OPNSense caveats

Privacy Questions
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And I was reading this thread Video: Why I am Not Using OPNSense - r/opnsense and Is OPNsense comparable to pfSense? Can an OPNsense firewall replace a pfSense firewall for/on a home LAN? - r/homelab

pfsense seems to have terrible behavior towards open source projects, their community and overall business practices.

Hope OPNSense ships security updates faster than that (it is usually just a couple of days difference compared to pfsense) and improve their Wireguard implementation. Other than that, the project is really great, and have a better UI compared to pfsense.

Do you guys have any other opinions? their security updates got any better or their wireguard’s implementation?

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I use pfSense for my firewall at home.

I have this sort of same issue with Michael Jackson. I don’t like the guy but the music has does have merit (IMHO). I just listen to the radio but I don’t support and buy his albums. This was when he was alive.

Its the same with pfSense. I use the community version and don’t pay the devs.

The software truly has merit and AFAIK its parent company Netgate directly supports the development of its underlying FreeBSD so even if you pay them, you are helping maintain BSDs indirectly (so you can transfer to the BSD bandwagon when Linux becomes mainstream :rofl:)

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I am a pfSense customer and my experience with Netgate has been overall nice, I’d certainly recommend them and when I discovered a bug in a pretty niche software package their support team sent me a custom patch to apply until it was fixed within 24 hours.

I don’t think you can really go wrong with pfSense or OPNsense as a free user, although the technical arguments made in the forum post you linked are insightful. I feel like there’s a lot of drama about Netgate locking features behind pfSense+ and getting rid of their free(?) “homelab license,” but they’re genuinely features that really no home user has a reason to use in the first place.

I like the Netgate 8300 hardware a lot and I think it is more performant than comparably priced hardware sold by OPNsense.[1]

They’ve both acted pretty immaturely to each other in the past. pfSense a bit more so. Classic open-source drama :crazy_face:

  1. Another reason I went with Netgate is that I could switch from pfSense to TNSR in the future if I ever need to, which is genuinely very impressive router software (but we are talking for like 100Gbps+ so probably not relevant to most lol) ↩︎

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Do note that lawrence system is a commercial entity that do network consultation for consumers. They also sells hardware and are partnered with the bjg networks company out there. You can see that by watching some of their youtube videos.

There might be some conflict of interest due to the business relation with competitor of opnsense.