Description
The pfSense project is a free network firewall distribution, based on the FreeBSD operating system with a custom kernel and including third party free software packages for additional functionality. pfSense software, with the help of the package system, is able to provide the same functionality or more of common commercial firewalls, without any of the artificial limitations. It has successfully replaced every big name commercial firewall you can imagine in numerous installations around the world, including Check Point, Cisco PIX, Cisco ASA, Juniper, Sonicwall, Netgear, Watchguard, Astaro, and more.
pfSense software includes a web interface for the configuration of all included components. There is no need for any UNIX knowledge, no need to use the command line for anything, and no need to ever manually edit any rule sets. Users familiar with commercial firewalls catch on to the web interface quickly, though there can be a learning curve for users not familiar with commercial-grade firewalls.
pfSense alternatives and similar tools
Based on the "Security" category.
Alternatively, view pfSense alternatives based on common mentions on social networks and blogs.
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lynis
Lynis - Security auditing tool for Linux, macOS, and UNIX-based systems. Assists with compliance testing (HIPAA/ISO27001/PCI DSS) and system hardening. Agentless, and installation optional. -
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Wazuh
Wazuh - The Open Source Security Platform. Unified XDR and SIEM protection for endpoints and cloud workloads. -
CrowdSec
CrowdSec - the open-source and participative security solution offering crowdsourced protection against malicious IPs and access to the most advanced real-world CTI. -
Suricata
Suricata is a network Intrusion Detection System, Intrusion Prevention System and Network Security Monitoring engine developed by the OISF and the Suricata community. -
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OSSEC
OSSEC is an Open Source Host-based Intrusion Detection System that performs log analysis, file integrity checking, policy monitoring, rootkit detection, real-time alerting and active response. -
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Password Pusher
🔐 Securely share sensitive information with automatic expiration & deletion after a set number of views or duration. Track who, what and when with full audit logs. -
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SpamAssassin
Read-only mirror of Apache SpamAssassin. Submit patches to https://bz.apache.org/SpamAssassin/. Do not send pull requests -
InfluxDB - Purpose built for real-time analytics at any scale.
* Code Quality Rankings and insights are calculated and provided by Lumnify.
They vary from L1 to L5 with "L5" being the highest.
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README
pfSense
Overview
The pfSense project is a free network firewall distribution, based on the FreeBSD operating system with a custom kernel and including third party free software packages for additional functionality. pfSense software, with the help of the package system, is able to provide the same functionality or more of common commercial firewalls, without any of the artificial limitations. It has successfully replaced every big name commercial firewall you can imagine in numerous installations around the world, including Check Point, Cisco PIX, Cisco ASA, Juniper, Sonicwall, Netgear, Watchguard, Astaro, and more.
pfSense software includes a web interface for the configuration of all included components. There is no need for any UNIX knowledge, no need to use the command line for anything, and no need to ever manually edit any rule sets. Users familiar with commercial firewalls catch on to the web interface quickly, though there can be a learning curve for users not familiar with commercial-grade firewalls.
pfSense started in 2004 as a fork of the m0n0wall Project (which ended 2015/02/15), though has diverged significantly since.
pfSense is Copyright 2004-2022 Rubicon Communications, LLC (Netgate) and published under an open source license. Read more at https://pfsense.org/ and support the team by buying bundled hardware appliances or commercial support.
Contribute
For information on how to contribute to the pfSense project, see [CONTRIBUTING](.github/CONTRIBUTING.md).
*Note that all licence references and agreements mentioned in the pfSense README section above
are relevant to that project's source code only.