Pros and Cons of pfSense 2023 (2024)

Pros and Cons

• Firewall

• VPN

• IDS/IPS

• Centralised management interface

• Web Filters

Pros and Cons

• pfSense blocker NG

• Ips

• Ad blocker

• Ha proxy

• QOS

• Country wise block

• Lots of issue with fresh configure [in my experience]

• [I feel] Gui not user-friendly

• Not advanced level security features available [in my experience]

Pros and Cons

• High Availability

• Sandboxing

• Easy to Integrate

• Technical Support

• Web console interface needs improvement

Pros and Cons

• VPN Server

• Load Balancing Feature

• It also provides Reverse proxy

• It support IPv6

• Wake-on-lan feature is also available with [pfSense]

• Less Documentation available

• Difficult to upgrade the firmware

• Software Bugs

Pros and Cons

• Vpn server

• Load balancing

• Traffic shaping

• Dns and dhcp server

• Intrusion Detection System and Intrusion Prevention System

• Packet Inspection

• No advanced security features

• No sandbox features available

• Complicated configuration

Pros and Cons

• Firewall rules

• Multiple WAN failover & balancing

• Statistics and reporting of internet connection use

• Automated configuration backup

• More support for PPOE connection drops/errors

• Central management console for multiple devices

Pros and Cons

• Robust appliance that is easy to install, manage and update.

• XML-based configuration backup and restore lends itself well to automation and pre-built configurations.

• Open-source platform means the availability of a wide array of third-party packages providing integration with everything from monitoring servers to backup.

• First releases are often buggy. For example, 2.5.0 broke fundamental routing features in some environments.

• Lack of API for automated configuration.

• Lack of CLI for scripting and automation purposes.

Pros and Cons

• OpenVPN is very easy to set up and administer.

• The web UI makes it very easy to configure.

• The feature set is broad and powerful.

• No official central management system (cloud or otherwise).

• Support for WireGuard VPN is limited.

Pros and Cons

• OpenVPN

• Inter-Vlan Routing

• Firewalling

• CLI Commands

• Hardware Support

Pros and Cons

• Easy to use. Good user interface design! Easy to understand and easy to set up.

• Lower hardware requirement. 3 years ago, we used an old PC to run it. Now, we have changed to a router device with Celeron CPU and 8GB RAM. It runs smoothly with a 1000G commercial broadband.

• Need to assign WAN, LAN interface in "text" console but not in web interface when you first install in a new network.

• I need to configure everything and send a pfSense device to my colleague in other countries, they are not IT professionals so they have difficulty assigning interfaces when they first boot.

Pros and Cons

• OpenVPN solution: straight forward and very easy to manage. It's easy to setup clients through the OpenVPN export wizard.

• Load Balancing Internet Connections: I was able to use a single pfSense machine to load balance two internet connections. Basically, if one connection is losing too many packets or drops out, all internet traffic is automatically routed through the other internet service gateway. Users didn't even notice whenever there were internet outages.

• Sometimes when there was an internet outage pfsense would start running really slow. I'm assuming because all the clients trying to access the internet creates a load. There should probably be a timeout feature where all traffic pauses and stops trying to access the internet if the internet is obviously down. The simple fix for this is to just disconnect the switch with all clients.

• There are numerous packages that try to act as middle-man web traffic filters. They are a little complex and don't always work. This pfsense isn't to blame but it just might be nice to see a more standardized solution that's easy to set up.

Pros and Cons

• Great firewall. It has all the capabilities of very expensive firewalls. I have never had to restart the device in 10 years due to an issue.

• DHCP always works without any issues.

• OpenVPN has been rock solid, I like that OpenVPN has clients for all Linux, Mac and MS Windows.

• Reporting

• Viewing log files

Pros and Cons

• pfSense is an excellent firewall - It logs all of your traffic. It has packages you can install to snort bad traffic.

• pfSense has a tool called "p0f" which allows you to see what type of OS is trying to connect to you. You can filter these results and you can also block a specific OS from connecting to you.

• pfSense is an excellent load-balancer: (Multi-WAN and Server Load Balancing) The fail-over/aggregation works very well. This is perfect if your business uses multiple ISP's to ensure your customers are always able to access their data. Also helps with bandwidth distribution as well.

• VPN's - I am not entirely sure if this package was free with pfSense, but it does offer the ability to use OpenVPN which is what I am familiar with.

• They also have IPsec in the settings as well, but I am not familiar with that enough to go into any detail with it.

• As I mentioned I do use OpenVPN the only thing I don't care for with it is I can create OpenVPN configs for each user I want to be able to VPN into the network and I assumed each one would be "unique" but this does not seem to be the case. I could be doing it wrong, but if I create a config for a specific employee I would expect only that employee should be able to use that config, but I have been able to login to everyone that I made using my credentials.

• I mentioned earlier that pfSense had a GUI.

