pfSense is a great and reliable firewall solution
September 11, 2025

pfSense is a great and reliable firewall solution

Luiz Eduardo Garcia | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

pfSense Community Edition (open source)

Overall Satisfaction with pfSense

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
  • Positive, implementation
  • Positive, administration and management
  • Positive, high availability
  • Positive, applications
  • Negative, compliance
The graphical user interface is very light, intuintive and easy to understand and operate. It has a customisable dashboard, with a lot of options to display, in graphical or status information. The command line prompt, also offers management commands to manage it's operation, with a helpfull instructions of how to use then. It's very easy to deploy from zero.
Both products listed above, are very great solutions, but payed ones. If you are looking for open source firewall solution, pfSense is the one. Based on FreeBSD, it has strong security features and is very easy to deploy, configure and manage. pfSense also plays network simple roles, such as DHCP, web filtering, client VPN, but also more complex scenarios like IDS and IPSec. It is very reliable and low hardware ressources consuption.

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

Grafana, Graylog, Fortinet FortiGate, Azion, Cloudflare, NGINX, Kong Gateway Community (Open Source)
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.

pfSense Feature Ratings

Firewall
9.5
Identification Technologies
8
Visualization Tools
9
Content Inspection
10
Policy-based Controls
10
Active Directory and LDAP
10
Firewall Management Console
10
Reporting and Logging
8
VPN
10
High Availability
10
Stateful Inspection
10
Proxy Server
9

Using pfSense

4 - Security Analyst, responsable for administration and management; Infrastructure Analyst, read-only role, log consultation, system resourses uses; System Administrator same as Infrastructure Analyst, but with some write permitions for nat or security rules.
2 - Security Analyst, knolage of networking, IPV4 protocol, and so on. Hardware skills also needed for implementation and deployment from zero. Terms and technologies such as high availability, cluster functions, network interfaces aggregations, OSI model, are also welcome.
  • Firewall
  • VPN Server
  • IPSec
  • IDS
  • DHCP

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