Not Happy with “Home Protect Basic”

[abrown203]

////EDIT: I just found this post that I should have posted a replied to with my rant.////

Up until today I have been a very happy HomePro user. The $50/yr cost is reasonable. Untangle allows me to precisely control my network, has an intuitive UI, as well as rich dashboarding and reporting features.

Today (2020.11.19) I received an email from Untangle titled “Untangle Home Protect Plus Expands NG Firewall Features to Home Users”, and anxiously dug into the details on the “Untangle At Home” page that compares “Home Protect Basic” and “Home Protect Plus. What I found made me very unhappy.

I assume that when my current annual Home license expires I will be put on the “Home Protect Basic” plan. If this is true, then I will lose access to the following applications currently included in my Home license:

• Virus Blocker (full),
• WAN Balancer,
• WAN Failover,
• IPSec VPN,
• Web Cache, and
• Captive Portal.

My biggest disappointment is losing the full version of Virus Blocker. Running this covered my mobile devices and supplemented the commercial antivirus software running on just my high risk endpoints (Windows PCs). If you know a good side-by-side comparison of Virus Blocker vs. Virus Blocker Lite features please let me know, as my quick search of this forum and the wiki did not find one.

My next disappointment is losing WAN Failover. I use it only for detection and notification of WAN outages on my one internet provider. I hope Untangle considers adding this app back into “Home Protect Basic”, or creating a WAN Failover Lite application that just provides WAN failover detection.

I was looking forward to using WAN Balancer along with WAN Failover to manage the transition from my cable provider to a 5G home solution, so I guess I need to find another way to do that.

When Threat Prevention launched with v15.0 back in February I assumed included in the Home edition. Today my App dashboard now says “No License Found”. I guess I was wrong there.

No heartburn about IPSec VPN from me, as OpenVPN allows me to access my home network while on the road is just fine. Also no need for me to use for Web Cache and Captive Portal.

Without WAN Failover and the full version of Virus Blocker, I am now questioning if $50/year remains a good value. Paying another $100/year to get these features back is absolutely not worth it for me.

Letting my Untangle license expire is not an option. The functionality provided by SSL Inspector, Policy Manager, and the full version of Web Filter are key to how I oversee the internet use of my three young children. Also Bandwidth Control is key to ensuring the my network traffic for work and school is given very high priority.

What is equally disappointing is the way Untangle pitched this change in the email. The first few sentences states they are “expanding … at Home options” to help address the customer’s needs to “balance working from home, the expanded network needs of their children, and the overall increased need to optimize limited bandwidth”. Asking your customers to pay more to keep existing features is not helping. I feel Untangle is not supporting its Home customers in the midst of a global pandemic.

I really hope my understanding of this is wrong. If not, Untangle has lost my respect.

I will be building out pfSense (free) in a VM, and then start up the learning curve so I can make a decision on transitioning before my current Untangle Home license expires.

[sky-knight]

It's apparent you didn't read that threadnaught, not that I can blame you... But, I must point out a few things.

HomePro is not Home. Home subscriptions are apparently going to be sunsetted at some point, but there are no details as to when. If you have HomePro, that subscription is going exactly nowhere. You still have it, and Untangle has mentioned there are no current plans to eliminate it. So you can keep what you have, and simply renew. Though I suppose Untangle could at some point in the future not let you renew. But that's true of any subscription based package.

PFSense tried to sue me for the audacity of telling people my hardware could run their software. Switching from Untangle to PFSense is not only an Apple's to Orange jump, but you're jumping into the arms of a project that's well known for far more aggressive sales tactics than is being presented here. Even if you assume Untnagle is the wrong, going to anything with Electric Sheep Fencing's name on it is going to be a huge downgrade.

If these events have you that upset, and you want a change. I suggest you use OPNSense instead. It's a fork of PFSense, and is managed by people that I could argue are better at this moment than Untangle is. You also have the option of using the Sensei plugin for OPNSense which bolts in all the layer 7 stuff that PFSense and OPNSense simply do not do. Again... apples and oranges. But if you do that, and you want control Sensei is going to cost you $100 / year for 100 devices.

So, aside from change for change's sake. What are you getting out of this change?

I've used and supported every single open source routing project on the shelf for decades. I'm using Untangle... there are reasons for that. However, I must say that OPNSense + Sensei look very attractive for several reasons when considered against 2020s events. So I'm not trying to talk you out of or into anything, just making sure you're aware. PFSense is NOT an option... that project is managed by a nightmare. Going there will not get you want you want, it won't get anyone what they want. It won't save you money either, not unless you want to give up content controls entirely.

[abrown203]

Hi sky-knight,

I just finished reading through the other thread, and now feel comfortable that I will not be loosing my HomePro license any time soon. I am very happy with what I have with Untangle for what I am paying, and now have no plans to change.

Also thank you very much for the insights on OPNSense.

[TirsoJRP]

PFSense tried to sue me for the audacity of telling people my hardware could run their software.

Holy crap... An OPNSense fake site, Hitler video, hostility at their forums, aggressive "brand protection"... this shouldn't be a surprise...

OPNSense looks better every new day.

[Brutos]

Holy crap... An OPNSense fake site, Hitler video, hostility at their forums, aggressive "brand protection"... this shouldn't be a surprise...

OPNSense looks better every new day.

OPNSense is far superior just by the fact the community is better, I use to be a big advocate of pfsense until I saw what they did to OPNsense, shocking.

[pprior]

we're getting into the weeds, but I also have been exploring alternatives given the limited rollout of features for home use. Do you have any idea the hardware requirements to run Sensei at 500-1GB speeds? I was on one forum that seemed to have very high processing requirements that would take way too much power for my use case.

I've had ongoing extremely slow VPN performance with my untangle device, I've tried all the suggestions untangle support has offered and it remains a problem. I was hoping to try wireguard to see if it's an openvpn issue but can't do that now. It might also be my box (a lowly z4) but it's all that I have. I don't want to jump into a situation where I have to have a xeon based server just to run L7

[sky-knight]

we're getting into the weeds, but I also have been exploring alternatives given the limited rollout of features for home use. Do you have any idea the hardware requirements to run Sensei at 500-1GB speeds? I was on one forum that seemed to have very high processing requirements that would take way too much power for my use case.

I've had ongoing extremely slow VPN performance with my untangle device, I've tried all the suggestions untangle support has offered and it remains a problem. I was hoping to try wireguard to see if it's an openvpn issue but can't do that now. It might also be my box (a lowly z4) but it's all that I have. I don't want to jump into a situation where I have to have a xeon based server just to run L7

Sensei has system requirements that are virtually identical to Untangle. UTM filtration at that level at gigabit speeds requires very strong hardware. Your z4 should be able to do what you're asking of it with either product. But if you want real gigabit performance with full features, you're going to need that Xeon monster you don't want to buy.

[jayinva]

OpenVPN will run much better on hardware that supports AES-NI. I don't believe the z4 does. For me I don't see much of a difference between WireGuard and OpenVPN. I have both running in VMs on the same host (which supports AES-NI).

You will see a big difference with Wireguard if both client and server don't support AES-NI.