My main use case for OPNsense is that it is my home firewall for my home lab.

A quick specific example of how I use OPNsense in my home lab is that I use VLANs, so I have different networks or sub-networks inside my home network, and the VLAN inside of OPNsense allows me to keep them isolated.

I have added some firewall rules to allow different devices to talk to different subnets regarding how I'm using OPNsense in my home lab.

The best features OPNsense offers include the VLANs that work spotlessly, and I feel very secure in my network because of it. It was relatively easy to set up, though I think a better wizard would help out.

One of the things I appreciated about the VLANs is that I can have a Wi-Fi VLAN and feel secure that the server network or the VM network that I have on a different VLAN are isolated, and they cannot talk to one another, which adds a great level of security.

OPNsense has positively impacted my organization and home lab through its security features, though it's hard to quantify as I don't pay enough attention to the logs to see what it's stopping from an outside perspective. It's actually sitting behind my modem from my ISP and I'm not in bridge mode.

OPNsense definitely gives me peace of mind and helps my workflow because of the network isolation. I can have multiple subnets without having to worry about one affecting the other.

OPNsense could be improved with a better wizard, as when I first installed it, it seemed difficult to know where to go. I had to watch a couple of YouTube videos on it, so having better videos sponsored by OPNsense might be helpful.

It would be beneficial if they could create some videos on how to set it up themselves.

I have been using OPNsense for about two years now.

OPNsense is stable for me.

OPNsense's scalability in my experience is very scalable, and I've been able to generate multiple VLANs without seeming to have any degradation.

I had not previously used a different solution for my firewall; this was the first one I tried.

Unfortunately, I have not seen a return on investment with OPNsense; I don't keep track of that, beyond the sense of saying that for a very little investment, I was able to increase the security of my network.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that since OPNsense is free, the licensing and setup was easy, and honestly, it's great for the price.

Before choosing OPNsense, I did evaluate other options, specifically I looked at pfSense first.

The advice I would give to others looking into using OPNsense is to absolutely go play with it. For little cost, if you have an extra machine around that you can test it out on, test it out. I'm running it on a low-end mini PC with multiple network interfaces and it works great.

I would say that OPNsense is one of those technologies, a firewall that if you're not playing with, you should, just to keep your skills up and to secure your home network.

On a scale of 1-10, I rate OPNsense an 8.

Neutral

I use OPNsense primarily for network security. It involves basic firewall operations and GeoIP location functionalities. I've got multiple versions running, some on hardware purchased and some on VPSs.

The most valuable features include the basic firewall functionality and the GeoIP location services. OPNsense is very stable, easy to upgrade, and maintain. I can work efficiently, knowing it does what it needs to do.

OPNsense should improve its performance in handling large volumes of voice traffic. It needs more support for Vigoroute and extensive VPN technologies. Enhancing its performance for significant amounts of data traffic would make it closer to a perfect solution.

I've been working with OPNsense for about five years.

I rate OPNsense's stability as very high. I would give it a nine out of ten. The only challenge faced was its inadequacy to manage large voice traffic effectively, even with dedicated hardware. It couldn't keep up with the packet per second for voice load, requiring a revert in our setup.

OPNsense struggles to handle large volumes of voice traffic, indicating scalability issues in that specific use case.

I haven't used technical support. I rely on forums and manage the setup independently.

The only other similar product I can compare is FortiGate. Overall, I find OPNsense more user-friendly.

I consider the pricing of OPNsense to be high when compared with other market products. However, as a free firewall product, it is one of the best available currently.

I only evaluated FortiGate alongside OPNsense, as they are the two offerings from my company.

For small to medium businesses, I recommend OPNsense. I'd rate it eight point five out of ten.

I mostly rely on the solution's network intrusion detection and prevention system, along with other systems, CMs, and log management. We are currently satisfied with the solution's threat intelligence. It's a pretty much in-house developed solution because it's in a Wazuh server. We have several scripts around it, allowing us to improve our posture on threats.

SD-WAN (software-defined wide area network) is integrated into some restricted service providers for OPNSense.

I pretty much like the solution's APIs, but it's somehow limited. I would like the APIs to be more mature and more developed and have more options to automate threat hunting. Also, I would like to see more drill-down possibilities.

We have to rely on specific hardware for the in-depth analysis of NetFlow. Although we have an interface on OPNsense, it's not as easy to use on the security side as other solutions.

I have been using OPNsense since 2016.

I rate the solution ten out of ten for stability.

OPNsense is an extremely scalable solution. I played on one network with CARP, and I was pretty happy with what I achieved there.

Before OPNsense, we worked with the Cisco ASA 5505 product for three years. Although it included the FirePOWER part, it was quite a poor experience.

