Pros and Cons of pfSense 2024 (2024)

Filtering and NAT forwarding.

Routing

IDS/IPS

IDS/IPS requires tuning and is sometimes too aggressive.

Filtering acts only by specifying ips. Even if less performing and secure, allowing the user also to insert DNS names would be a nice option.

Firewall rule management

Remote access over VPN

NAT for needed services

HAproxy for reverse proxy hosting

Communication regarding product roadmap

Affordable support for smaller companies/users

Site to Site VPN

VPN Client to Office connections

Firewall

Routing

IDS Ease of use

Layer 2 Filtering

Multidevice management from one interface

Firewall

VPN

IDS/IPS

Centralised management interface

Web Filters

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]

High Availability

Sandboxing

Easy to Integrate

Technical Support

Web console interface needs improvement

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

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

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

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.

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.

OpenVPN

Inter-Vlan Routing

Firewalling

CLI Commands

Hardware Support

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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