But if you have a hardware firewall running pfSense or OPNsense, you might also have a plug-in console port. That can be invaluable when needing to recover a failed configuration change or update ...
When deciding on software to run on a hardware firewall, there are currently two main contenders: pfSense, which has been around for a long time, and OPNsense, which started out as a fork of pfSense.