Comparing pfSense Plus & pfSense CE: Cost and Key Differences Explained

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⏱️ Time Stamps ⏱️
00:00 pfsense plus VS pfsnese CE July 2023
00:18 How Much does pfsense plus cost?
01:15 Differences between versions
03:33 Release Frequency

[HomeBudgetComputing]

I've been running CE for a few years now (since 2.4) at home on a refurbished HPE DL360G7, and it has worked phenomenally for me. I have also installed and set up pfSense for a customer (~150 employees). They needed something that would handle 3 internal subnets (2 physical networks), dual WAN failover, several VPN clients, and a VPN tunnel to a satellite office (which also has pfSense, but since I used a NG1100 it has +). The previous SonicWall was costing them too much money for licensing and underperforming. I used an old pair of Dell workstations with add-in NICs. The second one is a cold-swap spare that gets updated as needed and the config saved from the main one just goes into the second with no issues. Changeover takes about a minute in case it's needed.

They are over the moon happy with the performance of the product and the level of training I was able to give them on how to maintain it and set up VPN users.

I learned all of this from your videos and a little of Network Chuck. Thanks Tom!

[bigchew]

I Have Ben Running PfSense for 6-8 Years Now Thanks to You & All Your Videos ! Home Use & I Have Always Ran PfSense CE & I Really Dont Have any Desire to ever change..The Ce Has Ben Great For What I Do It Runs Perfect on my Old Dell R210II Quad core & a 120gb ssd I Also Have Several Home Servers Running As Well TrueNas & UnRadid ! Just Wanted To Say Thanks !

[Shadow_Banned_Conservative]

Thanks for the explanation Tom, I really enjoy your videos. In fact, you're the one who introduced me to pFSense a few years ago. I started off on HP thin clients (T-620 & T-630) with a 4 port NIC card, and moved up to a Lenovo M720q 1L PC, with an I3-8300T. Those have a nice feature of a PCI expansion slot so you can upgrade them with a low power video card, or external NIC in this case. It's been running great, using little power, and been reliable for over a year now. It's even smaller than the HP thin clients I used before them.

I've still got a lot to learn about networking, firewalls, rules, etc but your videos give the new network user a great starting point.

[michaeljaques]

I updated from CE to Plus about 6 months ago. I've gotta do the .1 update that just came out recently one of these nights when I can schedule some downtime that doesn't impact users (ie: family) on my network. Biggest reason to switch to Plus is boot environments. Really that's the only feature for me that makes the upgrade enticing.

[michaelflynn]

Newbie user here, thanks for your videos, they've been quite insightful. I'm sticking with CE, I don't see need for the small set of extra features.

[JordanEE]

I have a mix of both, pfSense CE on the home front since I like testing new configurations out and don't wanna just "waste" ( I know its free but I still don't like requesting licenses all the time just a personal thing) the + keys, and pfSense+ on the businesses I support. Great Product, was dealing with Fortinet and their issues before stumbling upon your videos, very glad I did!

[leeposey]

had been running ce but watched your video i upgraded to pluse thank you for your great videos and info.

[WereCatf]

I am running CE simply because I don't have any use for the Plus-only features. If you don't have any need for those, then it's just simply easier to stick to CE, since you need to install it anyways first if you wanna go with Plus, so I am simply skipping that latter step. For me, it's not any sort of an ideological choice or anything like that, just simple laziness.

[robertmorrison]

I am running pfSense plus on a dedicated PC with two NIC’s. I chose the subscription that includes the TAC Lite.

[UK-Expat-in-USA]

I did not know that I could get pfSense Plus for free until I saw you mention it in one of your video's, then I upgraded, keep up the good work I enjoy your videos.

[stand]

Through no fault of Tom, this video aged like milk.

[ianaway]

I use the plus version everywhere in my home / lab project and test ! Since it’s free why not using it ?

[Adam-gsq]

Quick question Tom or anyone else that may know the answer. I've tried to find a definitive answer to this but each article I read contradicts the other. Is it allowed to use pfsense CE for business usage. By business usage, I have a couple of scenarios. 1) Lab environment for staff training purposes. 2) In our own production environment. I must stress that we would NOT install it on an appliance and sell that appliance! Many thanks.

[JohnPMiller]

pfSense reminds me of Red Hat Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, CentOS, Rocky Linux. Things seem good now, but I worry about the future. 20+ years ago, I used Red Hat (not Enterprise) Linux, and today I regretfully use Ubuntu.

That said, I really like pfSense, and today I run CE at home, as I don't need any of the Plus features.

[udirt]

I'd not say that they were 'very on top' of security 'in the past' (using pfSense since like 20 years now). There was more than enough cases where updates came late or it never went to the security announcement list (especially not until they started noticing the issue) when that list was still the 'official' source.

[UnixDaemonKiller]

I like the layer 2 filter in plus. Is that in CE yet?

[Neavris]

pfSense CE was only for x86 and amd64, pfSense Plus works on many of their devices on ARM. Can you expand on how whether you can install pfSense plus with free support on other, non-netgate, ARM devices? ie: RaspPi comes to mind but other mini-ARM pc if not. Thanks

[shaawin]

You missed IPsec-MB and Layer 2 filtering released in 23.05

[Carlesgl]

I have used only plus as i bought a sg1100 for home use. If you want to use pfblocker, i would recommend anyone to get CE and use something with an appliance with more ram than netgate devices for home use with more than 4 GB of RAM. It will cheaper than the $799 that costs the 6100, the first netgate device that has 8 Gb of memory.

[kjakobsen]

I'm using pfSense in school, and Fortigate at work. In school we already use CE, so no change there.