pfSense Reviews

pfSense is currently the backbone of our company's network. We have five of them deployed handling VPN and routing. One is on a Dell R210II in the office handling the inter-vlan 10Gbps routing and 3 WAN failover. The second is a Hyper-V VM in our colo facility handling the NATing and forwarding there. The third is a Lenovo SFF PC in an office far away that we can selectively route through for geo purposes. The forth is a VM in a datacenter, again, just to selectively route out. The fifth is acting as a VPN server for the other four to connect to and route between each other as well as for clients outside the office to connect to.

We use pfSense across several countries office such as Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai & Beijing and served over 150 staff. We use pfSense to build site-to-site VPN to link up our office network. pfSense is quite stable and easy to manage that is very important because our IT teams are small. Handled over 4 years, pfSense has not given me any big issue so I will recommend it to my friends.

The company I currently work for uses pfSense mainly for load balancing and also as a firewall. We have a lot of cloud customers and this software comes in real handy to ensure that if one of our services go down our customers will not experience any outages as pfSense will automatically make our second connection the primary one. I am currently just getting into the system administrator role and I am working under our current sysadmin who is going into development so I have been trying to learn a lot of this software on the fly.

One of the coolest features of pfSense for someone like me who is learning on the fly is the fact it has a GUI version as well as the CLI version. So you can manage your pfSense instances very easily by using drop-down menus.

I can see this being really useful for small to medium size businesses. The software is very scalable and very flexible. It is also open source so there is not a bunch of licenses to purchase. There are a bunch of addon/packages you can install to add features and they also have "commercial" packages which do cost money but can add features some of the really expensive solutions have.

The support for pfSense is pretty great too - they have a huge online manual you can look things up in and the forums/community support is incredible. I had a question a long while back and I remember having an answer just a couple of hours after I asked it. pfSense runs on FreeBSD - The install was straight forward and once it was installed it is really easy to set up so you don't need to know a bunch of commands. The interface is pretty much "press: 1 to set this up."

I would highly recommend giving this software a try even for personal use. I have been considering trying to make a pfSense based router for my own home use.

We use pfSense as our primary firewalls on two fiber connections into our organization. We also utilize pfSense for load balancing and fail over of incoming requests for our software and service hosting.

We needed something easy to setup and manage on a day to day basis that didn't come with expensive fees or recurring costs to reduce our financial exposure. As time marches on, we've definitely made the best choice in choosing pfSense as it fits our needs extremely well.

pfSense is being used as the primary edge firewall for the internet connection. As many hardware-based firewalls/routers do not receive timely security updates, it was time to implement something with more granular control over updates and patches. pfSense has exceeded expectations in terms of flexibility. We are also using the Snort add-on to perform IDS/IPS functionality.

pfSense is used as our firewall, VPN server, DNS forwarder, and NTP server. We also have two other pfSense devices installed at remote locations to provide VPN connections to our headquarters.

I used PfSense mainly as a firewall and an OpenVPN solution company-wide. It's very easy to manage and has a lot of features. I've also used Pfsense to load balance multiple internet connections as well as segregate multiple VLAN networks. It's been very reliable and is a great system overall.

Pfsense is our layer 2 software firewall that allows us a better control over the overrides for the internet navigation; give us an accurate integration with a ton of plugins you can build your on appliance using a decent desktop; to manage with ease two ISPs, make the load balancing, set the VPN for your external users, reduce the downtime's, backup your config, and restore it in matter of seconds. Pfsense work together with the IPS sensor from the basic to the hard case. It's a 10 in our organization.

In my company we also manage a network of large numbers of users who need a stable server on which they can count at the time of sending a request. This software has helped me to have a Network Address Translation with which I get security in my sub network such that at the time of an attack, it can not reach our servers. It also has helped me to be able to place some services on the network through the property of the server DNS. It also offers the VPN connection so that I can connect from anywhere to check how my services are on the network

We are a small business, so we use pfSense to manage our office network.

I support ~15 network users, which represent something more like 30-40 devices (after notebooks, mobile phones, tablets, etc are accounted for).

pfSense is used as the primary router to our internet connection, as well as our VPN connect endpoint, local DNS resolution, and internet connection failover. Having all of these services bundled in one powerful, well supported, and robust software configuration platform saves a ton of time and makes managing our internal office network very easy.

Pfsense is used in our whole organization. Our main firewall has been made by using Pfsense. Recently we've bought two appliances with pfsense preinstalled. Pfsense is crucial for our enviroment because we're a small company so we cannot buy expensive firewall. After some research and local tests, we've decided to use pfsense.

I first learned of PFSense when searching for custom routers. Started from DD-WRT among other products such as zeroshell and pfSense. Some requirements were Dual WAN redundancy, failover and load balancing. In my particular experience I have setup/migrated pfSense in a Dual WAN redundant setup. pfSense was perfect as you can scrape up any old computer with 3 NICS (WAN1, OPT1, LAN). The setup is rather easy. If you are familiar with the setup of Linux, it should be a breeze. You setup a bootable USB stick and boot to USB and install pfSense. The initial setup of the NICs is also easy but you do need some networking experience. Once you get the initial setup completed and connected to the Web UI, you can pretty much go through each option and set to your needs.

pfSense supports Multiwan, load balancing both at the WAN level and load distributing level, VPN (IPSEC, OPENVPN), among many other features. I have a client who is using pfSense with Multi-Wan, three separate ipsec tunnels (Datacenter to HQ, HQ to Azure, HQ to another cloud provider). We have basic ACLs rules in place and host a number of servers behind the pfSense. We do not use the load balancing as pfSense is used in Headquarters where we do not host many services that require load balancing behind the router. In anycase for an office it works out well as my client has intermittent ISP issues so the mult-wan comes in really handy.

We've had hardware failures where I simply setup a new pfSense box and copied the configs over and was up and running in no time.

I would highly recommend pfSense for small to medium size businesses, maybe even large but I have yet to test loads at such high scales. I also have not setup pfSense in a production environment with high load so I cannot comment on that part. Overall, I think pfSense is great! I also used pfSense in a VMware environment for test labs and that worked out great fulfilling all my needs as well!

It's a firewall that will compete with any "enterprise" firewall solution and often kicks the paid-for competition into touch. The fact that it is community supported is a big advantage as it is always at the cutting edge of security and support. It's a firewall for technologists first but once installed even the non-technically minded can take advantage of an outstanding network security solution. The latest version of pfSense provides a much improved GUI that will appeal to the less technically minded but it still retains the same level of rich functionality.

pfSense is used as a security appliance for numerous applications and addresses the problems it was designed to address. (Providing specifics relating to the implementation of security in a public forum is a really bad idea. Asking people to disclose details relating to the deployment of security devices on the network is a really bad idea.)