Firewalla Purple SE

Received this network firewall about a week ago and let me just say it is really well done. It's small size and simple setup (assuming you check your router against their incompatible list of routers on their website) make it rather approachable. I also like how the app you use with it has a well thought out interface that doesn't overwhelm you with information but let's you get deeper insight into your network by navigating the easy to use app. I do wish they would have better means of customizable content filters for groups of devices not all or individual devices. This thing is tiny but oh so powerful up to 100mbps. I have 83 devices currently and it seems to handle it fine. I contacted their support and received help after 5 on a Saturday which was impressive granted it was over email. They provided me with a solution to work around a newly discovered bug with firewalla. It was nothing major for home networks but essentially I had too big of a subnet mask for it to scan devices. The scariest thing about this is it spends all its time collecting alll this data that you may not even be aware is possible to obtain via the network. Monitoring and alarming features work exceptionally well except turning off some notifications such as abnormal activity doesn't turn off abnormal uploads. Having several cloud based cameras renders a lot of these types of alarms. Also I will add that having the map, Whois, and ips really help identify what's happenening with a device and potentially stop it. I noticed also it doesn't block certain activity on its own you have to tell it to allow or block activity. It is working great with my eeros 2nd gen. Can't wait for the firewalla Blue to get more performance out of our internet seeing as we are paying for 300mbps. I think it is definitely a cool new product/startup I also think given everything it gathers it may be concerning as to privacy implications in regards to protecting its database.

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.

Basic setup was quick and simple. The capabilities and information provided by this box are far beyond what’s provided in its sales documentation. Firewalla Tech Support is highly responsive and helpful. While I would like to see these boxes have a much faster throughput, this box provides affordable and professional quality home (and small business) network protection that most anyone can use and benefit from without having to be an IT professional. Be mindful that you will occasionally find things that need follow up as you gain user time with this device. For example, after using Firewalla’s default settings when we enabled the blocking of all video sites, we found that our Apple devices stopped auto-updating their apps and the Apple App Store became unreachable. With the help of a quick email assist from Firewalla Tech Supoort, we learned that Apple uses an itunes server for both their video AND app updates. Firewalla was blocking itunes since we had enabled the blocking of all video sites. Armed with that information, we then easily customized Firewalla’s default video block settings to allow access to the itunes server and we restored normal app updating for our Apple devices. Firewalla quickly showed us which devices were our network’s biggest data hogs. It also flagged several suspicious uploads going to certain web servers. Thanks to Firewalla, we put the data hogs on a diet and closed the door on the suspicious uploads. Our home network is now performing more efficiently and is certainly more secure. As soon as I can get my hands on the Firewalla Blue box, I’ll have my small business network outfitted in like manner as my home network. I’m eagerly looking forward to using Firewalla products for many years to come.

The firewalla purple is a tiny device but packs a punch with plenty of rich features. It's easy to install and manageable via a mobile app. We can create a specific domain to allow or block the domain. Parental control features allow to block kid's Internet activity for a specific amount of time. Thanks to firewalla, we didn’t observe any virus pop-ups on our devices after installing the device. To avail all of these features there are no monthly subscription fees. I highly recommend firewalla devices.

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.

I based my purchase mainly on the company’s video advertisement on YouTube and failed to read the actual customer reviews on Amazon. Overall, it is a good start, but not there yet. According to the video advertisement, the device doesn’t slow down you internet connection. It is common sense that because the device checks all inbound and outbound packets on your network, it will result in a slow down. The device does indeed slow down your internet connection. Their test is based on a broadband test from a specific test server, which in my opinion is not indicative of the actual speed you will get from other sites. This is because there are so many other variables at play that determine the actual speed you get. I feel that they should test other well know sites for their speed test to be more accurate. I have seen times when my connection to certain sites were very slow, but a speed test using servers at my ISP or other speed test sites tested very fast. If I need to download large OS updates, I simply just unplug the device which allow me to obtain the maximum speed that can be obtained from that particular download. The device does block certain porn sites by default, but does not block some of the well know sites. The device does send alarms indicating that a particular computer on you network is watching porn. From these alarms, you have an option to block porn. There is no option to block specific and allow certain sites. On video streaming sites, sometimes there are stutters and at times the video will stop steaming completely. I have tested this on a particular video with the device disconnected/connected and it does have an affect on the quality of your streams. The device installation and setup was very simple on my network. I could not rate tech support, because I have not used it. My overall rating of 3 is based on the inaccurate advertisement in the company's product video.

It slowed down my network, was very confusing and complicated. I am a very techy person and can figure most things out easily. This thing had me so confused and I didn’t know what was what most of the time. It does provide a lot of information on your network and I guess it secures your network, I’m not really sure because the app is so confusing. I bought it because it’s one of the few network security options that doesn’t require a subscription. I think it’s worth the money if they could streamline the app and create a user friendly interface, but as it stands now I returned it and wouldn’t buy again.