opnsense vs pfsense

[paco]

hello, please i want comparing between opnsense and pfsense in details and i'm lost I found they looked same of the majority and i cant know the difference please help me what do I have to do

[mimugmail]

It's best to try both and choose yourself what you like more. I bet you wont find many people in the OPNsense forums recommending pfSense

[Ciprian]

 

Also, I guess this post should be removed from Tutorials and FAQs?! :-?

[comet]

I'll take a stab at this one.  In my opinion, pfSense is trying to go more in the direction of being a commercial product.  The software itself is still free, but they would very much like you to buy one of their appliances, or a support package.

Another difference is that while you can talk about pfSense in this forum, if you even mention OPNsense in one of their forums your post will probably be removed and you run the risk of being permanently banned.  And that is for just mentioning OPNsense in a neutral manner.  There's a strong chance that your original post here would earn you a ban over there.  Also, while I don't care to get into specifics, they have something of a history of making less than truthful statements, and spreading FUD about OPNsense and the team behind it.

OPNsense gets more frequent updates than pfSense, and that matters if you are concerned about security.

If you are interested in intrusion detection, OPNsense natively supports Suricata while pfSense supports Snort (although I think you may be able to install either package in both).  Neither is what I would consider easy to set up.  Also, in both packages the GUI interface can change significantly over versions, so if you find a video or screenshot from a couple of years ago or older, it may not look very much like what you'd see in a current version.

I personally think the OPNsense interface is somewhat better designed than the pfSense one, although some pages are very similar.

The one downside I have found with OPNsense is that because it is a newer project, there are not as many relevant videos and help pages as there are for pfSense.  In fact, often when you search for something related to OPNsense, the search engines will say "Did you mean pfSense?" and then proceed to show you pfSense results anyway.

Neither project is exactly what I would call new-user friendly.  If your only experience with networking up until now is with off-the-shelf routers, you may find that doing some basic things that are easy enough in those routers more difficult in either of these distributions.  I won't say any more about that so as not to start another "argument" (I'm referencing a bad experience in another thread here) but if you are new to this, don't have very high expectations about easily finding understandable help.  On the other hand, if you have taken networking classes or have a lot of experience in networking, you'll probably be fine.  You don't NEED those to use either software package, just saying the road will be easier if you've had that education and/or experience.

All of the above is just my opinion; I'm sure there are other equally valid opinions that would differ from mine.

[Davesworld]

I like the fact that it embraces hardened BSD and the devs are very accessible. I came here from trying PFsense and immediately liked the gui and the open nature. There is a big learning curve for both after using much simpler firewalls and some tutorials can be applied to either firewall.

[fabian]

moved to general

[dcol]

IMO OPNsense has a friendlier GUI. Also, I never got IPS (inline) to work with the 'other' sense. And IMO, without IPS a firewall is not a true firewall. Otherwise the two are close in performance and features. PFblocker is one nice feature in pfsense, but you can achieve similar results with different features in OPNsense. PFblocker is the only feature I miss. I certainly don't miss the rudeness in their forums. I started asking about OPNsense over there and was abruptly banned. That speaks volumes to me. I highly suggest if you bridge both, use different usernames.

[Ciprian]

Fortunately for me, since I started using OPNsense directly and since the beginning, and not migrated from pfSense, there is no need for me to register on their forum too.

But, I have to admit, every once in a while, when I don't get the answer around here, (and since Google still considers OPNsense a typo for pfSense - "did you mean 'Suricata IPS on pfSense'?") I pay a visit there, and double my chances to find at least a lead, if not the answer itself.

[kapara]

I would recommend going with Opnsense at this point as it is my understanding because of the fact that they can not monetize on the software of pfSense due to its licensing that they will be moving to a new solution based on Linux.  This means we will see much less development going towards pfSense if at all.

[franco]

It's a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, but the reason why OPNsense was forked was exactly to anticipate this change of behaviour in pfSense.

https://marc.info/?l=pfsense-dev&m=139616950115681&w=2

Nobody bothered to answer this, but forking OPNsense was met with unrelenting resistance later on.

Fortunately, those early years are behind us now.


Cheers,
Franco

[Ciprian]

As far as I understand your email, I would say stealing an open source piece of code is stealing even (and especially) if is open sourced.

Competition is bliss!

[franco]

My complaint was simply that outside contributions were sidelined or maybe just cherry-picked. Combined with the refrain of "we are open source" and "our tools repository access is now restricted" and "we need more contributions" and "what have you ever done for pfsense" there is not a lot of ground for valid discussion on how to bring a project forward long-term.


Cheers,
Franco

[8064r7]

It's a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, but the reason why OPNsense was forked was exactly to anticipate this change of behaviour in pfSense.

https://marc.info/?l=pfsense-dev&m=139616950115681&w=2

Nobody bothered to answer this, but forking OPNsense was met with unrelenting resistance later on.

Fortunately, those early years are behind us now.


Cheers,
Franco

BTW - thx for all of this & continuing to steer the community (which this at least is compared to whatever PFSense is nowadays).  I started doing some research test a few months ago and now have started the complete production transition in my homelab and relative sites to OPNSense at those edges.  I have yet to come across any question that wasn't either natively intuitive to solve, or had ample support from the wiki/community.  Overall the front-end is just more intuitive than PFSense's for me.

[franco]

Hey 8064r7,

Thank you for your support!  <3


Cheers,
Franco

[rpsmith]

Don't waist you time on pfsense!  Just go straight to the OPNsense download link!

You'll be glad you did 

Roy...