pfSense

Reader supplied reviews for pfSense Average rating 9.5 from 4 review(s) Version: 2.6.0 Rating: 10 Date: 2022-10-09 Votes: 41 I love pfSense! I've been using it for over a year now and I must say that it truly is worth it, even to have it for pfblockerng alone! It's really easy to throw it on a thinclient (I use it on an HP T520 thinclient) so that way it's completely silent as there are no fans. The HP T620PLUS is pretty popular for pfSense because of the expansion port but you almost don't need that if you're a bit frugal. On my T520 I just cut a small piece out of the case and installed an mPCIe Intel network adapter and the actual port comes out of the hole that I cut. It works and it was cheap! I see a lot of reports saying to use Intel based hardware but the Realtek network adapters work just fine as well. But this little mod will ensure you can use pfSense on more thinclients than just the PLUS models. If you own a Roku, it's also a must have device! Combined with pfBlockerNG, you'd be shocked at just how much garbage the Roku tries to access to serve up ads and other junk. Probably phoning home too for all you know. It will not eliminate YouTube ads unfortunately but it's still really good for what it does and can help stop many regular ads before they go out to your network so it's still a win win and your browser based adblocker won't have to work quite as hard. So if you're serious about your network and want to up its game, get pfSense today! Version: 2.6.0 Rating: 8 Date: 2022-06-22 Votes: 2 The OG of BSD firewall distros. One of the first ones I've used and probably the most well known. I recommended the pfSense hardware a lot because I think they have the best turn key hardware solution. I'm not a fan of how they have split up the solution into a Community Edition and paid for Plus edition, but I understand they need to make money. Not a fan of the strange politics with their fork, it's natural for projects to fork so different solutions can be tried. It's good for the open source community so I don't understand why there needs to be any bad blood. For awhile the updates came very slow which was a big turn off for me. I like to be patched quickly but they do have good QA testing IMO so I found fewer things broke after an upgrade. I wish there was more openness to running this software on non-vendor hardware and keeping the original BSD license but that does not affect the technical ability or features of this software. I feel the UI needs a refresh or reorg as it's getting cluttered and seems to be held back by a lot of legacy features and how things were done in the past. Version: 2.6.0 Rating: 10 Date: 2022-02-26 Votes: 54 I've been using pfSense for around 15 years. I've tried others but always come back as this product does everything I require. I've used it mainly on ARM blackbox hardware but recently purchased the Netgate 3100 to support the continued development effort. The DHCP server and DNS integration works very well. I also provide time services through the appliance. The logs can be sent over the net to a loghost for consolidation. NAT and port forward via static and UPnP works flawlessly This is a great product and I hope it's around for many more years to come. See all 4 reader reviews of pfSense...