OPNsense Reviews

We upgrade our clients when they are ready for the newer versions of OPNsense.

We are one of the local cloud providers in Indonesia. We implement OPNsense for the VPN and IPSec. We also collaborate with Zerotier to provide SD-WAN.  

Our customers have solutions that integrate between on-premises and our cloud.

We provide this solution for several clients, in multi-location offices. We have several retail customers in the city and we provide OPNsense with plug-in remote access. 

We also use OPNsense for remote access, and IPSec gives them access to a cloud environment as well as on-premises.

OPNsense is easy to scale when running on the hardware.

The interface needs to be simplified. It is not user-friendly.

The bandwidth management is easy to use, but very hard to implement. The multi-provider internet is protected by OPNsence but the features are limited, and not stable.

The high availability feature is not feasible when the hardware fails.

I have been working with OPNsense since 2008.

Internally we are using the latest version. 

The stability of OPNsense needs improvement.

OPNsense is commonly used in large enterprise companies.

We have not yet contacted technical support. All of the technical issues are resolved within our company.

We are also using pfSense.

The initial setup is straightforward. It's an easy process.

It takes one hour to deploy.

We provide maintenance for our clients at a cost, however, 90% of our clients are familiar with the product and able to maintain the solution themselves.

We are implementors, and we provide this solution for our clients.

As an appliance, it's in the medium price range.

OPNsense is suitable for Small to Medium-sized companies.

I would recommend this solution to others who are interested in using it.

I would rate OPNsense an eight out of ten.

I am currently working with OPNsense to see if I can learn it. This product is used in small to medium-sized businesses for security, UTM, and other similar operations. We are a solution provider and this is one of the security solutions that we implement for our clients.

Offering this solution has provided some of our clients with firewall protection and UTM, which basically just protects them from the internet.

The most valuable features are reporting, the Sensei plugin, and firewall capabilities.

The vendor should offer compatibility-approved boxes, or at least stock one with OPNsense already installed. This would make it a one-stop-shop, and people would not have to worry about sourcing the hardware separately.

I would like to see better SD-WAN performance. I think that could be a very good bonus because SD-WAN is all the rage these days. That is probably the big thing that people need to improve upon, in terms of combining two, three, or four links.

The interface should continue to improve, which would make things a bit easier. For me, it was already easy, but nonetheless, it is quicker to install a FortiGate firewall.

I have been working with OPNsense for approximately one year.

This is a very stable product and I've had no issues with it.

This product is very scalable. I always buy hardware that can handle a lot of connections and a lot of users. So, in terms of scalability, all you have to do is upgrade your hardware. Or, it is especially scalable if you use the VM version because you only have to provision more resources.

We regularly have between 20 and 50 users, although sometimes it is as little as 5 or 10.        

I have not been in contact with technical support. So far, everything has been good because I just use Google to find all of the answers and all of my solutions.

I primarily work with FortiGate, but I am currently dabbling in OPNSense to see if I can learn it. I've also installed Cisco in the past, as well as Sophos.

FortiGate is a better firewall but that is commercial software that you have to buy a license for. OPNsense is suitable for small to medium-sized businesses. FortiGate is definitely quicker to install because you just buy the appliance. It's also more user-friendly.

If you dabble a bit with OPNsense, it can do about 90% of what FortiGate can do, but FortiGate is more user-friendly. Of course, with OPNsense being open-source, it will always beat FortiGate on price.

I think that with FortiGate, it is easier to log a support call. I haven't really needed technical support for OPNsense, but I know that FortiGate has the score logging facility, whereby you can just quickly log a call. There's also support in South Africa and I know company people that I can just call for help with FortiGate. But with OPNsense, I haven't really had a complicated setup, so for me, it has been okay and it hasn't been an issue.

The SD-WAN is also better on FortiGate. I think that they are heavily focused on security, so they might have better application profiles and other things, such as application threat detections.

Although about 80% of our clients ask for FortiGate, some of our clients ask for Sophos instead. For example, there are some banks and commercial institutions that ask for Sophos.

The initial setup is straightforward and quite simplified. I work in a Linux environment so for me, it will be a bit easier.

OPNsense is an open-source solution and it is free to use. You need only purchase the hardware.

The suitability of this product often depends on the size of the company, although sometimes there are clients that just want FortiGate and they're not open for negotiation. Personally, I like open-source and it's always a bonus if I can get stuff for free.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

It is the main firewall for one of our locations. We use it for intrusion detection and prevention. We are using the latest software version, but the hardware is not the latest.

