pfSense vs. Venngage

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.

I find it great for personal use especially when you are a visual person. As an assistant that needs a lot of organizing, it's wonderful. It helped me a lot and I usually don't require a lot of features. I also find it great for accessibility stuff, I respect that since I have a relative who has special needs. I didn't really need that specifically, but it's nice to know it was considered.

• 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

• Extremely user-friendly: simple, easy-to-follow interface really made ramping up on the offering incredibly fast and painless.
• Variety of templates: Venngage has a HUGE assortment of templates ranging from corporate reports and business decks to more visually-engaging, "fun" content such as infographics, awesome charts, and highly customizable social graphics.
• Brand-alignment: we really appreciated the opportunity to tee up our brand guidelines and have those remain on the back-end and let us apply our style guide to multiple templates instantaneously.

Incentivized

• 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

• It's hard to lock graphics into place in Venngage once you create something.
• Layering is next to impossible. The feature is there but is very difficult to use and most times the user is better off copying the object over instead
• Unless you have a business account (we have a professional account- middle grade) you cannot sort and organize your infographics. This is messy and cumbersome to go through and the price difference between professional and business grade accounts was quite large.

Incentivized

I use Venngage for a new project 1-2 times per week... I could not see using another program at this point.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I find it very user friendly, straight to the point, and the minor issues I found wasn't really impacting on my role. So I think it would depend? but personally I find it perfect for me. There were lots of templates I could use, and they were very open to feedback and customer service was very accommodating.

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

Incentivized

I think that the attention that I get as a small business owner from Venngage is excellent. They quickly respond to questions and provide information that helps to resolve the issue that I am having.

Incentivized

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.

We prefer Canva but feel Venngage is easier for us. In comparison to Adobe, we prefer Venngage because of the ability to have everything in one system and not have to jump around.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• It was frustrating to be required to purchase a full month, not be able to download into PowerPoint and edit, and not be given a refund.