Great thread you started. Im still new to the pfsense product line having come from other vendors. In the beginning, i was frustrated that there was feature incompleteness when compared to other products but I have since changed my mentality a bit
The obvious fact that it's free and there is paid support behind it makes me feel comfortable deploying
Just understanding the use case for the product. I see pfsense as a router and firewall (L4) first and foremost. The VPN functionality when used in an "as-is" deployment is very good. The problems start to come in when you now have a business requirement that a 10+ year old firewall OS doesnt even have a feature set for. Need traffic visibility? Nope. Simple things like, which IP is the top talker between 8am - 4pm. No historical data is found. Sure you can use darkstat but cmon....its more of a hack and it provides no meaningful data. There is no application awareness despite what the marketing on the netgate site will tell you. OpenAppID rules have not been maintained on pfsense since 2017. The metadata conf is updated yes but not the text rules. I could go on but why bother.
My hope is that the pfsense+ train is where the added functionality will appear. I know it's something that people dont want to hear but if they charge for it down the line but has feature completeness in key areas identified in this thread then ill pay. pfsense CE will continue to be free.
As others have said on other forums and even here, it's a great product but one should only deploy in SMB scenarios. If your company has any I.T. budget then more than likely they are going with a named vendor.
