Secure Mobile Access are great for providing your workers with the ability to work remotely during the pandemic to access their office network. Both have secure networks and are stable systems to use. They both perform well for employees and provide helpful customer tech support when needed.

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• 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.

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• Security incidents went down by about 30%.
• With the new world of hybrid work, this SMA functions well and is a necessity.
• We've had a few issues with patches breaking functions.

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