Netgate SG-5100 with pfSense Plus Software - Router, Firewall, VPN Security Gateway Appliance

The unit is a solid performer, although it cannot provide 1G speeds when using plugins such as Snort or Suricata for IDS/IPS , Dont purchase if you are wanting to have any kind of IDS or complex firewall. Average throughput with protection running as about 200Mb.

I bought this for my house with symmetrical gigabit to resolve the strain of needing home office quality routing while still allowing heavy personal usage like torrents.This device is about as top end as one needs for symmetrical gigabit links. I can fully host a secured DMZ, blast torrents, and fully maintain clean connections for critical work from home video conferences or chatting with Grandma.I had two setup gotchas. First I didn't realize that only port zero would be on the network initially and that the other ports weren't switching. Second, because my provider was expecting my old router's MAC address the Netgate box took a very long time to, I assume timeout and then, start up DHCP and web services. Because I didn't have a WAN link I thought the device was bricked. Finally after 30 minutes or so the system started up. I noticed in the UI that my WAN link didn't have an address. After clicking around I thought to spoof the old hardware MAC and that got everything going. After the hiccups everything has been impressive.I had one final surprise that I should have understood but didn't. The ports aren't switching. I thought I would put several rooms through each of the ports but instead I got a bigger backend switch and was good off the single uplink.As I mentioned, resolving my uplink's lack of DHCP by MAC spoofing the old routers is a big plus as I didn't need to call the ISP. The spoofing menu was clean and gave me a taste of how wonderfully diverse the boxes offerings are.Otherwise I'm beyond extremely impressed with what services are available. The internal DNS service just works and is nice if you need an DMZ address to resolve tonam otherwise external domain. The contextual documentation is spot on, open, and thorough. Everything is very accessable via menus and overall the pfsense offering is perfected in the netgate hardware.Other than those starting pains this box exceeded my expectations and met the price point. This box is perfect for the power home network operator.

I ran pfSense on my own hardware for years (10+), and have always loved it, but recently have always had little bugs here and there. An issue I kept running into however, was that every once in a while stability issues would crop up. The router would freeze, internet would stop, and I'd have to reboot everything manually to restore. I know that I could have dove into the configs to fix this, but with remote work becoming more of a thing, I wanted to be able to depend on my internet and not have to fuss with this part. I have 10 vLANs, 2 VPNs, Snort, pfBlockerNG, Squid, DDNS, and more all going at once on this piece of hardware and the uptime is over a year with no internet outages. Furthermore, I can get throughput of over 600mps with minimal CPU load. I definitely recommend this if you want something that is infinitely configurable, stable and fast. Yes it's a little on the expensive side, but it's worth supporting when the quality is of this caliber.

#1 This gateway is not a "toy router" aka a Big Box store -- it's heavy for it's size, built tough and wouldn't look or be out of place in a corporate network closet or data center.#2 Though the online documentation includes a comment on needing a mini-USB cable for console access, one was supplied in the box. Nice touch!#3 My installation is at home in for a WFH environment plus household and family access, but I have what might be termed a more complex home setup -- redundant WAN gateways, redundant switches (LAGG), lots of endpoint devices, multiple access points, a number of VLANs, etc... Installation was as smooth as silk -- cutover was literally a few seconds as I swapped one WAN over, did the major config, swapped the switch uplinks then swapped the redundant WAN after I turned down the old environment.