Firewalla: Cyber Security Firewall for Home & Business, Protect Network from Malware and Hacking | Smart Parental Control | Block Ads | VPN Server and Client | No Monthly Fee (Purple SE)

First off as a product, I love this thing. Me and my husband are advocates of open source tech so this drew my attention. I love that the services are free just the cost of the device. I hope that business model doesnt change.TLDR; This will slow down your network pending on which mode you set it to. The most secure is NAT mode but that will limit your bandwidth to 50Mbs download and upload. If your a non techy person and have a faster internet connection go with the blue version of this product. If you are techy read the rest of this post.Now about the actual product. We are foster parents so we are working with teens most of whom have looked up age inappropriate things. Ive tried most open source software to mitigate the damage without affecting the internet experience and have been let down cause almost everything was outdated. I started looking at paid products and this caught my eye. I decided to buy it and I love it. This will lower your max overall bandwidth even between local devices to 50Mbs down and up. For a lot of people this is a deal breaker, so I would recommend the upgraded version of this the Firewalla Blue that one will limit to 500Mbs down and up.We have an 100Mbs connection and we still bought this. Since I am a techy person I setup 2 Wifi networks. One for the parents and one for the kids. I stuck the firewalla on the kids network and left the parent's devices on the main network. Since we are working from now, because of COVID-19, this made sure that we had enough bandwidth for our video conferencing. Since the kid's was capped at 50Mbs as a reserve for us parents.I am in the process of creating some blog posts on how to do this successfully. Will post a link after I do that.In tech lingo, I did this by creating a VLAN and a SSID that is tied to the VLAN. On the router side, I disabled the DHCP and blocked all traffic to the router except from the firewalla IP. Isolated multicast packets from Firewalla to not leave the VLAN. This is so kid's phones can still use devices like chromecast from a different network. Then configure Firewalla to be in NAT mode. Then POOF you have 99% control of the childrens network without it affecting the parents. I say 99% because we have a teen who I'm pretty sure is dedicating 100% of her free time to breaking my network :D.

I have bought a couple of purples in the past which are more expensive than the SE model. I had issues with their initial batch of purples which is a known issue but their support replaced the units pretty fast. Their support is amazing, any questions I have regarding using the devices or help setting up the VPN server and they have been able to stir me the right direction. Usually answering within hours no matter what day it is. I bought this version since it was a lot cheaper and I don't need the gigabit speed capacity for a site that only has 10 megs as the uplink. These boxes are worth every penny to have control over your network and are a bargain if you need to set up a VPN server, unfortunately that is dependent on your ISP as well. I have run into ISPs that don't let you unblock the port needed for the VPN to work. Either way, all the features that these boxes include is well worth it for anyone that is "good at computers" to an IT/network professional that does just wants something that is plug and play.

For about 10 months my Firewalla box worked great. It was easy to set up and the app was easy and effective. About a month ago it died. It would no longer connect to anything. I’ve reached out to Firewalla by email on four separate occasions now. Zero reply! Watch out! At over $200 a pop….I feel it should last more than 10 months!I have an update. Firewalla finally got back to me. After they asked me to do a bunch of troubleshooting which I did over the course of two days, they asked me to buy another piece of equipment to re-flash my unit. I refused. I shouldn’t have to buy a piece of equipment to fix a product that is under warranty. At first they said it wasn’t under warranty…then I sent them proof and they agreed. After being thoroughly frustrated with troubleshooting, I asked them to take this unit back and ship me a new one. They would not do that. I had to ship my old unit back so they could test it and maybe fix it and maybe send it back. It’s really too bad. I loved it when it worked, but my review stays the same. Great when it works….if it doesn’t….good luck. Unless you are very tenacious and keep after Firewalla “customer service” you will be out your $200+. If they somehow redeem themselves…I will change this review….but at this point…I’d never buy another one.