Firewalla Gold review: Powerful home network security in a tiny box

Price When Reviewed

$468

Best Prices Today

The Firewalla Gold provides house customers a community filter, router, and safety engine in a compact {hardware} case, guarding their high-speed web connection in opposition to assaults from each exterior the community in addition to compromised gadgets contained in the community. It additionally provides advert blocking, parental controls, and a “Social Hour” that disables social-network entry for 60 minutes, to, say, spend time away from the screens.

We reviewed the Firewalla Gold, which prices $499 when it isn’t on sale, however the Firewalla Blue Plus provides all essential options for many households for simply $189.

It’s not a brand new thought to insert a {hardware} gateway between an inside community and the remainder of the web to examine information and connections in actual time, and make choices about what ought to cross and what shouldn’t, and set off alerts about harmful exercise. But most gadgets with sufficient energy to be helpful require a community IT-tech stage of data or the willingness to fumble round in a hard-to-understand web-based administrative interface.

The Firewalla, against this, is a compact, trendy possibility acceptable for properties and a person with simply common community data. Its smartphone app interface is crisp, simple to make use of, and, most significantly, understandable.

Some of its options will be present in superior house routers or in broadband modem/router combos supplied by ISPs. But these {hardware} choices can’t meet the breadth of Firewalla’s, nor—usually—the simplicity and depth. Having a devoted system focuses utility.

Detecting, deterring, and shaping web visitors

Plug within the Firewalla, carry out just a few setup operations through a smartphone app (together with validating bodily possession by scanning a QR Code), and let it quietly churn away for a couple of minutes scanning community visitors and finishing its setup. The app then reveals a lot of selections you may make for alerts, monitoring, prioritization, and blocking, amongst different accessible options.

The Firewalla Gold has a four-port inside Ethernet swap and a separate WAN port for a connection to both the remainder of a community or to a broadband modem. The greatest worth for a tool of this type is to sit down between your modem or your foremost router or gateway. The Gold mannequin may carry out all routing capabilities. (The less-expensive Blue Plus can sit as a bridge between a router and the remainder of a community.)

During the preliminary setup, the Firewalla can scan the inner community for gadgets recognized to have compromises, an even bigger concern than having your computer systems, telephones, or tablets attacked straight from the web. Now, makes an attempt to hijack machines come from gadgets inside your community which were remotely and routinely hijacked by malware. These native gadgets are sometimes ignored by Wi-Fi gateways and ISP routers, though their trusted standing lets them extra simply try to infect native gadgets or launch assaults as a part of a coordinated military of “zombies” to take down different networks.

The Firewalla interface has a cleanly introduced dashboard that reveals some community statistics after which provides settings classes like Ad Block, Family, Open Ports, and Network, in addition to considerably extra superior ones. You can faucet one in every of this stuff and drill down into viewing and analyzing info or configuring choices. You may faucet a hyperlink exhibiting the rely of networked gadgets after which set insurance policies individually by system, or create teams to use polices to units of gadgets.

Ad Block and Family allow you to allow filters to dam well-known ad-serving websites and violent and pornographic content material. For the previous, Firewalla supplies no details about the way it has assembled its ad-blocking checklist and provides simply “Default” and “Strict” labels as choices. Ad blocking will be restricted to particular gadgets. The Family part provides selections to dam websites and search outcomes, relying completely on the free client taste of OpenDNS, a service that can be utilized with out Firewalla just by altering a tool or router’s DNS servers.

I examined its malware consciousness by visiting analysis websites that checklist malware particularly to check detection, and the Firewalla supplied the suitable blocking and alerts.

Firewalla Gold consists of two totally different sorts of VPN servers, each open-source initiatives, and a VPN shopper. The servers allow you to join securely to your property community and its web connection through a typical VPN from wherever you might be on the earth. The shopper can cross visitors from a person system to a business VPN (Firewalla suggests an Apple TV, which might be a solution to allow you to bypass country-locked restrictions), create a safe VPN tunnel between two Firewallas, and different potentialities.

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Users with extra refined community wants or pursuits would possibly just like the professional-level options for creating separate bodily networks from every of the router’s LAN ports, so you’ll be able to conduct community safety as separate Ethernet chains. You may create VLANs (digital networks) for making a logical separation throughout bodily networks. There are additionally choices to prioritize and management community flows to downgrade video over extra work-related functions—or vice versa!

Firewalla provides iPhone and Android apps, required for preliminary setup. However, it additionally supplies entry through an internet app that depends on a intelligent use of end-point encryption. On loading the online app, it’s important to authenticate entry through a smartphone app by scanning a QR Code displayed within the browser. This passes an encryption key securely into the online app that’s solely saved regionally. This method prevents different events, together with Firewalla, from accessing the information.

The Gold mannequin of Firewalla, the mannequin we reviewed, incorporates each characteristic the corporate provides in any router, however has the hefty worth of $499. The agency says it might deal with information flows of over 3Gbps, making it acceptable for a house with gigabit web. However, in case you don’t want superior bodily or logical LAN configuration options and have a community connection of 500Mbps or much less, the a lot cheaper Blue Plus, at $199, will match the invoice.

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The backside line

The Firewalla Gold carried out as anticipated working off a leg of a house community: It blocked malware, tracked habits, found gadgets, reported internet-accessible ports, prevented advertisements from loading, and supplied a treasure trove of perception into what the gadgets on my community have been as much as. The firm wants to supply extra transparency about the way it assembles its ad-blocking checklist, and may think about licensing safe-site lists to combine straight as an alternative of utilizing OpenDNS not directly.

The Firewalla Gold or Blue Plus ought to be configurable sufficient and supply sufficient suggestions about its actions to go well with anybody who needs the diploma of management supplied, plus extras like a built-in VPN connection. Particularly good? No recurring charges.