The Must Have Home Router Solution
What do you like best about the product?
This is the best user interface I've ever used for the complex task of network management. The defaults are excellent, and optimizing settings is easy thanks to great documentation.
What do you dislike about the product?
I've had quite a bit of trouble using the built in upgrading feature. It always breaks the router and you *must* install pfSense fresh and recover your previous configuration.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
I'm taking control of my own network. I'm controlling bandwidth access, external access, and optimizing my own traffic.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Take the time to learn what pfSense can do and how to do it and your life will be so much better. Controlling your own network gives you a lot of peace of mind since network connectivity is so important in today's world.
Great Openvpn Fireewall Router
As usual pfsense is one of the top freebsd based router/firewall/ids systems available,ahrd to fault and the interface doesnt lack anything.
This AMI image provided by netgate and amazon ec2 is up and running for multiple users within an hour if you are familiar with openvpn and pfsense,with the amazon ec2 interface making ease of the process.
Throughput , lack of loss and scalability even on the t2nano ec2 is superb and certainly exceeded our expectations considering other testing on bare metal configurations with more ids and other applications.When looking at the this machine vs the required bare metal to to normally achieve this hypervisors performance its great value.
Looking forward to the arm version of this and other additions.
Filter you ssh channel in the ec2 console for your address or dont enable the ssh console on pfsense until or when needed.
One of the best Firewall Appliances in the Market
Best value for money. pfsense has never failed me to date. It's powerful and in par with industry leaders. Matter of fact, there are many instances where industry leaders are behind in some technologies that pfsense support. Keep up the good work guys
Fully featured smart router firewall
What do you like best about the product?
pfsense converts your old PC into a fully-featured smart router firewall with the addition of a few network cards. The best thing is you can do this by yourself and plenty of support is freely available over the internet.
What do you dislike about the product?
Being an open-source product the possibility of bugs and errors may be higher than closed source products. In order to tolerate this, updates and new versions are frequently released.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
pfsense gives its users very good reporting capabilities. Real-time reporting such as network bandwidth can be found very useful when it comes to keeping a lid on network resource usage. Various reporting packages are also available to be added to the pfsense installation as per your requirement.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Pfsense can be proposed as a total solution that satisfies routing and firewall requirements in network administration.
Best software based network firewall
What do you like best about the product?
pfSense is a software based networking firewall, where the source code is freely available. Hence they given the freedom to modify the source code and customize it according to our requirements.
What do you dislike about the product?
pfSense only provides the software for the firewall and only specifies the required hardware. So this may raise a question whether they would be able provide comprehensive support in case of hardware problem results an software error.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Lot of network based service can be found bundled together in pfsense. This is the main reason for its popularity in network community. Even if you do not find some service on the default version, it can download and installed later.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
This highly recommended for Network Administrators for efficient network resource management.
pfSense
What do you like best about the product?
I like that it is based on free software, it has built-in features of switches, routers, firewall, dhcp server, proxy, it is easy to install, easy to configure, it supports protocols such as tunnels vpn ip sec, and it can be installed on site and in the cloud .
It allows load balancing and redundancy in WAN links.
What do you dislike about the product?
Linux at the hardware level is manual, in many cases if the installation is done on a computer, the network cards will probably have to be installed manually
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Network infrastructure management on a single computer, everything is centralized, dhcp server, vpn tunnels with clients, built-in diagnostic tools, proxy, content filtering, it is also free of licensing, I really recommend it fully
Recommendations to others considering the product:
It is the best option, quality and low cost, all the tools integrated in the same system
Works well with AWS networking
I used the pfSense Netgate firewall/VPN/Router to help study for the AWS Advanced Network Specialty exam. Simple to set up, I used it to build VPNs w/BGP between two VPCs and a remote network using pfSense on two sides and a VGW in the middle. The latest version supports VTI interfaces so you can use route-based VPN instead of policy-based VPN. Without VTI interfaces you can set up a VPN but BGP doesn't work as expected. I had no problems setting up VTI interfaces in the VPN configuration, installing OpenBGPD, and routing traffic using CloudHub VPN and BGP to connect the two VPCs and my remote network together.
In my opinion, the pfSense firewall was easy to set up and the interface is fairly intuitive if you're familiar with networking and security. I've used the community edition for a while and the AWS version has the same look-and-feel. There's also a number of open source options that can be added to extend the functionality of the product.
I think the only downside is the pricing. I wish the t2.nano and t2.micro were both priced the same. The t2.nano is great for a trial run. However, if you install any options you'll probably want something larger than a t2.nano and that will create a significant price increase. Then again, Netgate's pricing seems to be much lower than comparable products in AWS marketplace so it looks like it cost less to run than other products with similar functionality.
I would recommend Netgate pfSense if you are looking for a low-cost stateful firewall that is built using open source software and can do VPN and routing too.
1 person found this helpful
Great option of perimeter firewall
What do you like best about the product?
The pfSense is an Open Source project that is being supported by Netgate and offers great perimeter security for small businesses that do not have the money for an ASA, FortiGate or other similar device. The application of traffic policies is very easy to do and personalization of these is very useful with the tools available to the system. It is great the system of packages that extend the functions, for example the package for IDS / IPS Snort is great, the OpenVPN for VPN is very easy to use and so other options that can be incorporated for free.
What do you dislike about the product?
In the last version the support to the unofficial packages was removed, this decision is very annoying because there are many very good packages that are not included in the pfSense library. Another point not so remarkable is the traffic monitoring options that pfSense has, however it fulfills its function for non-demanding users.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
The main advantage of pfSense is the cost, which is 0 and thanks to this, contracts were obtained with external clients that did not have enough funds for a commercial perimeter firewall. The function of VPN with OpenVPN and the application of Snort are the best features that have significantly improved the performance and productivity of our customers' networks.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Consider the pfSense in case your network needs port security and minimal protection from the outside. If an active and more granular management of the threats and the traffic that passes through it is required, think about accumulating more resources to acquire another superior product.
Great for Site-to-Site
Very easy to use.
The UI is Intuitive.
Site-toSite VPN is very stable.
You can upgrade to a newer version from the UI.
Strongly recommended!
1 person found this helpful
Very easy to install out of the gate and a robust routing platform.
What do you like best about the product?
Can't believe how easy it is to set up out of the box. Fire up the server, install the platform and then you assign a LAN/WAN interface... DONE!
What do you dislike about the product?
I would like to see more analytics or an easier way to get to client based data from the dashboard.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
I am looking for a secure, but easy and highly configurable platform that just plain WORKS. This seems to fit the bill.
