Item: pfSense
Rating: 9
Author: Richard Kiernan

Overall Satisfaction with pfSense

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Easy and quick to change firewall rules - no painful re-loads or reboots (!) like some firewall solutions
VPN support is excellent and so fast as hardware acceleration is supported
Large set of free add-on tools
Multiple hardware platforms supported

Cons

Quality of service and traffic shaping setup could be better but the answers are usually on the pfSense forums if you look
Non-technically minded will lose patience but it's designed to be a fully-fledged firewall so it's not surprising

Return on Investment

It's free
It doesn't go wrong

Alternatives Considered

pfSense was chosen due to its excellent community support and forums

Other Software Used

Ubuntu OpenStack, Visual Studio Test Professional, Microsoft SQL Server

Likelihood to Recommend

pfSense may be deemed too risky an investment for larger organisations as their perceptions that they need to purchase an "enterprise appliance" will carry more gravitas with a CTO or IT head but it's important that potential users understand that most firewall solutions are built off the same Unix derived core code and as such you're paying over the odds for the name not better technology.

Comments

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It's free - what's not to like!