After auditing over 200 networks across SMBs, mid-market companies, and a handful of larger organizations, I have a fairly strong opinion about the pfSense debate: it's the wrong question. The right question is "who is maintaining this firewall?"

That said, let me give you the honest comparison I wish existed when I was starting out.

What pfSense CE actually is

pfSense Community Edition is a FreeBSD-based firewall/router. It's free, it's open source, and it's genuinely capable. The feature set covers everything a small-to-medium business needs: stateful packet filtering, NAT, VPN (OpenVPN, WireGuard, IPsec), traffic shaping, VLAN support, high availability with CARP, and a plugin ecosystem that adds IDS/IPS (Suricata), DNS filtering (pfBlockerNG), and more.

It's not a toy. I've seen pfSense deployments protecting 500-user organizations with complex network topologies, and they were fine — when they were properly configured and maintained.

I've also seen pfSense deployments that were running firmware from 2019 with the admin interface exposed to the internet on default credentials. Both of these were labeled "we use pfSense" in the asset inventory.

The audit view: what actually fails

When I run a firewall audit — checking ruleset logic, egress filtering, administrative access controls, firmware currency, logging configuration — the failure modes split cleanly by category, not by vendor.

pfSense failures I see most often:

• Outdated firmware (often 1-2 major versions behind)
• No egress filtering — the default is "allow all out"
• Admin interface accessible from the WAN or from the general LAN without MFA
• pfBlockerNG installed but never updated
• No log forwarding — alerts go nowhere

Commercial firewall failures I see most often:

• Default admin credentials unchanged (yes, even on FortiGate)
• Licenses expired, so threat intelligence feeds are stale
• Rules accumulated over years with no cleanup — "allow any any" buried 50 rules deep
• Configuration done by the VAR at deployment, never touched since

The truth is that commercial firewalls don't protect you from operational neglect. They just have a vendor you can call when something goes wrong — which is valuable, but it's not a security control.

Where pfSense wins

Cost. pfSense CE is free. Hardware can be a used Protectli box for $200 or a Netgate appliance if you want something supported. For a 50-person company, the difference between pfSense on a $300 box and a FortiGate 100F starts at around $2,500 for hardware plus $800/year for threat feed subscriptions. Over three years, that's $4,900 vs. roughly $800 total for pfSense. That delta matters for SMBs.

WireGuard integration. pfSense added native WireGuard support and it works well. Setup is straightforward, performance is excellent, and it's significantly simpler to configure than IPsec. For remote access VPN, this is now my recommended choice for pfSense deployments.

pfBlockerNG. This plugin does IP and domain-based blocking using community threat feeds — essentially what commercial firewalls charge $800/year for in their "advanced threat protection" subscriptions. The feed quality is different, but for a budget-constrained SMB, pfBlockerNG configured properly is genuinely useful.

Transparency. You can look at what pfSense is actually doing. The ruleset is visible, the logs are accessible, and if something breaks you can debug it. Commercial firewalls often abstract this away behind a GUI that hides complexity but also hides what's actually happening.

Here's a quick diagnostic I run on every pfSense engagement:

# Check state table and active rules from the pfSense shell
pfctl -sa | head -50

# Check for rules with "any" as source or destination
pfctl -sr | grep -E "from any|to any"

# Check firmware version and available updates
pkg version -v | grep pfSense

# Check if admin interface is accessible from WAN
# (run from outside the network)
curl -sk https://<wan-ip>/ -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}"
# 200 here is a problem

Where commercial firewalls win

Support SLA. When the firewall goes down at 11pm on a Friday before a major client presentation, "you can post on the Netgate forum" is not the same as "call this number and a TAC engineer picks up." For organizations where network downtime has real revenue impact, that support contract has value.

Threat intelligence. FortiGate's FortiGuard, Palo Alto's threat feeds, Sophos's Synchronized Security — these are genuinely better than community feeds. Not by an order of magnitude, but better. If you're in a regulated industry or handling sensitive data, that gap matters.

Compliance documentation. Auditors like documented vendor relationships. "We use FortiGate with an active support contract" checks a box that "we run pfSense on a Protectli box" does not, even if the pfSense deployment is technically better configured.

SSL inspection at scale. Commercial firewalls handle SSL/TLS decryption more gracefully at high throughput. pfSense can do it but it's not where it shines.

The honest decision matrix

My general recommendation after 200+ audits: pfSense is the right choice for budget-constrained SMBs with at least one person who can and will maintain it. If that person doesn't exist, buy a commercial firewall with a support contract. A neglected pfSense is worse than a commercial firewall with default configuration, because at least the commercial vendor will reach out about expired licenses.

For organizations with 250+ users or in regulated sectors (finance, healthcare), go commercial. The support SLA and compliance documentation justify the cost.

If you're running pfSense and want to audit your own configuration, I've published a detailed pfSense firewall hardening checklist that covers ruleset review, egress filtering, admin interface hardening, logging configuration, and pfBlockerNG setup. There's also a Sophos SFOS hardening checklist if you're on the commercial side. Both are free — PDF and Excel.

The full security checklists library has 17 checklists total covering firewalls, Active Directory, Windows, Linux, DNS, and more.

I run AYI NEDJIMI Consultants, a cybersecurity consulting firm. We publish free security hardening checklists for FortiGate, Palo Alto, pfSense, Sophos, Active Directory and more — PDF and Excel.