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pfSense

pfSense

Overview

What is pfSense?

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…

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Recent Reviews

pfSense

9 out of 10
January 17, 2024
Incentivized
pfSense is used to route internal development networks, either tagged or untagged, manage the ACLs between those networks, and forward …
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TrustRadius Insights

pfSense has proven to be a versatile and reliable network solution, addressing various use cases for organizations of different sizes and …
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Popular Features

View all 11 features
  • VPN (11)
    10.0
    100%
  • Policy-based Controls (11)
    10.0
    100%
  • Reporting and Logging (11)
    8.0
    80%
  • Content Inspection (11)
    4.1
    41%

Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Video Reviews

2 videos

pfSense Review: With Over 10 Years of Service, pfSense Proves To Be A Reliable Firewall For Business
02:15
User Benefits From Open Source Nature of pfSense When Limitations Are Solved By Others: User Review
03:33
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Pricing

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SG-1100

$179

On Premise
per appliance

SG-2100

$229

On Premise
per appliance

SG-3100

$399

On Premise
per appliance

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://www.netgate.com/pricing-pfsense…

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Product Demos

PFSense 2.4.4 with LCDproc on Broadband9 Firewall appliance! Tested with 100Mbit leased line

YouTube

Introduction of PFSense Open Source Firewall and Router

YouTube

pfSense installation and setup demo (VirtualBox)

YouTube

Building cloud firewall-router appliances for free: Installing Pfsense in Hyper-V

YouTube

pfSense Tutorial - How to enforce Google Safe Search using PfSense - Guide and Demo

YouTube

1. How to Install and Configure BGP in GNS3 using pfSense

YouTube
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Features

Firewall

A firewall is a filter that stands between a computer or computer network and the Internet. Each firewall can be programmed to keep specific traffic in or out

7.6
Avg 8.5
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Product Details

What is pfSense?

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 IPv4 and IPv6 support, and intrusion prevention. Within its VPN capabilities, it provides SSL encryption, automatic or custom routing, and multiple tunneling options. pfSense also supports optional clustering and load-balancing, along with proxying and content filtering services. The product can also monitor and report on network traffic.

pfSense Videos

Pfsense vs Ubiquiti - Which is better for you?
In this video, TrustRadius goes over the pricing, top features, and user sentiment of pfSense.

pfSense Technical Details

Deployment TypesOn-premise
Operating SystemsWindows
Mobile ApplicationNo
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(70)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

pfSense has proven to be a versatile and reliable network solution, addressing various use cases for organizations of different sizes and industries. Users have successfully managed multiple ISPs and performed load balancing, ensuring efficient internet connectivity and reducing downtime. The ability to quickly backup and restore configurations has been appreciated by customers, providing peace of mind and minimizing disruptions. The stability and ease of management have been particularly important for small IT teams, allowing them to efficiently handle network operations.

Many organizations rely on pfSense as their primary firewall, utilizing its features for load balancing, failover, and hosting software and services. The support for multi-WAN and load balancing at both the WAN and load distributing levels has been highly beneficial for users. pfSense has also been successfully used to establish multiple IPsec tunnels for site-to-site VPN connections, enabling secure communication between different locations.

The scalability, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness of pfSense have made it a great solution for small to medium-sized businesses. It can be easily customized and integrated into existing infrastructures, including the implementation of VLANs and time-based rules. The GUI and CLI versions of pfSense have streamlined management tasks, making it accessible to users with varying technical expertise.

Furthermore, the extensive online manual and community support have received praise from users, providing valuable resources for troubleshooting and guidance. The community-supported nature of pfSense ensures that it stays up-to-date with the latest security measures.

Overall, pfSense serves as a reliable network backbone, handling routing, VPN connections, security features, failover scenarios, and inter-VLAN routing. Its versatility eliminates the need for multiple servers in smaller environments while providing essential security functions. Users appreciate its basic security measures and routing features which make it a cost-effective solution for those with limited budgets. With its proven reliability and enterprise-grade features, pfSense continues to be a trusted choice for organizations seeking a powerful network solution.

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.

