I've spent the last month making a grand tour of the firewall world - tried everything from IPCop to Smoothwall, a fully-licensed PIX-515E from work to m0n0wall, and I still come back to pfSense. Not only is this my hobby, I oversee a flock of ~70 PIXen & FWSMs at work every day.
There's just nothing quite as feature-rich, easy to use, or quick to set up. GNAP comes close, and I'm working on making some custom extensions to it that may draw me away from pfSense again, but making it do 95% of what I want takes _so long_. I just wish I was more conversant with *BSD so I could really dig under the covers like I did on the Linux-based ones, even though I was greatly disappointed when I did. Granted, you're going to get more horsepower, support, and scalability with a commercial appliance, but they leave out things that should be simple - like setting up port-forwarding. Then there are the *really nice* things, like 3rd-party extensions. Like I said, I may be drawn away again some day, but for the time being I'm back to stay. In that light, is there anything newer than Beta-2? RB
