MikroTik offers a series of Cloud Router Switches (or their CRS series), their flagship products.
N/A
pfSense
Score 9.9 out of 10
N/A
pfSense is a firewall and load management product available through the open source pfSense Community Edition, as well as a the licensed edition, pfSense Plus (formerly known as pfSense Enterprise). The solution provides combined firewall, VPN, and router functionality, and can be deployed through the cloud (AWS or Azure), or on-premises with a Netgate appliance. It as scalable capacities, with functionality for SMBs. As a firewall, pfSense offers Stateful packet inspection, concurrent…
$179
per appliance
Pricing
MikroTik Cloud Router Switch
pfSense
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
SG-1100
$179
per appliance
SG-2100
$229
per appliance
SG-3100
$399
per appliance
SG-5100
$699
per appliance
XG-7100-DT
$899
per appliance
XG-7100-1U
$999
per appliance
XG-1537
$1,949
per appliance
XG-1541
$2,649
per appliance
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
MikroTik CRS Series
pfSense
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
MikroTik Cloud Router Switch
pfSense
Features
MikroTik Cloud Router Switch
pfSense
Firewall
Comparison of Firewall features of Product A and Product B
MikroTik Cloud Router Switch work very well as layer2/3 switches in enterprise environments, aggregation or distribution layers. Example: in our case (ISP) we use CRS326 and CRS317 at multi-dwelling units to finish the customer lines, manage vlans of service and apply basic qos. They offer a good variety of ports 1/10G, which is perfect for connecting other ISPs or connecting corporate end users. MikroTik Cloud Router Switch would work fine in low-traffic Routing and Switching, you could configure L3 Hardware offloading and serve some significant traffic, but you may missing some features like, mangle, nat, firewall or other things that may be solved with other device in an upper layer of infrastructure. Based on our experience MikroTik Cloud Router Switch is not good for high performance traffic, they are not optimized for heavy L3 routing task. Example: if you use a CRS as core or router in a small DC or IX the result is traduced on high cpu usage and load performance. If you are looking for special works, MikroTik Cloud Router Switch in this aspect is out.
pfSense is incredibly budget friendly and capable for organizations of all sizes. My specific scenario, working for a non-profit organization, requires budget consciences decisions without compromising security and function. pfSense has helped tremendously in accomplishing this. It specifically tackles advanced routing, static routing, remote access, intrusion prevention, in a single platform, mostly available for free.
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.
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.
Powerful features at a low price: MikroTik Cloud Router Switch provides a good variety of features that are not present on more expensive brands. Flexible deployment options: SwOS for simple switching use cases and RouterOS for more advanced configurations. Winbox is a fast and responsive tool for configuring, maintain and monitoring the traffic or other variable. Why it doesn't score higher, we think that the learning curve for new users could be hard. Sometimes the logic configuration can be unintuitive example: bridge filtering, vlan interfaces. Inconsistent UX Across RouterOS versions, some features may change without clear documentation causing confusion missconfig or incompatibility between versions. Documentation and support are poor, official documentation is fragmented and depht in some cases, the active community should be your best friend.
pfSense can be a very elementary firewall but can also be as comples as you want, according your needs. I'd always reccomend a HA solution when used in a company and, for bigger companies, commercial license is recommended. It's also very adptable to everyone's needs.
We chose MikroTik Cloud Router Switch because it met our technical requirements without significantly affecting our budget. MikroTik Cloud Router Switch offers a performance reliable and scalable for access and aggregation roles and is easy to integrate with our existing infrastructure (Mikrotik CCR). While it doesn't offer enterprise-class UX, or automation frameworks out the box, its disruptive focus, control and granular configuration convert it in an attractive option for ISP operations.
PFSense is not a fully featured and supported enterprise-grade solution; however, it does offer a lot of similar functionality at a fraction of the cost for more minor requirements.
pfSense has only had positive impacts on our company. We are not a huge company so not having to buy licenses to get all these features have been excellent.
I was not around when our current sysadmin decided to use pfSense, but I am assuming from day one it was probably a 100% return on investment since it does everything we need it to and it was open source software.