Inconvenient integration with modems: Several users have expressed frustration that integrating modem functionality into pfSense is not possible, which can be inconvenient for those looking for a more comprehensive solution.

Challenging web GUI setup and management: Non-expert users may find it challenging to set up and manage the web GUI, particularly when it comes to assigning WAN and LAN interfaces.

Limited API and scripting capabilities: Some reviewers have highlighted the lack of an API for making changes in pfSense. This limitation can be a hindrance in environments where frequent updates to firewall rules or HAProxy configs are required.

Users have made several recommendations based on their experiences with pfSense. The most common recommendations are:

  • Users recommend reading the documentation and taking official training for pfSense. This suggestion highlights the importance of familiarizing oneself with the product and its features. By investing time in understanding the documentation and receiving official training, users can maximize their proficiency in network administration using pfSense.

  • Users suggest making the switch to pfSense and using reliable hardware. This recommendation emphasizes the benefits of utilizing pfSense as a comprehensive solution for routing and firewall requirements in network administration. By switching to pfSense and ensuring the use of reliable hardware, users can optimize their network resource management.

  • Users advise doing test builds and hardening before going live with pfSense. This recommendation underscores the importance of thorough testing and securing the system before implementing it in a live environment. By conducting test builds and hardening processes, users can identify potential issues or vulnerabilities, ensuring a smoother transition to pfSense.

These recommendations reflect user opinions on how to effectively utilize pfSense for routing and firewall requirements while optimizing network resource management.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-24 of 24)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
January 17, 2024

pfSense

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Daniel Fisher | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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).
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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.
Mario Matinelli | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Reseller
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.
June 28, 2021

Review for pfSense

Pardeep Sharma | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
pfSense is mainly open source firewall but if you want enterprise level hardware firewall then you have to pay the money.. pfSense really very good firewall. We are using this from last 3 years..there are lots of features which helps us to fulfill our goals and protect from external cyber attacks
Pretty Varughese | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are using pfSense in our environment for routing & remote VPN feature. It provides a reliable security solution with a number of security features. pfSense provides customizable kernel solution & advanced routing features. We are using it across all the departments. It provides compliance security for CIS as well as for PCI-DSS System.
Chirag Deol | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are using [pfSense] for routing & security feature implementation on our infrastructure. It provides a custom kernel & based on FreeBSD open source solution that is easy to customize & integrate. We are using it across all the departments & implementation VLANs for allowing the specific data. It also provides a Geo-blocking feature & time-based rule feature that we are using as of now.
June 22, 2021

Pfsense review

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
[pfSense] is [a] combination of firewall and router features. This is very good product [compared] to others open source firewall. If you [lack a] budget for firewall then you should go with this firewall. [pfSense] provides you basic security as well as routing features. I [have been] working on this device [for the] last 20 months and [it] helped my client to achieve their goal with no security budget..
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
We use pfSense to protect and route network traffic for ourselves as well as our business clients. It provides a highly reliable network solution with a huge range of enterprise grade features. It has complex firewall rules to allow us to complete PCIDSS compliance for card payment terminals. It also allows for seamless failover of multiple WAN internet connections to ensure that our staff and customers are never without internet access.
James Freeman | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
pfSense is core to our network architecture, both for ourselves, and for our clients. Its robust appliance style architecture lends itself extremely well to all manner of edge firewall applications, whilst the x86 architecture means we can run it on just about anything from physical tin to virtual machines on a variety of hypervisors. It provides a solid feature set and its pluggable application architecture and a rich VPN server and client functionality means we are able to use it to create secure mesh networks across both the internet and private circuits to ensure our clients are always on, and always securely connected.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use pfSense on our campus as our primary firewall/internet gateway as well as DNS, DHCP, time, and VPN server/gateway. It also handles internal routing across our VLANs. The versatility/feature set is helpful as it avoids the need for running multiple other servers for a small-business environment.
Christian Shaheen | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Allan Leung | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Charles R. Coggins III | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Aaron Smith | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
germary zambrano | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
Victor Arana | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Jim Rubenstein | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Paolo Daniele | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
July 27, 2016

pfSense - Review

Rikia Kosaka | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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!
Jim Nitterauer | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.)
Richard Kiernan | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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.
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