A silly Question, is there a better alternative to pfsense for home use?

[Patrick]

@SamDabbers even better: Proxmox VM.

On the pfSense v. opnsense v. Sophos v. untangle v. ipfire. Here is some perspective that is very important:


If you do "Sophos UTM" instead of Sophos, the search levels over the last year are with the other four.

There is still an enormous gap between pfSense and some of the smaller projects.

@Rhinox looks like one of the free clickbait articles we get offered to run on STH. You can see the indented link list that the site you linked removed the links for. Also, the formatting has no headers other than Verdict. Most bigger sites will have subheadings. It is strange to have a review like that missing performance, stability, and etc.

 

[mstone]

There is still an enormous gap between pfSense and some of the smaller projects.

Sure, they have a bigger search share. (I'd argue, for mainly historical reasons.) That doesn't have much impact on whether they're still the best choice for all the reasons already covered. I'm also skeptical that this methodology really proves much other than the fact that pfsense has exactly one product and is easy to google, while most of the market leading firewalls have a bunch of products and are hard to tease out of google search results.

Google Trends

 

[Nnyan]

I've used pfsense for a long time then moved to opnsense. Very feature rich and powerful but over the years things would go sideways and while most of the time I could googlefu a fix sometimes a rebuild was the only way to get back up and running. I ran sophos utm for awhile and would try XG now and then, but until recently it was buggy, incomplete and SLOW. The latest versions had me sold. Responsive and solid. Feature wise still missing some things but nothing I needed. If it wasn't for me moving to Unifi I would still be running it.

 

[Deslok]

Just to throw another opinion in the fire, I've been using OPNsense since I moved last fall and it's been solid, I have it running in hyper-v on a 3770 without too much fuss(I know Ivy Bridge is old but new hardware costs money) and since I dislike realtek anyway I haven't had any issues with it. Running in the vmhost which I have running anyway has been a space saver although I did consider this mikrotik since I have one at a remote site for work as well and like it, but free is very appealing when you have time to set things up. MikroTik

 

[Nnyan]

Having used pfSense, OPNsense and Sophos UTM for many years I think they all work pretty well. I prefer the OPNSense GUI (cleaner, easier to find things overall IMHO) but that is subjective. Sophos is a nicer looking UI but it too can be a bit scattered as to where things are but it worked well enough. I tried XG since beta now and then and until recently I would not recommend it but lately it's really been smooth and solid. I was using that until I moved to Unifi gear. BUT I'm looking to install XG in bridge mode (inline to the USG) in the near future. PFS and OPNS are great but when something goes wrong it really goes wrong. At least OPNS had a nice restore function that worked well (not quite as nice as the XG but well enough).

 

[Patrick]

@Nnyan - my home pfSense box died recently. I had a SG-1000 lying around. Booted it, restored from the backup configuration, and everything was back up in a matter of a few minutes. Fairly good for x86 to ARM transition.

 

[Stril]

Hi!

I prefer mikrotik for home use, but the biggest problem is the same for all systems:
Maintaining large rule-sets is a pain. The best solution, I ever found was fwbuilder, which is making every linux-system a great firewall with object-based rule management and the ability to use rulesets for many systems, BUT:

The system is opensource, but without a maintainer. I would be willing to pay a lot to get a new version...

 

[Nnyan]

@Patrick I didn't want to give the impression that pfSense didn't have a restore function, it does and it does work for the most part but I have had a number of issues over time with restores. OPNsense isn't perfect either but I had fewer restore issues but that could have just been chance.