Overall and Final Verdict
Time is money and when it comes to products like the EnGenius ESG510 it doesn’t matter if you are paying someone to handle your IT or if handling the network is just one of many tasks that someone considers their job. If you can simplify things and cut down on the time needed to keep an eye on things it is going to save you money, time, and headaches. With the ESG510 this is accomplished in a few ways. With it integrating with EnGenius Cloud you can remotely keep an eye on things when needed if you have other supported network hardware like we have on our network then everything you need to check is all in one place. The ESG510 also helps save money and headaches by supporting multiple internet connections with its dual WANs and also supporting the addition of a cellular modem as well for a third backup. You can use multiple connections to help prevent downtime and the ESG510 can use the backup connections as a fallback or load balance to gain even more bandwidth. The third area where the ESG510 helps is with how they simplify VPN use. You can quickly set up client VPNs to individual users which with the prevalence of remote work is important and you can also set up site-to-site VPNs if you have multiple offices. On top of all of that the ESG510 supports 2.5G connectivity on its WAN and LAN ports to help handle Gigabit and higher internet connections.
This is EnGenius’s first gateway and with that, it does feel like there is still room to grow on the software side of things. I came from PFSense before the ESG510 and I’m going to miss some of the plugins that allow you to handle things like Domain Name System Blacklists. When trying to pinpoint an issue while using the ESG510 it was frustrating to use the built-in diag tools that full screen. Running multiple screens I could get around it, but I can’t imagine how frustrating it would be to have those full screen with just one monitor, and when you close them the performance graphs close and start over when you reopen it. The other issue I ran into was high CPU usage on the ESG510 when I was running speed tests. I didn’t experience any internet slowdowns, but when I’m not running load balancing and I don’t have a crazy fast internet connection I don’t understand why the CPU was going up with internet use at all. Hopefully, that is a configuration issue on my end or a bug that can be fixed in the future.
As for if I will be sticking with the ESG510 long-term? Well, I am really liking the simplicity of having everything tied into EnGenius Cloud for simplicity. I may have to set up a VM or a Pi running something like Pi-Hole to get DNSB Groups to help stay on top of keeping my network secure, however. The ESG510 has an MSRP of $599 which isn’t cheap but isn’t completely out of line with the enterprise competition. In fact, CDW has it for $446 and I saw it for $420 previously. For comparison, the SonicWall TZ470 which is about as close as you get with similar 2.5G connectivity and cellular modem support has an MSRP of $840 and is selling for $672.
Live Pricing: HERE
