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* Most free & open source types took more time & effort to figure out, but were more extendable. Its free offering is very generous, and its management GUI is top-notch. Untangle is by far my top choice in this category. They gotta make money somehow, right? If my priority was getting something up and running quickly or I were building something for a friend or company that wants to self-manage, then I'd go with one of these. This is probably because the extensions are part of their paid offerings. * Most commercial w/ free version types worked well out of the box, but were difficult to (freely) extend. Now for some of my findings and determinations: It's also worth mentioning that the Monowall project has officially ended. Monowall is worth mentioning, though, since PFSense forked from it. My goal was to find something with UTM features, something I couldn't find at all in Monowall. What about Monowall? I briefly looked at that one too, but it seemed to be more of a router distro for embedded devices, and not so much a true firewall.
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* For security reasons I'm not a big fan of this all-in-one approach when it comes to firewalls. * the free version is barely functional-it's actually a demo
UNTANGLE FIREWALL ADVANTAGES FULL
* full of nag screens asking you to buy commercial versions * offers a ton of features-it's a full-blown small biz server Booo! What good is a free version that doesn't update? It looks like updates are part of their commercial offering. * free feature set isn't as generous as other distros * lots of features & plugins that go beyond firewall functionality
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* doesn't seem as extensible as other distros * free version doesn't seem to get updated often * allows for more config tweaks than Untangle (in the GUI) * one of the more refined distros I found You have to hack it a bit to extend functionality. * Free version doesn't allow easy add-on installation. In its defense, VyOS is considered more of a router distro with firewall features, and not a full-blown UTM distro. Without that, I might as well build my own Linux-based firewall and manually configure the packages. CLI might be fine for some people and under some environments, but why bother when other free options give you a GUI? To me the whole point of a firewall distro is its web GUI. To be totally honest, I didn't give this one much of a chance because I was hunting for distros with web GUIs. * No GUI usually means a light build and nimble performance. * It has a growing fan-base, particularly among network engineer types that prefer router-like, CLI-only environments. * The package system was a bit rough around the edges-it was hard to tell what I was installing as there were few package descriptions. * package system allows installing add-on features While packages like snort and squid behave very well for me others like modsecurity drive me batty. This situation has improved as the distro has matured, but I wish they would stop listing buggy alpha-level packages in the add-on repository. Some add-on packages just don't work very well, and updating a package sometimes broke it. * Add-on packages and package updating could be better. You have to put some time & effort into learning it, especially if you're going to use the add-on packages. * Not as simple and easy to understand as Untangle. * has a vast following, so the documentation & forums helped me get my head around it * light and nimble-much faster boot-up/shutdown than Untangle
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You can get it to land space ships on Mars. * Most feature-rich free firewall distro I've ever used. * free version is very functional-plenty of features for most home networks * very easy to setup & get up and running quickly