UniFi vs pfsense Firewall 2025

The UXG-Pro & UXG-Enterprise do not have the UniFi network server software built in and you can use a self hosted instance or a cloudkey to manage them. The other models such as UDM Pro Max and Enterprise Fortress Gateway do have the controller built in.

Features pfsense Plus UDM Pro Max / SE / EFG & UXG-Enterprise
Can Run on Your Own Hardware Yes No
Can Be Virtualized Yes No
Centralized Management Yes & Self Hosted on pfsense (beta) Yes Via UI Site
Web interface Yes Via Built in UniFi Network Server
License Fees Free With Netgate Hardware No
Operating System FreeBSD Linux
Automated Updates No Yes
Granular change & rollbacks Yes & ZFS OS rollbacks No
High availability Yes Yes (Shadow Mode*)
Multi-WAN support Yes Yes
VLAN Support Yes Yes
VXLAN No No
BGP / OSPF Yes Yes
Captive Portal Yes Via UniFi Controller
Let’s Encrypt Certificates (ACME) Yes No, can be done manually
Identity Provider Intergrations Yes Radius or LDAP Radius, LDAP, AD, MS Entra, Google & Jumpcloud
OpenVPN Yes Yes (very basic)
IPSec Yes Yes
WireGuard Yes Yes (No site to site yet)
L2TP VPN Yes Yes
Automatic Site to Site no Site Magic SD WAN
Automated VPN or Overlay Tailscale Teleport VPN
Policy routing Yes Yes
IDS/IPS Yes (Suricata or Snort) Yes & Proofpoint CyberSecure
Content filtering & Controls No (squid is depricated) Yes ( SSL on EFG & UXG-Enterprise)
Traffic Monitoring & Reporting Yes (NTOPNG) Yes
DNS filtering Yes (pfblocker) Yes (No custom Feeds)
DNS Management Yes Yes
DHCP Server Yes advanced Yes
GeoIP filtering Yes (pfblocker) Yes
Traffic shaping & QoS Yes Yes
Packet Capture & Diag Tools interface Yes Yes
SNMP monitoring Yes Yes
Netflow Export Yes Yes
Logging and Alerting Yes Yes
Time Based Firewall Rules Yes Yes
Reverse proxy or WAF Yes HAProxy No
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Great summary, one note I would personally add to this list though is the Automated VPN or Overlay for Unifi.

Teleport exists, but it’s full tunnel only, there is no way to do split tunnels with it like you could with Tailscale. Pretty big deal IMO and is one reason I refuse to use Teleport.

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We have gone full Unifi stack in which we self host for many clients, where before we would deploy Netgate or EdgeRouters for the Firewall and Ubiquiti for the switches and APs

Watching your video there appears to be many features missing in our UI that appear in yours

  • New Firewall Rules Layout
  • Site Magic
  • Packet Capture
  • BGP

We are using UXG Pro for our Firewalls and Pro Switches along with U6 Pro APs
We also have the latest firmware and Device Upgrades.

Im thinking we may need to redo our unifi controller from scratch any help will be much appreciated. Thanks

The controller is what needs to be updated to make sure these features appear, it’s specific to the Unifi Network Application. Have you updated the controller you are hosting?

The release page here may help: https://community.ui.com/RELEASES