The VPN server feature is the most valuable. It is integrated with Radius and AAA for doing accounting and authentication.

Insight view is also an important feature for me at this time. It allows me to assess our network traffic. I also like the firewall feature. The BSD kernel has a packet filter. It is one of the most solid frameworks for firewalls.

Its user interface is one of the best interfaces I have used. 

The only thing that I would like to see improved is the Insight or the NetFlow analysis part. It would be good to have the possibility to dig down on the Insight platform. Right now, we can easily do only a few analyses. If this page becomes more powerful, it surely will be a well-adopted platform.

I started to use OPNsense about three years ago.

It is stable, but for us, it is not yet so reliable. Our server is an old DL120 HP Server, which is from the year 2006. We have ordered another appliance. After we receive the new appliance, it would be more stable for us.

It scales well for our needs. I haven't tried any horizontal or vertical scaling so far.

I did not need any technical support.

I used pfSense two years ago, but I was not so happy with our system protection. I have also previously used Cisco ASA appliance. It was a 5505 model, but it failed because of the hardware issues. It was prone to hardware failure, and in one month, we lost both firewalls. It was also not so easy to see traffic with Cisco ASA. I could not easily identify traffic issues. 

The initial setup was straightforward. I also have experience with BSD services, so I had no issues at all. It took us half an hour to deploy it for 250 users.

We deployed it ourselves. There was no need for a consultant for the deployment. We have two engineers for its deployment and maintenance.

It is not an expensive product. Basically, I deployed it because it was the fastest solution to satisfy our needs in open source.

We plan to continue using this solution. Right now, we are settling our networks. We plan to expand its usage, but I don't think it will happen until 2022.

It has a good user interface. Its configuration is simple but requires a little planning. It is much simpler than the Cisco ASA configuration.

I would recommend this solution. I would rate OPNsense a nine out of ten. I am happy with it.

Our primary use case of this solution is for VPN connections. We are currently supporting an SAP company, which has many customers, and most customers need a site-to-site active set connection for maintaining the SAP systems. We currently have round about 200 VPNs.

The feature I find most valuable is that the program helped me to realize all the requested functionality that was needed:

- IPsec VPN connections to remote gateways from various Vendors

- IPsec VPN connections with SNAT (our local network in use at remote site)

- IPsec connections with DNAT (remote network in use at our local site)

- Let's Encrypt certificate for WebGUI

- SSH Access by Putty to the device

Something that needs to improve is the translation. This comes into play when you have a remote and a local site and you have to work with two different transfer networks for each direction. What I'm missing is user portal for downloading the configurations for SSL VPN clients. It's still not implemented so it seems that this product is still in a developing process. 

Sometimes it's a little difficult to find some examples for special scenarios. But we have to keep trying and I believe it is possible. It's quite a suitable possibility to use it for VPN connections.

The monitoring is a little complicated and I have tried to use a plug-in, but it's quite complicated to configure. I had to write my own script.

With the VPN solutions, it is possible  to cover up all the scenarios which we have. For instance, if you have a customer and your local network is already in use, you have to work with source nat. It is possible and it works. Another issue that customers sometimes have Networks, which are already in use on out local site. It means you have to work with a destination nat but it is possible to create. 

I would, therefore, like to see the monitoring of the firewall being easier to configure, or to have more templates for this so that you can download the configurations for each scenario and get more detailed descriptions like how all the available plug-ins are performing.

I am currently running it on Hyper-V and so far I have had no problems. It is currently stable enough.

We have 250 people in our company using this program who are able to run the SAP systems with side-to-side connections between the company and the customers. We have six people for deployment and maintenance. I am responsible for the networking. 

There is no technical team in the Netherlands, but so far I fixed my own issues by reading up on the internet.

We are using several VPN gateways. We are using our primary solutions in our company, making all the IT for the complete caller group. The caller group has around about 1,600 people in 10 companies. They are part of this group. We have one, main office and several branch offices.

We are using Juniper SSG Firewalls for Site2Site IPsec connections to customers and this Equipment is working really good. Unfortunately this devices will be running out og supprot soon, so we have to look for some alternatives.

The central equipment we use is Sophos UTM/SG and Sophos XG configured as high availability. The branch offices are connected by Sophos RED and we mainly use Sophos RED 50 with the AP 55 access points configured as WPA2 Enterprise. For central management, everything is managed in the main office. We are using SMTP proxy with anti-span and anti-virus on SG solutions. This is the only one that doesn't work because we have a problem in that our exchange users are too many, and there are too many accounts - this fact caused the Appache runnig out of ressources.

