pfSense

Score8.6 out of 10

82 Reviews and Ratings

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for pfSense are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

Intuitive User Interface: Users have consistently praised the intuitive and user-friendly interface of pfSense. Many reviewers have expressed that the well-thought-out web interface makes it easy to configure firewall rules and set up VPNs, allowing them to perform tasks quickly and efficiently.

Informative Dashboard: The extensive dashboard of pfSense has received widespread praise from users. Reviewers have mentioned that the traffic graphics on the dashboard are wonderful and provide all the necessary information at a glance, making it easy to monitor network activity and performance.

Low Hardware Requirements: Users appreciate that pfSense can run smoothly even on older PCs or router devices with lower-end specifications. This is seen as a significant advantage by many reviewers as it allows them to implement pfSense without the need for expensive hardware upgrades.

Reviews

30 Reviews

pfSense is a great and reliable firewall solution

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

September 11, 2025

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.

Pros

Geo location IP blocking
VPN with OpenVPN
IPSec
High availability and failover
Networkin simple roles

Cons

Graphs of usage
Alerts messaging
Updates deployment

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.

Luiz Eduardo Garcia

System Administrator in Information Technology at JET e-business (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

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Great product for the correct deployments.

Rating: 9 out of 10

June 19, 2025

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.

Pros

Firewall configurations.
S2S Azure VPN Connection.
Plugins
Certificate Authority.
HomeAssistant Integration.

Cons

DHCP

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.

Pablo Mojica

Systems Administrator in Information Technology at Ellucian (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

8 years of experience

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pfSense as a company firewall

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

May 27, 2025

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.

Pros

VPN access either IPSec or SSL for the roaming users
Firewall with stateful packet inspection
NAT
HA setup

Cons

IDS (snort)
Affordable support for small companies

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.

Verified User

Employee in Information Technology (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

15 years of experience

pfSense is Best of Breed and Least Expensive

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

April 24, 2025

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.

Pros

Fully configurable custom, automated or combines outbound NAT
Floating rules that are applied before all others
Very easy to GUI
Logs for everything easily viewable in GUI
Advanced or Wizard configuration for almost everything

Cons

Some third party packages may not work with current version.

Likelihood to Recommend

Already described.

Jerry Riggin

President in Professional Services at J. Riggin & Associates, Inc. (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

15 years of experience

View profile

pfSense is a great bang for the buck

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

April 11, 2025

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.

Pros

routing/firewall
SSL VPN
Flexible

Cons

VPN
Cloud Management
Missing zone based rules and next gen firewall features
Little active directory integration
No Entra ID integration

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.

Verified User

Director in Information Technology (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

15 years of experience

Great routerfirewall platform

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

April 9, 2025

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.

Pros

Ease of configuration
Redundancy
Performance
Low cost

Cons

Multi-instance management
Authentication

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.

Ansley Barnes

Lead Network Engineer in Information Technology at CIC (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

12 years of experience

pfSense

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

January 17, 2024

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.

Pros

Filtering and NAT forwarding.
Routing
IDS/IPS
VPN

Cons

IDS/IPS requires tuning and is sometimes too aggressive.
Filtering acts only by specifying ips. Even if less performing and secure, allowing the user also to insert DNS names would be a nice option.

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.

Verified User

Team Lead in Information Technology (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

15 years of experience

pfSense great for home offices

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

January 2, 2024

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).

Pros

Firewall rule management
Remote access over VPN
NAT for needed services
HAproxy for reverse proxy hosting

Cons

Communication regarding product roadmap
Affordable support for smaller companies/users

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.

Daniel Fisher

Manager, Power Systems Engineering in Engineering at Home Office (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

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pfSense provides excellent routing and firewalling capabilities

Rating: 10 out of 10

December 29, 2023

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.

Pros

Site to Site VPN
VPN Client to Office connections
Firewall
Routing

Cons

IDS Ease of use
Layer 2 Filtering
Multidevice management from one interface

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.

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

15 years of experience

pfSense - Security guaranteed by transparency

Rating: 10 out of 10

November 11, 2021

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.

Pros

Firewall
VPN
IDS/IPS

Cons

Centralised management interface
Web Filters

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.

Mario Matinelli

Director in Information Technology at IT AND GENERAL (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

Reseller

7 years of experience

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