OPNsense has helped reduce the speed of threat detection and containment from 50 minutes to 15 minutes.

I have quite a background in Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) systems. I was looking into BSD, especially for the packet filter side. While evaluating, OPNsense was the most solid solution. I was also considering pfSense as my first option, but it is not so strong on the file system side.

OPNsense is a strong and solid solution that is easy to interact with. I don't see much on the new generation of firewalls, and only a few solutions are available for OPNsense. OPNsense handles network traffic much faster during peak loads because it's on dedicated hardware. I would recommend OPNsense when no specific topic prevents me from recommending OpenSense.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

The tool's integration is more like a button press. 

pfSense has better performance and quicker updates.

I have been working with the product for six months. 

The tool is more stable than pfSense because it has the drivers for my network card, Realtek. I didn't know at the time because manufacturers sometimes don't advertise what network cards they come with. I bought a computer with Realtek, and pfSense says immediately, out of the box, that it doesn't work with Realtek cards. OPNsense is the same, but it does have a way of installing the Realtek drivers, which gives you a lot more stability overall on the system.

I didn't contact the tool's technical team yet. 

The tool's deployment is easy. Apart from Cisco firewalls and Fortinet, if we talk about Untangle, pfSense, OPNsense, and so on, they are fairly quick to set up. It's not something you spend too much time on. It's a firewall, so you can spend months tweaking the system. If you know what you're doing, you can spend forever on logs, checking and tweaking the system because there's always a new update or feature coming up. Then you start playing with them, tweaking settings, checking logs, blocking or unblocking different things.

You can stay in that loop forever. But for a startup, the initial configuration is fairly easy and quick. It can be completed in 30 minutes. 

I've used the free version. My computer with two network cards at home allows me to try as many different software options as I want. I did pay for the license, but it was for the Zenarmor license, which is the packet inspection tool. They use AI for packet inspection, which integrates with OPNsense and pfSense.

I'm not using OPNsense at the moment. I work with many different technologies and keep testing various setups. Currently, I've gone fully customized. I'm using a Linux server configured as my router and firewall, and I'm using Zenarmor for packet inspection.

This setup allowed me to easily configure SSL VPN and port forwarding for specific ports, which isn't as straightforward with other systems. I've tried several, including Untangle, pfSense, and OPNsense, but found them somewhat restrictive.

OpenSense is quite good. I like it. It has many services and is somewhat similar to the WatchGuard system. I honestly have no complaints; it was a very good experience. It's easy to set up, especially if you know what you're doing. It also offers a nice library of add-ons.

However, if you have appliances with Intel network cards, I would probably go for pfSense instead. Firmware updates and other updates come a bit faster, making it a more reliable service than OPNsense. 

Everything that comes up on OPNsense appears first on pfSense. Some features are not yet available on OPNsense, and they haven't announced a release date. However, I'm confident they will eventually release these features, as they have previously done.

Ultimately, choosing between pfSense and OPNsense is more of a personal preference since they are very similar. Both are FreeBSD systems, operating in similar situations and offering comparable functionality.

Now, I'm just using a Linux server. I can monitor the system, reboot the card, install Apache, and redirect web servers within my home directly to the firewall. This eliminates the need for third-party boxes or other connected computers, allowing me to do everything in the same box. It gives me a lot more freedom.

That's the main reason I stopped using the other systems. I used OPNsense for about six months, which shows I've tried various solutions to find the best one. Despite all the good things I'm saying about OPNsense, I did stay with it longer than pfSense.

I traveled to China, so I used my home as my VPN instead of paying for one. They block VPN services in China, so I was using OpenVPN at home. OpenVPN is a known service, but it gets blocked there. The only way to do it was through SSL VPN, which worked fine. But, talking about OPNsense, everything was working fine. I had no problems. I just had to move away because I needed to use port 443 for something else on my web server, and I can't have a web server together with other stuff. It's a bit more complicated to configure because I use Nginx and Apache, too. You can install these tools on OPNsense, but I found it more complicated than just going onto the command line and doing it.

If you want to use something like OPNsense for FreeBSD, use pfSense instead. Unless, obviously, like me, the person in question has some hardware incompatibility with pfSense. Only then would I go for OPNsense. Because, I mean, they're the same systems, but pfSense is a bit better in terms of overall performance, and security updates come quicker and more often.

I rate the overall product an eight out of ten. 

I use OPNsense for network security.

What I like the most about OPNsense is that it offers an easy-to-use dashboard for device management and control. It also provides good security.

In terms of improvement, the performance could be enhanced.

I have been using OPNsense for a year.

Overall, I would rate OPNsense as a ten out of ten. I would recommend it to others.