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)

I've had the Firewalla Purple SE for two years now and this feature-rich device has been flawless. It's easy to use and set up, and the company offers good support both via email and on social media. The amount of granular control over your home network is seemingly endless, yet you don't have to be an IT security person to use it. I wish I could give it more stars!

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. So I’m a little late with this update, but Firewalla did end up sending me a new device. It did function properly, but have since found a better solution. I did like the Firewalla interface/app, but after having such a hard time and it taking so long to get the old one replaced…I decided to go another route. If Firewalla had just sent me a replacement unit in a timely fashion once I’d reported a failure within the warranty period, this review would be different.

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.

Awesome lil device. I’d say upgrade to the gold se though. And buy an AP7 from Firewalla with this device. They work hand in hand together. Highly recommend for monitoring your network for security and if you want to be a bunghole strict parent there’s lots of parental monitoring capabilities. With the AP7 from Firewalla you can segment your WiFi network so devices can only interact with what devices you want them to. It gets really complex but the app and a little tinkering make it easy to set up. A little trial and error if you’re like me and had no idea what I was doing network wise, but well worth it. I now have a pretty secure and well identified set of networks through vlans and vqlans.

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.

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 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.

I bought this before they did the stupid subscription model and it worked well. Since then, Firewalla took the features that were available for configuration and put them behind a paywall and now the network is slow and barely usable. I'll be switching to a better solution.

Works as described. Best parental control firewall

This is a truly great cyber security tool for consumers as super easy to use. For UK folks first buy an adapter US type A to UK. Then as typical FTTC customer with BT like SmartHub cannot be used in bridge mode so it will be your router so use the Purple in Bridge. Next, if like me you have a Mesh unit downstream of the BT Smarthub you will need to run the Mesh in Access Point (e.g., Bridge mode) or if your Mesh does not support bridge mode you will see only the Mesh as one unit on the Purple. Even in this double NAT with both BT and Mesh acting as routers the Purple SE in bridge still is worth having for sure but to get per device visibility the downstream mesh must be in bridge and to get full control of devices (eg segmentation and priority) you need any upstream device to Purple to be in bridge just acting as a modem. But even stuck in the middle of a double NAT (two routers) the Purple SE still does full visibility and control of in and out flows with blocking and alerts, ad block and vulnerability scans. You add full device visibility if any downstream router is in bridge and add full device control and segmentation (vlans) if any upstream router is in bridge.

Product description is a bit confusing because the purple edition is normally indicating that it has wifi capabilities, but this one doesn't.

Allt var nästan bra. Utom kontakten , den var inte avsett för Sverige utan amerikaner Där jag fick köpa ny. Annars hade det blivit 5 ⭐️.

Muy buen producto, llevo 4 días usándolo y firewalla a monitoreado mi red, puede bloquear la mayoría de los anuncios, me alerta si un dispositivo en mi red está jugando en línea, si hace descarga inusual, puedo bloquear contenido para adultos, puedo crear una vpn (open vpn) y agregar mis dispositivos a ella, puedo activar alerta si un nuevo dispositivos se a unido a mi red. Puedo escanear puertos abiertos en la red. Lo malo es que no puedo monitorear mis dispositivos que están en mi sub red, es decir que están en un router que puse para extender mi red wifi.