An example would be if you have one workstation with two smartphones, and each person has maybe three or four sessions opened on the exchange. If you have 1,400 accounts, you can reach 8,000 sessions. If the Appache message scoreboard is full is comming up, no further users can connect. We have contacted Sophos support to solve this but they were not able to do this - the only effect was a correction of the sizing guide from Sophos. 

The setup was straightforward and the only mistake you can make is not to log in at the installer during the setup. I made this mistake once and configured a lot of features. After doing this I could not save the configurations on a disc. Generally, it was quite easy to install and to configure. 

The initial deployment took about two hours but figuring out how it works in detail and to run a roundabout took two or three days. 

There are no licensing costs for OPNsense.

We had to evaluate other solutions because our primary solution was Juniper SRX, but we were not happy with the features. So we had no other choice and we were forced to look for something else. We use the Sophos XG firewall because we can configure it directly from Azure. 

We found the OPNsense solution interesting because there are no costs. In Azure, you only pay for the virtual machine. 

My advice would be to compare all the solutions because they all offer something different. Find out what's available and get a feeling for the product and look at the configurations on the firewall. 

In the next version, I would like a friendlier user interface where the users can look at and download the configurations for the OPNsense clients.

My rating for this solution is a seven out of ten.

The most valuable feature of OPNsense is compatibility.

OPNsense could improve by making the configuration more web-based rather than shell or command-line-based.

The timeline for new features could be better. They could be faster at updating features.

I have been using OPNsense for approximately 10 months.

OPNsense is stable.

We have a maximum of approximately 80 users using this solution on a daily basis.

I have not used the support from OPNsense.

I was previously using pfSense but I switched to OPNsense because it was a newer kernel, which would have worked better with our upgraded hardware.

I have used ClearOS for a long time prior to pfSense.

The initial setup of OPNsense is very easy.

I rate the initial setup of OPNsense a four out of five.

The price of OPNsense is good.

I rate the price of OPNsense a five out of five.

I advise others before they start to see the documentation of the solution first. The documentation was very useful.

I rate OPNsense an eight out of ten.

I rated the solution an eight because there's always room for improvement. It's not a perfect solution.

The system in general is quite flexible.

The interface isn't so friendly user. But we have some technicians here who are quite confident with this tool. OPNSense could maybe add sets of rules so it's simpler to manage different groups with particular needs.

We've used OPNSense over the last six months.

The support service isn't very accessible, so you have to look at the forums to solve some issues. It would be better if they could offer this product with an associated support service.

It's quite easy to install and configure the rules.

The main cost is the hardware. We don't pay anything for the software.

I would rate OPNSense five out of 10.

I am using OPNsense as a security platform at work but am currently working from home and using it for network access.

I have found the solution has some great features overall, such as guest access capabilities, dashboards, and ease of use. There is plenty of documentation and support and it has the plugins that I needed.

The logging could improve in OPNsense.

I have been using OPNsense for approximately one year.

The solution is stable.

OPNsense is scalable.

I have contacted the support for the Open Source plugin and the company has been really supportive. Within approximately an hour or two I was receiving a response, I was really impressed with the support.

There is fantastic community support available online.

The installation was straightforward.

I have been very happy with the solution.

I rate OPNsense an eight out of ten.

We use the solution for an SD-WAN firewall.

We have found pretty much all the features of the solution to be valuable.

The solution could be more secure. 

I have been using OPNsense for upwards of ten years. 

The solution is very stable.

The solution is scalable. 

As we have in excess of 2,000 solutions deployed in the field, there is no need for us to increase its usage. It is already sufficiently increased. 

In the past we used pfSense. We have also used Sophos and Palo Alto Firewall but have replaced many of these solutions.

Our initial setup was more on the straightforward side.

It did not take a long time, although this can hinge on what needs to be accomplished. 

We handled the deployment on our own. 

The technical team required for deployment and maintenance purposes is small, probably around five people for every 100 devices.

It consist of a combination of managers, administrators and engineers.

The choice of a license on a yearly or monthly basis is optional. 

The solution is not expensive. 

There are several hundred users in our organization who are utilizing the solution. 

I would absolutely recommend the solution to others who are contemplating its implementation.

I rate OPNsense as a ten out of ten.