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pfSense provides excellent routing and firewalling capabilities
December 29, 2023

pfSense provides excellent routing and firewalling capabilities

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

pfSense Plus (formerly pfSense Enterprise)

Modules Used

  • SG-1100
  • SG-5100
  • XG-7100 1U

Overall Satisfaction with pfSense

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.
  • Site to Site VPN
  • VPN Client to Office connections
  • Firewall
  • Routing
  • IDS Ease of use
  • Layer 2 Filtering
  • Multidevice management from one interface
  • Allowed us to be more competitive both in features and in pricing with our competitor MSPs
  • Allowed us to eliminate extended downtimes due to equipment failure.
  • Grants us the ability to fully customize and/or audit the codebase.
Meraki has a unified management login for all devices, which is nice. It also has decent content filtering, both areas where pfSense is weaker.

Where pfSense far ouclasses Meraki is in the ease of use and the other width of features. These include features such as better VPN interoperability, non-subscription based pricing, auditability, not relying on the infrastructure of a third party, more transparency of what's actually going on, easier to deploy replacements if hardware fails. Additionally, the NAT management for pfSense seems to be a bit better, as you can NAT between any network segment and not just the LAN segments out the WAN interfaces.

Do you think pfSense delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with pfSense's feature set?

Yes

Did pfSense live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of pfSense go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy pfSense again?

Yes

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.

pfSense Feature Ratings

Firewall
6.8
Identification Technologies
2
Visualization Tools
7
Content Inspection
3
Policy-based Controls
10
Active Directory and LDAP
7
Firewall Management Console
9
Reporting and Logging
8
VPN
10
High Availability
10
Stateful Inspection
7
Proxy Server
2

Using pfSense

The interface is simple, has sane defaults, and is consistent throughout.
ProsCons
Like to use
Relatively simple
Easy to use
Well integrated
Consistent
Quick to learn
Convenient
Feel confident using
Familiar
None
  • Firewall configuration
  • OpenVPN and Client Exporting
  • Content Filtering
Yes - Anything I've needed to do, I've been able to do from the mobile interface, but I still prefer the desktop interface when possible.