Item: pfSense
Rating: 10
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with pfSense

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 and Cons

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

Return on Investment

Excluding problems not related to pfSense, we've had 100% runtime over the last 5 years thanks to our HA configuration.

Usability

pfSense can be a very elementary firewall but can also be as comples as you want, according your needs. I'd always reccomend a HA solution when used in a company and, for bigger companies, commercial license is recommended. It's also very adptable to everyone's needs.

Alternatives Considered

Fortinet FortiGate

FortiGate offers an extensive set of features including the Unified Threat Management and a lot of FortiGuard services . pfSense is extremely modular, probably because of its open source "flavour"m but relies on community support. Fortinet ROI depends on the reduced administrative effort and the pfSense ROI depends on the lowcost and adaptability to variuous needs.

Key Insights

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?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of pfSense go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy pfSense again?

Yes

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.

pfSense Feature Ratings

Comments

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pfSense as a company firewall

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