• I personally really think it is cool because it has a bunch of reporting graphs for monitoring your networks. I think when I become the full-time admin at the company I am going to try to talk them into getting me a TV I can mount on the wall and display all the graphs and real-time info pfSense shows so I can monitor what is going on with the network(s) at all times. Plus I think it would look rad.

• I did kind of mention a Con in the Pro section with OpenVPN.

• When I create a config for an employee other employees are able to login to that config.

• I could be doing something wrong when I am making it - I am not afraid to admit that as I am pretty new to all of this, but it seems like it builds a key and I would think the key would be unique in some way to each employee, but I could be wrong.

• I actually do not have a lot of Con's for this software - I did not get to set this up on our work network so I am not sure of any downfalls when installing.

• I installed this on my personal machine in a Hyper-V environment to get a feel for it before I started working on it at work and it seemed pretty smooth. I didn't run into any issues.

Pros and Cons

• Easily configure firewall rules through a well thought out web interface.

• Easy to configure VPN setups and if using OpenVPN, easy to deploy client setups.

• Many additional packages and features can be installed on the fly, including things like OpenBGPD, freeradius3, and lightsquid.

• Load Balancing and connection proxies built in and the ability to HAProxy easily.

• Backup and restore in minutes, not hours. A online (free) service is also offered to backup each and every change made to their cloud.

• There is no API for making changes. This can be a hindrance in environments where auto-deploying something needs firewall rules or HAProxy configs updated. Since all settings are stored in an XML file and then configs are generated from that, even manually updating config files cannot be done.

• Beware that some network cards can have issues. pfSense is based on FreeBSD, so it's best to look on their compatibility list before deploying.

Pros and Cons

• stable vpn connection through your web application and easy to use

• load balancer that allows me to distribute the bandwidth to the ip that I need with more power at the request of the user and less power to users who have fewer requirements

• dns server that allows me to give a domain name to several applications that I have hosted in my network so that it has a connection from the outside and can be seen by the user

• they should improve in creating more manuals of procedures or processes that can be done with this systems since the documentation obtained from this system is small, which makes it difficult to use 100 percent of this system

Pros and Cons

• Open Source (free). Pay only for support.

• Plugins are the crown of the product.

• An extensive dashboard gives you all that you need to have on the first look.

• Traffic graphics are wonderful.

• You can't integrate modem functionality into a pFSense box.

• I don't want to go completely open source if downtime is a risk factor that could lose more income that supported products would cost.

• Can be an expensive configuration if you choose to build your own pFsense box for several ISP.

• For non expertise users is a pain in the neck to manage the web GUI.

Pros and Cons

• Point and click configuration for nearly any network infrastructure service you could need

• Centralized configuration, with documentation, of all firewall rules, dhcp lease rules, vlan routes, etc

• Fast security updates when vulnerabilities (and patches) are found in any of the software that pfSense uses out of the box

• Super simple to deploy

• Light-weight, doesn't need a high end system to run

• Some services can be clunky to configure if you're not 100% familiar with the technology

• Service configuration is bound to the pfSense interface, so if the UI doesn't expose configuration for a feature you need (and the service supports it), it's a significant challenge to configure the service outside of the pfSense system. (Note: this has rarely been an issue for us, once or twice in the entire time we've used the software)

Pros and Cons

• Web User Interface: With new web UI, based on Bootstrap framework, you can control your Pfsense from everywhere.

• Scalable: It's an all-in-one solution useful for every kind of company. It's also very easy to set up rules and NAT, and it has several modules like transparent proxy, VPN, and traffic shaping.

• Community: There's a large community behind Pfsense so you can find a lot of documentation, tutorials, and howtos and also support from the official forum.

• Virtualization: We use virtualization on our systems based on KVM enviroment so they could improve Virtualization integration.

• Export/Import: You cannot import/export all of pfsense modules configuration. And also sometimes pfsense export/import creates conflicts with s Mac address.

Pros and Cons

• Great Multi-Wan redundancy.

• Great control of ACLs

• Perfect for VPN connections

• The tools that come with pfsense are great but I've seen better tools from home based routers like the ASUS routers. Wish we had more pretty graphs, traffic use by user or hostname, etc.

• The UI is good but seems a little outdated. The graphs and reporting looks more like cacti versus the look of something pretty like Kibana.

Pros and Cons

• It secures things!

• It blocks bad things.

• It is easy to configure.

• Nothing really. The developers fix thing pretty quickly. They might want to run some vulnerability scanners against a device and fix those minor issues.

Pros and Cons

• Easy and quick to change firewall rules - no painful re-loads or reboots (!) like some firewall solutions

• VPN support is excellent and so fast as hardware acceleration is supported

• Large set of free add-on tools

• Multiple hardware platforms supported

• Quality of service and traffic shaping setup could be better but the answers are usually on the pfSense forums if you look

• Non-technically minded will lose patience but it's designed to be a fully-fledged firewall so it's not surprising