Firewalla Purple Review: This Tiny, Pricey Box Takes Your Home Network to the Next Level

Simply barely larger than a deck of enjoying playing cards, the Firewalla Purple firewall gadget packs an terrible lot right into a tiny package deal. At $319, it positively would not come low-cost. However in the event you join it to your router or modem and set it up as per the Firewalla app’s directions in your Android or iOS gadget, you will unlock a bounty of superior options that offer you full management over the units in your community. 

For starters, together with safety in opposition to malware and viruses, you’ll monitor the children’ gaming habits or pause their social media entry with the press of a button, and you’ll block advertisements, web sites and grownup content material with ease, too. You’ll detect and shore up vulnerabilities amongst your IoT units, or route your connection again dwelling everytime you’re touring or utilizing a public Wi-Fi community… and all of that actually solely scratches the floor of what this gadget brings to the desk.

That mentioned, if the Firewalla Purple succeeds at serving as a complete web toolkit for energy customers, it comes up a bit brief at bringing common Janes and Joes alongside for the journey. The sheer variety of choices inside the Firewalla app might be dizzying to absorb, and whereas primary options like advert blocking and parental controls are all fairly straightforward to make use of, a big variety of options require a deeper stage of dwelling networking know-how, or at the very least a willingness to learn up on matters that may be a ache to wrap your mind round.

Nonetheless, there’s rather a lot to love right here, even in the event you solely persist with the straightforward stuff. The excessive worth makes it robust to advocate as an informal buy, however the interesting lack of month-to-month charges offsets that considerably, and units Firewalla aside from subscription-based rivals that price much less upfront. If you happen to’re on the lookout for an added layer of safety on your private home community and might see a transparent use case for any of Firewalla’s options, then the Purple is certainly value a glance, as a result of there is a good likelihood that you’re going to get extra use out of it than you count on.

Getting began with Firewalla Purple

A center youngster amongst Firewalla’s household of merchandise, the Purple guarantees to assist community speeds as much as a gigabit, and I did not discover any slowdowns after I set it up by myself gigabit community right here at dwelling. That setup course of was pretty simple — with only a USB-C energy jack and two Ethernet ports within the again (one WAN and one LAN), you will plug it in and wire it to your modem or router, then scan a QR code on the underside of the gadget together with your cellphone’s digital camera. 

The precise wiring will range relying on whether or not you need to use the Purple as a mini-router or use it at the side of an current router, and there are totally different approaches to setup primarily based on whether or not you are utilizing an everyday router, a modem/router gateway gadget or a mesh router, too. No matter your state of affairs, you will need to pay shut consideration to the Firewalla set up information, which gives clear directions for the commonest setups.

When you’re up and working, the Firewalla app gives an in depth take a look at the units in your community and the quantity of knowledge flowing between them, in addition to a protracted record of options and controls for the way these units join. By default, the Purple will scan every part for vulnerabilities and irregularities, notifying you of any suspicious site visitors flows and blocking them from persevering with. 

A few of these insights do not feel fairly as actionable as I might like — for example, wanting on the historical past of Firewalla’s blocked flows of knowledge offers you a protracted record of domains with out a lot context or categorization. If you happen to’re on the lookout for a networking gadget that’ll inform you what it is seeing in pure layman’s phrases, you won’t all the time be happy.

You may additionally begin seeing a lot of notifications about what the totally different units in your community are doing — notably if a tool is accessing gaming or playing web sites, streaming video or viewing grownup content material. You may have to pare these notifications down by muting those you do not care about, however the app does a very good job of letting you toggle totally different notifications for various units as you see match.

Options galore

The Firewalla app is full of options, however I believe good variety of customers will begin with the parental controls. To begin, you’ll be able to faucet the Household button to activate primary, blanket protections in opposition to violent and pornographic content material, in addition to a secure search characteristic that mechanically permits grownup filters on high-traffic search engines like google and yahoo like Google and YouTube. There’s additionally a nifty characteristic referred to as Social Hour that blocks units from accessing social media for one hour with a single faucet.

Past these baseline choices, you’ll be able to choose any gadget in your community to craft customized guidelines for the way it’s allowed to entry the net. Together with the flexibility to dam gaming web sites and social media throughout the board, you will get extra granular, blocking entry to particular websites and companies, together with Fb, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Twitter, YouTube, Discord and extra. You’ll be able to time these blocks for particular durations of the day and particular days of the week, and even block site visitors to any gadget from a particular nation.

That is leaps and bounds higher than the native networking controls provided by most of right this moment’s routers, even premium subscription companies that include a month-to-month payment.

Your Firewalla may also act as a safe level of entry to your private home community for licensed connections coming from afar. That is helpful in the event you’re touring or utilizing public Wi-Fi, as Firewalla primarily helps you to encrypt your site visitors and port it again via your private home community. If you happen to’re a small enterprise proprietor or a distant employee, establishing a second Firewalla on the workplace and pairing it with the one you employ at dwelling would allow you to set up a two-way, site-to-site VPN for safe distant entry and switch of information.

That mentioned, it is value noting that utilizing Firewalla will not masks your site visitors out of your ISP like a real VPN would. For that, you will nonetheless have to pay for a separate, third-party VPN service. Firewalla gives full assist for a number of of them, together with NordVPN, ExpressVPN, SurfShark, IPVanish and others. Importing these VPN settings into the Firewalla app requires some intermediate know-how, however Firewalla does a very good job of providing clear, step-by-step directions for every suitable service. And, as soon as you’ve got received it up and working, you’ll prolong that VPN entry to any gadget in your community without having to set the VPN up on the gadget itself. That is a very helpful, privacy-minded comfort, particularly for issues like good dwelling devices that may’t run VPN software program on their very own to start with. 

Different Firewalla options of word embrace an in depth information utilization tracker, which is helpful to have in case your web supplier enforces a month-to-month information cap, in addition to a Good Queue that guarantees to scale back buffer bloat on congested networks, which could assist your Zoom calls run somewhat smoother. Since it is so small, I am additionally intrigued by the concept of bringing the Firewalla Purple alongside on a trip or enterprise journey for safe, short-range Wi-Fi. If I get an opportunity to check that out, I will report again.

The decision

At $319, the Firewalla Purple is much from a throwaway buy, and might be greater than you want in the event you’re simply on the lookout for a primary stage of dwelling networking safety or parental management. Even so, I believe there are many individuals (dad and mom specifically) who’d be shocked by the sheer variety of helpful options provided right here, a few of which they might not have even thought-about earlier than. Frequent vacationers and anybody who needs to get extra out of their dwelling’s VPN service would do nicely to offer the Purple a glance, too. It is costly, however spectacular.