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
SonicWall VPN Clients
Score 9.2 out of 10
N/A
The SonicWall VPN Clients present a number of options for secure private access to enterprise network assets.
N/A
Pricing
pfSense
SonicWall VPN Clients
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
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Offerings
Pricing Offerings
pfSense
SonicWall VPN Clients
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
pfSense
SonicWall VPN Clients
Considered Both Products
pfSense
Verified User
Administrator
Chose pfSense
Pfsense seemed to always be cheaper and just as good as its competitors.
For fast-growing or SME companies, pfSense is quite suitable because pfSense already had many advanced features such as VPN and multiple WAN / LAN. As a result, we just need to pay for expensive router frequently to upgrade our infrastructure.
If your organization has a full-time IT department or support staff, SonicWall VPN Clients might be a good fit. Configuration can be challenging if you're a small business office manager who HAPPENS to take care of IT (as in my case). Still, once the SonicWall VPN Clients is configured, it works pretty well and at minimal ongoing cost. We opted for extended support from the manufacturer just in case we run into issues that we can't address internally.
pfSense is an excellent firewall - It logs all of your traffic. It has packages you can install to snort bad traffic.
pfSense has a tool called "p0f" which allows you to see what type of OS is trying to connect to you. You can filter these results and you can also block a specific OS from connecting to you.
pfSense is an excellent load-balancer: (Multi-WAN and Server Load Balancing) The fail-over/aggregation works very well. This is perfect if your business uses multiple ISP's to ensure your customers are always able to access their data. Also helps with bandwidth distribution as well.
VPN's - I am not entirely sure if this package was free with pfSense, but it does offer the ability to use OpenVPN which is what I am familiar with.
They also have IPsec in the settings as well, but I am not familiar with that enough to go into any detail with it.
As I mentioned I do use OpenVPN the only thing I don't care for with it is I can create OpenVPN configs for each user I want to be able to VPN into the network and I assumed each one would be "unique" but this does not seem to be the case. I could be doing it wrong, but if I create a config for a specific employee I would expect only that employee should be able to use that config, but I have been able to login to everyone that I made using my credentials.
I mentioned earlier that pfSense had a GUI.
I personally really think it is cool because it has a bunch of reporting graphs for monitoring your networks. I think when I become the full-time admin at the company I am going to try to talk them into getting me a TV I can mount on the wall and display all the graphs and real-time info pfSense shows so I can monitor what is going on with the network(s) at all times. Plus I think it would look rad.
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.
Phone support has been very reliable and useful, but there have been times when better support documentation would have made that call unnecessary. I like to tackle problems internally if I can, as it tends to save time and usually money. The SonicWall VPN Clients system seems to be pretty locked down as far as being accessible to self-manage.
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 professional grade switches and wifi access points, offloading all of the services that the consumer grade products took care of, onto pfSense (DHCP, DNS, routing, firewall, VPN, etc).
We started the process of vetting Norton VPN, but since it wasn't available from our preferred vendor, we ended up going with SonicWall VPN Clients by default.
Moving to a FWaaS solution installed on a decent computer the initial investment was moderate to cover 50 to 250 users, but still being cheaper that a Fortinet, Cisco ASA, or a Sophos UTM.
Paying only for support can be a double edge knife, cause you need to identify what's the goal of the request, or your drown into a an endless list of requirements.
To stay in the top with the half of a regular investment pFSense gives a wide variety of plugins that will give you a deep knowledge of your security flaws and strong points.
ROI is difficult to determine because of the minimal initial cost; that said, now that we've experienced the benefits of having secure VPN access, we couldn't imagine not having it.
Users have much greater flexibility now that specific legacy systems are accessible from places other than the office.
