OPNsense vs. pfSense Round 8: Installation

Categories: OPNsense, pfSense

pfSense:

Installer handles root on ZFS and GELI encryption options. The latter is of limited use in a firewall appliance but ZFS has its merits when you deploy devices at sites with flaky power or that are designed to be used in the field by road warriors who are unlikely to shut down before pulling power.

OPNsense:

Installer does not handle ZFS or FDE so if we were to leave it at that, the point would go to pfSense. But OPNsense have an ace up their sleeve: There is a bootstrap script that (very successfully) turns a minimal FreeBSD 12.2 install into OPNsense! If anyone has seen something like that for pfSense, please let me know. It is very useful to me. For one it means you can set up FreeBSD with ZFS if you need it. It also means you can spin up OPNsense on AWS Lightsail or any other VPS provider that won’t let you mount an ISO but will offer a FreeBSD template. This has saved me many times.

Verdict:

Point goes to OPNsense, purely for the existence of opnsense-bootstrap

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