We performed a comparison between OPNsense and pfSense based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: According to our user feedback, pfSense is the superior option when compared to OPNsense. It is highly stable, easy to use, and cost-effective, making it a popular choice. Users appreciate its ability to be customized, its web interface, and its monitoring capabilities. Despite some suggestions for improvements, pfSense is highly praised for its scalability and flexibility. It is also cost-effective for small and medium businesses, with no ongoing fees and a significant return on investment.
"Fortigate represents a really scalable way of delivering perimeter network security, some level of layer 7 security, WAF, and also a way to create a meshed ADVPN solution."
"I'm pretty happy with its reliability. It is also very scalable."
"All of the features of Fortinet FortiGate are useful and the security protection is good."
"It increases security posture and is helpful for firewall reporting, intrusion protection, web filtering, and SD-WAN implementation."
"Security solution with a straightforward and quick setup. It's a stable and scalable product."
"Fortigate's most valuable feature is that it doesn't need a push policy when writing rules."
"The scalability of Fortinet FortiGate is good."
"Fortinet offers the latest versions to cater to the needs of enterprises."
"The GUI is easy to understand."
"pfSense is a nice product, and I find that there's a lot of information out there. There are some good tutorials on YouTube and other websites with helpful information."
"pfSense allows us to spread the hours of connection and do the filtering on the pfSense site."
"I like pfSense's security features."
"It is a very good solution for enterprises that need a VPN for their employees. It is the best way to provide a remote work facility to employees at a very low cost. Other solutions that I have had in the past were very expensive. Enterprises don't always have that kind of money to invest."
"The plugins or add-ons are most valuable. Sometimes, they are free of charge, and sometimes, you have to pay for them, but you can purchase or download very valuable plugins or add-ons to perform internal testing of your network and simulate a denial-of-service attack or whichever attack you want to simulate. You can also remote and monitor your network and see where the gap is. Did you forget a printer port? Most attacks at the moment are happening through printers, and they can tell you immediately that you forgot to close the port of the printer. There are more than one million printers that are in danger, and everybody knows that hackers are using them to enter the network. So, you can download plugins to protect your network."
"The classic features such as content inspection, content protection, and the application-level firewall, are the most important."
"My technicians find the pfSense's web interface very useful. It is very easy to use. pfSense is very reliable and stable. We like the OpenVPN clients that can be deployed using pfSense very much."
"It's open source."
"What I like best about OPNsense is that, as a firewall, it's pretty good. I'm quite impressed with it. I had an excellent experience with OPNsense, which helped me achieve the targets I wanted."
"It's more secure and more reliable."
"OPNsense is highly stable."
"It has an open license. It works very well, and there is an update every month."
"The solution has high availability."
"One of the most valuable features is the network checking. Additionally, the firewall and web filtering functionalities are highly useful."
"The IDS and IPS features are valuable. From the usability perspective, there is a lot of good documentation. As IT professionals, we found it very easy to configure the firewall. It was easy to configure and use."
"I'm not sure if it's something that they already have or are developing something, however, we need some dedicated features for container security."
"I would like reporting to be improved and should offer a lot more tools to monitor the products."
"The scalability could be better."
"With the reports, you can see it, and you can get good feelings so upper management can go, "Oh, wow. That looks pretty." However, it's very basic."
"Fortigate's hardware capacities could be improved."
"Currently, FortiGate is providing SSL VPN. But they're missing some features that are available in Palo Alto's SSL VPN."
"Its price could be better."
"I would like to see improvements in the product's application rules."
"I expect a better interface with more log analysis because I create my own interface."
"It would be great to add more to security."
"I'd like to find something in pfSense that is more specific to URL filtering. We have customers who would like to filter their web traffic. They would like to be able to say to their employees, "You can surf the web, but you cannot get access to Facebook or other social media," or "You can surf the web, but you're not allowed to gamble or watch porn on the web." My technicians say that doing this kind of stuff with pfSense nowadays is not easy. They can implement some filters using IP addresses but not by using the names of the domains and categories. So, we are not able to exclude some categories from the allowed traffic, such as porn, gambling, etc. To do that, we have to use another product and another web filter that uses DNS. I know that there are some third-party products that could work with pfSense, but I'd like the native pfSense solution to do that."
"The user interface can be improved to make it easier to add more features. And pfSense could be better integrated with other solutions, like antivirus."
"More documentation would be great, especially on new features because sometimes, when new features come out, you don't get to understand them right off the bat. You have to really spend a lot of time understanding them. So, more documentation would be awesome."
"The integration should be improved."
"I would like to see pfSense integrate WireGuard. Currently, pfSense uses OpenVPN, and there's nothing wrong with it, but WireGuard is a lot leaner and meaner."
"The integration of pfSense with EPS and EDS could be better. Also, it should be easier to get reports on how many users are connecting simultaneously and how sections connect in real-time."
"While they do have paid options that actually gives better features, for most of the clients, if they tend to take a paid option will instead opt for Fortinet."
"There is room for improvement in SSL inspection."
"OPNsense could improve by making the configuration more web-based rather than shell or command-line-based."
"The reporting part could be better."
"The IPS solution could be more reliable."
"The user interface could be improved, and the DNS section should be more intuitive."
"An area for improvement in OPNsense is the hardware, which needs to be updated more frequently. DNS blocking is another good feature I want to be added to the solution. pfSense has a peer-blocking feature that I also want to see in OPNsense."
"When using the solution at the beginning was difficult. There was a steep learning curve."
Netgate pfSense is ranked 2nd in Firewalls with 22 reviews while OPNsense is ranked 4th in Firewalls with 17 reviews. Netgate pfSense is rated 8.6, while OPNsense is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Netgate pfSense writes "Feature-rich, well documented, and there is good support available online". On the other hand, the top reviewer of OPNsense writes "There are lots of capabilities built-in: Few would be High Availability, Proxy, DNS, Intrusion detection/prevention, content filtering, traffic and bandwidth management with 2factor autn. ". Netgate pfSense is most compared with Sophos XG, Untangle NG Firewall, Sophos UTM, Cisco Secure Firewall and WatchGuard Firebox, whereas OPNsense is most compared with Sophos XG, Untangle NG Firewall, Sophos UTM, Cisco Secure Firewall and WatchGuard Firebox. See our Netgate pfSense vs. OPNsense report.
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