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Firewalla Gold feature comparison vs competitors

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Damian E

I am looking for a modern router+firewall for my home. I have tried some of Unifi's products (ERX and UDM) and have been disappointed with what appears to be their focus on business features. I like firewalla's focus on home networking such as device and group rules, schedules, monitoring, domain blocks, etc...
I've been browsing the forum to see what "gotchas" I can find. It appears that reps are often answering questions and the feature set keeps growing. Here are some features I didn't find any info on yet

  1. Can the gateway be accessed externally in case I need to diagnose why my home server is down or at minimum restart the router? (think unifi's cloud key)
  2. Is there a NAT feature to force port 53 (DNS queries) from clients to use the gateway DNS instead of using whatever DNS the client wants?
  3. Is there a way to see current network usage "live". (To answer the immediate question: Why is my internet slow?)
  4. Is there a built-in DDNS support for cloudflare? or can I at least put a little docker DDNS container on it to update cloudflare if my IP changes?
  5. Can I effectively separate IoT devices through VLAN but still talk to those devices?(think controlling a Chromecast with a mobile on a different VLAN, or having that chomecast be able to use media from the plex server on the main trusted VLAN)

 

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    Chris Thomas

    1. You access the Firewalla through the mobile app, you cam reboot the router from the app.

    2. The clients are going to send DNS queries to whatever name servers they are configured with. Firewalla will provide its own IP as name server via DHCP, but that doesn't prevent a client from changing it manually. That said, with the DoH features enabled, Firewalla will intercept all dns traffic on tcp/udp:53 and perform lookups from the router itself over TLS.

    3. You can see a graph that shows last 60 minutes, there is anot a 'real time' display anywhere that I am aware of.

    4. Unknown. Firewalla does utilize DDNS for the App to connect to the firewall, you can get your hostname from the App.

    5. Yes. Firewalla supports VLANs, and the mDNS repeater works well as my Home Automation system has no issues discovering my Google Speakers and doing voice announcements through them, from a different VLAN.

    Firewalla platform is pretty robust, and the dev team is very responsive.

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    Damian E

    Thank you, one point of clarification, though. In #1, can you access the firewalla externally (through WAN)? For example, I'm away from home and cannot reach my server. I would like to diagnose a problem or at the very least just be able to restart the router.

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    Chris Thomas

    Damien,

    There is no local UI, everything is done through the mobile app. And yes, you can connect to the Firewalla from anywhere with a internet connection, via the mobile app.

    There is an option to restart router through mobile app.

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