Netgate pfSense Reviews & Product Details

The software is flexible, working well in KVM-type VMs that I mainly use. With a little practice you can do anything with it. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There are required features that have been lost for years and never implemented, such as a centralized administration console for sets of firewalls. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It's open source with the very best open-source ethos and practices. A high-quality exhaustive manual makes setup, implementation, modification, and troubleshooting easy. No vendor "we'll get back to you on that" horror story here. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Some of the repository committers are a little superficial when problems are reported. There was a DNS issue with the latest release that the dev team seemed reluctant to admit exists! However, with the usual crowdsourcing efficiency of open source, the user community was able to rub the developers' noses in it, so to speak :) Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Simple use for basic needs as well as vast depths to fine tune and secure infrastructure. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Reliance on 3rd party utilities (pfBlockerNG for example) Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Very easy to use. If not, community support is there. Been faithful for the past 7 years Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Don't have any dislike so far. Appliance and software working great! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The documentation is incredibly detailed, and easy to follow. Everything just works. Any snags I've run into have been quickly resolved. Setup is super easy, and the capabilities are well beyond what I imagined Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I have yet to find anything I dislike. The application has been perfect for our environment Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

They are very economical for being open source for companies that want to set up a firewall. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It does not have a central console to manage multiple PFSense, support only in English. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

A very active community and excellent documentation Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There are a lot of options that might overwhelm some people and some obscure features do not work as well as they should Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It's a very efficient firewall and network management platform. I much better protected with this than with my ISP's router. Give me a lot more flexibility on how I want to segment my network. The TAC Lite support that comes with the appliance is great, the team is very fast to respond and resolve issues almost always on the first email. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It's a bit complicated to setup but with some good research it's easy to find answers. There is a great community supporting it. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The router and firewall software are absolutely top notch. I got a CCNA when it first came out and spent years with Cisco hardware and Microsoft software and thought I was dealing with the best, but a jerkoff tech kid I had to work with during a gig at IBM introduced me to pfSense Community Edition and I was instantly hooked. It's beyond comprehensive; it can do anything I'm called upon to do easily, and I'm confident it can do anything I can imagine doing. I'm not a network guy -- networking to me represents a 2-3 day chore at the beginning of a project where you slog and you Google and you tweak until sometime after 2 in the morning -- *ping* -- it starts working, you don't dare touch anything, and you get to start your job 3 days behind.

pfSense is the antithesis of that. Its documentation is fantastic, its support community unparalleled, and this time around when I replaced my hardware and just went with NetGate hardware it was even better. I had trouble getting it configured and their engineers quickly helped me isolate the problem (the ISP), very kindly helped me undo the hacked-together spoof-based solution I had come up with, and then helped me factory reset and configure the router correctly.

As I said, I'm no network guy -- but I know a lot of them, and I'm sure they'd agree. Go with pfSense. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The only thing I can think of is the problem of "overchoice." The software is incredibly "plastic", which can be a good or bad thing -- if you're prone to address networking problems by just throwing switches and seeing what happens, well -- they give you one hell of a lot of switches.

But I for one appreciate it. They provide guides and wizards that work great, and if you go through the docs and read the community boards you never get the sense that their support group has lost interest in some aspect of their product and just hands you the rope to hang yourself with (my general experience with Microsoft, for example). Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Open-source backed with included updates. Enterprise features, regular community involvement. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Would like a (lower-level) command line interface for more rapid configuration. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.