Would you still get Sophos XG for Home usage?

Hello, welcome to the community!

Starting it,

Important features I am looking:

Block distracting sites (YouTube, etc) during homework and school time

You can do this with a Web Filter Policy, all you need It's to choose what you want to block and the time it will be applied.

Example:

Block Ads

Same as above, but with the Advertisements category, if it's necessary to block more domains that aren't covered with that category, you can add more domains with custom URL Groups within Sophos XG.

Example Rule currently being applied on my XG:

Block adult content and inappropriate sites on the kids devices only

Again, same as above, but with the "Nudity and Adult Content"

Example:

At the end you can have a Policy like this one:

After creating a Web Policy, you can apply it to the user you want with a firewall policy. This allows you to have different filter's being applied to different users.

Would you still get Sophos XG Free Home if you were starting over? Do you think it is better in comparison with Untangle or pfSense?

When my licenses for another branded firewall expired, I started searching on what to use next, I wished I knew XG before, I've wasted too much of my time using pfsense with blended-together packages that didn't corelate with each other, such as Snort not being able to inspect SSL traffic being decrypted by Squid, or squidguard (clamav) being complete bypassed by basic http evasions.

What hardware do you recommend? I was looking at Protectli or Qotom. Would they be good choices?

There's a lot of thread's about what hardware to use with XG Home, feel free to take a look at the community. Just remind yourself to only use Intel NIC's, and get a motherboard that have support for legacy bios. (Motherboard's with only UEFI aren't supported right now.)

Just keep in mind your limited to 4 Cores and 6GB of RAM.

Thanks!

Hello, welcome to the community!

Starting it,

Important features I am looking:

Block distracting sites (YouTube, etc) during homework and school time

You can do this with a Web Filter Policy, all you need It's to choose what you want to block and the time it will be applied.

Example:

Block Ads

Same as above, but with the Advertisements category, if it's necessary to block more domains that aren't covered with that category, you can add more domains with custom URL Groups within Sophos XG.

Example Rule currently being applied on my XG:

Block adult content and inappropriate sites on the kids devices only

Again, same as above, but with the "Nudity and Adult Content"

Example:

At the end you can have a Policy like this one:

After creating a Web Policy, you can apply it to the user you want with a firewall policy. This allows you to have different filter's being applied to different users.

Would you still get Sophos XG Free Home if you were starting over? Do you think it is better in comparison with Untangle or pfSense?

When my licenses for another branded firewall expired, I started searching on what to use next, I wished I knew XG before, I've wasted too much of my time using pfsense with blended-together packages that didn't corelate with each other, such as Snort not being able to inspect SSL traffic being decrypted by Squid, or squidguard (clamav) being complete bypassed by basic http evasions.

What hardware do you recommend? I was looking at Protectli or Qotom. Would they be good choices?

There's a lot of thread's about what hardware to use with XG Home, feel free to take a look at the community. Just remind yourself to only use Intel NIC's, and get a motherboard that have support for legacy bios. (Motherboard's with only UEFI aren't supported right now.)

Just keep in mind your limited to 4 Cores and 6GB of RAM.

Thanks!