OPNsense vs. pfSense Round 4: GUI

This is a short one because both OPNsense and pfSense offer themes. Both have some dark mode options and the rest of the topic is too subjective to be worthy a long debate.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

pfSense:

You can choose between light and dark themes and a bunch of accent colors. In 2.5.1 I find on many instances the UI will hang and restart all day long. Trying to edit an attribute or access a menu works for about 20 seconds then dies for the rest of the minute. Super tedious.

May 9 04:48:06 nginx 2021/05/09 04:48:06 [crit] 2078#100481: *70015 SSL_write() failed (13: Permission denied) while processing HTTP/2 connection, client: 10.8.0.24, server: 0.0.0.0:443
May 9 04:47:05 nginx 2021/05/09 04:47:05 [crit] 2142#100475: *69995 SSL_write() failed (13: Permission denied) while processing HTTP/2 connection, client: 10.8.0.24, server: 0.0.0.0:443
May 9 04:46:06 nginx 2021/05/09 04:46:06 [crit] 2142#100475: *69976 SSL_write() failed (13: Permission denied) while processing HTTP/2 connection, client: 10.8.0.24, server: 0.0.0.0:443
May 9 04:45:34 nginx 2021/05/09 04:45:34 [crit] 2142#100475: *69977 SSL_write() failed (13: Permission denied) while processing HTTP/2 connection, client: 10.8.0.24, server: 0.0.0.0:443

No bug filed because we do not yet have enough data to create a meaningful bug report.

The pfSense layout makes sense to me but after some weeks in OPNsense I can navigate that one just as well. In some cases pfSense loads faster than OPNsense out of the box, for example firewall_rules.php. If you have 50+ interfaces having them in a row on top loads faster than the frame on the left side that OPNsense uses but OPNsense has a compression feature that can help negate this penalty.

OPNsense:

Themes offered as plugins. Layout is different, somewhat contextual. They have a search bar in the rop right-hand corner of the UI that can find many (but for some reason not all!?) settings. I find the UI in OPNsense 21.x more stable than pfSense 2.5.x. Did not have it crash. They have a “HTTP Compression” feature that actually works really well. With this enabled the UI outperforms pfSense in every case I tested.

Verdict:

Point goes to OPNsense because “HTTP Compression” makes the UI perform really well and in pfSense 2.5.x I have encountered numerous devices now where pfSense GUI will just hang and recover in an constant cycle. Would be a tie if pfSense were stable.

• […] Round 4 – GUI. Tally: OPNsense 3 : pfSense 1 […]

  Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.