There are two types of firewalls in use. One is for system / server to control the users, services, ports, packets etc., and the other one is meant to control interactions between the system/server and another network. When you are connected with an external network the role of firewall is so crucial. Nowadays, every network is being watched by hackers, and the chances of data getting stealed are very high. Hence it is important to secure your network by analysing the packets. Some powerful firewalls/routers are necessary to manage such situations. The features of some of them are mentioned below.

Pfsense is one of the best and most powerful open source firewall/routing software based on freeBSD distribution with a custom kernel. When it comes to features and strengths, it is more powerful than Linux iptables. As the inbuilt firewall of many linux distros, iptables are more popular to secure your system / server. If the requirement is for more powerful firewalls to secure the systems and network because of the regular hack attempts and packet spoofing then Pfsense is an ideal option.

Another noticeable advantage of pfsense over iptables and other commercial firewalls is the Web Interface. With Pfsense, you can control everything from the web interface. You don’t need to have knowledge on Unix and you can use the CLI for configuring the firewall. Some features of pfSense firewall.

Unlike iptables, it can be managed through web interface and it comes with other advanced features like multi-WAN configurations, QoS, Hardware failover etc, It can provide Load balancing, DHCP services, and all kinds of other capabilities and supports IPSec, PPTP, L2TP, and OpenVPN VPNs. The working of pfsense is almost the same as that of miptables, but few features of pfsense make it more secure than iptables. Some of them are mentioned below.

1. Filter TCP & UDP packets by source and destination IP, Protocol

2. Limit simultaneous connections on a per-rule basis

3. Utilizes advanced passive OS/Network fingerprinting

4. Option to enable or disable log traffic by matching each rule.

5. Hardware failover, Load balancing, Multi-WAN capabilities.

6. Aliases are allowed

7. Packet Normalization

8. Option to disable the filters.

Apart from these there are many other features included in the pfsense firewall. Pfsense is a good firewall that can be used to protect your network from internet or any other network since it has many options to setup the powerful filters and is very easy to manage without much knowledge on Unix.