Home business/small business firewall

[BO Terry]

I am looking for a firewall for a small and/or home-based business. Most of my clients are 5 PC's or less and do not have a server. I prefer something that is not difficult to set up and manage. I've heard good things about Ubiquiti, PfSense, and Fortinet but have no experience with setup/management beyond adding the occasional modification to an existing setup. The two environments I am looking at now both have Arris AT&T Gateway's in place and one has MESH Wi-Fi in the environment. The other environment has a single Wi-Fi extender. Things to consider for other environments I would like to be able to present this to are corporate work from home and remote learning.

Preferably the new solution will allow it to add upgrades as needed vs needing to change everything at once, ex: add firewall first and upgrade Wi-Fi later if needed.

 

[timeshifter]

Ubiquiti UniFi products would be my vote.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

For basic needs, Ubiquiti Unifi product lineup is also my vote.
The "UDM" is a good combo router/4 port switch/wireless....like most residential home routers. Able to be centrally managed via your Unifi account at UI.COM through a multi tenant admin portal.
Can extend the wireless with Flex or Unifi or Beacon wireless APs....and the Beacon is designed as a repeater.

 

[Markverhyden]

I'll third the Unifi product line. They have several built in wizards to takes of the details in many common situations. And the price is very right.

 

[BO Terry]

For basic needs, Ubiquiti Unifi product lineup is also my vote.
The "UDM" is a good combo router/4 port switch/wireless....like most residential home routers. Able to be centrally managed via your Unifi account at UI.COM through a multi tenant admin portal.
Can extend the wireless with Flex or Unifi or Beacon wireless APs....and the Beacon is designed as a repeater.

Will this support other brands of WiFi extenders or MESH? Does it require any subscription to manage it?

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Does not require a subscription to manage it..Unifi service is free.
Unifi wireless products are designed to work with other Unifi wireless products. Generally with most brands, their mesh is designed to work with their own mesh...not with others. You may be able to get different brands working with an insane amount of trial and error...and likely end up with less than desireable results. And end up with something you can't remotely manage. But who wants that? You want products designed to work together, and easily managed.

 

[timeshifter]

Will this support other brands of WiFi extenders or MESH?

I haven't used the UDM yet. I have installed a number of USGs. There's nothing stopping you from using a USG with a different WiFi solution. Just won't be manageable through the UniFi portal. If you install a UDM then you'd probably want to turn off it's built in WiFi in those cases. Long term I'd look to moving your networks to all UniFi hardware, gateway, switches and wireless.

 

[mmerry]

I would use Ubiquiti where there is no need for a UTM. Once I decide that they need to look at security and a UTM, I would go with Untangle.

 

[BO Terry]

Thanks for the feedback. I plan to the USG-Pro-4 this afternoon and look forward to setting it up.