pfSense Reviews and Ratings

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use pfSense for firewall role, VPN and IPSec, DHCP, and an additional IDS with Suricata addon. We migrated IPTables and Sonicwall firewall solutions to pfSense, and it acomplish all of our needs and more. It is very flexible, easy and intuitive to configurate. We have deployed it both as stand alone and high availability with cluster, and works like a charm.

Likelihood to Recommend

As a open source firewall solution, it is a very robust one. It has options for appliance or hardware installation. It handles very well a traffic of 500Mbps, with Suricata analising the traffic, and using very low hardware resources, and responding very fast and well. But if you need complianced or certificated solution, it may be not the best option.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I've used PFSense for home lab environments as well as small office environments. As far as a full-featured firewall, there are very few other competitors that can offer the same value today. For free, using the homelab license, you can perform many tasks that mimic an enterprise-grade firewall, such as setting up S2S VPN configurations, DHCP, and NAT. Plugs in well with Home Assistant and also serves as a good way to detect if someone or something has actually connected to the network.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I use pfSense as main router/firewall to manage our company multi WAN connections, internal VLANs, IPSec connections to our remote partner and SSL VPN connections for our roaming users. pfSense, actually two as we've a HA clustered environment, runs on a couple of VMs with enough virtual NIC and resources but with a very small footprint.

Likelihood to Recommend

pfSense is great in VPN and firewall management and overall reliability in a HA configuration. The foot print is really small even if CPUs (virtual in our case) and RMA must be tailored according to specific needs. Actually, we've always had a 100% run time, apart problems not related to pfSense. The IDS, snort, needs a lot of tuning and the rules are not so easy to administer.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I have been using pfSense of over 15 years and have been extremely happy with it. I have use CISCO routers, Fortigate, SonicWAll, Ubiquiti UniFi and others, and the pfSense CE edition has more features and is is much easier to use while providing EXCELLENT protection. I have 18 pfSense CE versions running now on virtual or my on SuperMicro hardware at my hone and my servers at the WOW colocation facility in Tampa, FL and recommend it to all of my clients. I have upgraded many of them to pfSense Pluss which is $129 and fully supported by the Netgate team. (support hours additional $) It has more reliable updates and code than the CE edition. I HIGHLY recommend it.

Likelihood to Recommend

Already described.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

pfSense is used in a high availability pair as the primary firewall/router/gateway of our environment. It is also used as the primary VPN remote access solution. pfSense is also providing ids/ips, traffic shaping, and handling all layer 3 needs. pfSense addresses the licensing problem that most other firewalls have today. pfSense, while recently requiring a license, is not a continuous licensing investment like competitors.

Likelihood to Recommend

pfSense is incredibly budget friendly and capable for organizations of all sizes. My specific scenario, working for a non-profit organization, requires budget consciences decisions without compromising security and function. pfSense has helped tremendously in accomplishing this. It specifically tackles advanced routing, static routing, remote access, intrusion prevention, in a single platform, mostly available for free.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use pfSense in redundant pairs to service large coworking spaces, and it’s proven reliable and secure for many years. It’s easy to configure, simple, and reliable. We’ve weathered a lot of different events that I’ve seen bring down other firewalls. We apply a significant number of filters to reduce malware C2 and still achieve excellent performance. At this point we’ve deployed these machines to a dozen locations globally and have come to trust it.

Likelihood to Recommend

We use pfSense both for public internet access as well as specialized perimeter enforcement. There are some NGFW features it lacks, but I’ve never encountered any NGFW that comes within orders of magnitude of pfSense's affordability.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

pfSense is used to route internal development networks, either tagged or untagged, manage the ACLs between those networks, and forward specific protocols and ports from the outside to a DMZ. pfSense has been deployed in a HA configuration and IDS/IPS has also been set up by using snort. Snort is also used to prioritize some traffic over others.

Likelihood to Recommend

IPS/IDS, sniffer appliance, router/firewall, and VPN appliance are all well suited. I would not use it as a caching proxy (squid) and rely on different products.

VPN manament and reliability is great either for roaming users or IPSec connections.

pfSense can also be used with snort providing good performances.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I use it as my primary firewall and router to manage my WAN and multiple LAN/VLANS for my home office. I have been able to use it at low cost, since I am running pfSense on a custom PC build with an extra 4 port NIC installed. It has allowed me to easily segment my home network for better security, as well as host need services (e.g. remote access over VPN).

Likelihood to Recommend

pfSense is great for homelab, home office, and small business deployments. Once you are able to justify their support package, support is very good. For my own use case, the software has been very reliable and updates were smooth.

For very large deployments, you will likely need to go with a larger and more expensive vendor requiring licensing.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use pfSense both for ourselves and for our clients as a perimeter firewall and router. We've implemented it as a virtual machine, physical equipment, and in failover clusters. The deployments include everything from apartment complexes with between 1500-4500 devices to financial institutions, to businesses.

We've needed a solution that is easily managed, secure by default, and offers a wide enough feature set to handle unique requirements.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are one of the only Authorised Netgate Partner in the UK offering access to the Netgate range of products as well as expert support and solutions for complex requirements. We sell Netgate appliances because they run pfSense® that we love and

trust. It is reliable and tested specifically on Netgate appliances. We

use pfSense® in all our projects and our pfSense® certified staff would

be excited to work together with you on your pfSense® project and to

help you support your pfSense® setup.

Likelihood to Recommend

pfSense is the most complete solution in terms of features included even though it currently lack of a centralised management interface. pfSense is the most secure System because it is open source. Its code can be reviewed by anyone so any bugs and especially back doors would not go unnoticed. When it comes to security transparency and openness has been proven to be the most effective model. Many large and well known names in the market have been caught several

times using poor security practices. The use of back door or poorly

written code was discovered when it was already too late due to the lack of transparency.