Software Alternatives & Reviews

FreeBSD VS NetBSD

Compare FreeBSD VS NetBSD and see what are their differences

FreeBSD logo FreeBSD

FreeBSD is an advanced operating system for x86 compatible (including Pentium® and Athlon™)...

NetBSD logo NetBSD

PowerPC, Alpha, SPARC, MIPS, SH3, ARM, amd64, i386, m68k, VAX: Of course it runs NetBSD.
  • FreeBSD Landing page
    Landing page //
    2018-09-29
  • NetBSD Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-03

FreeBSD

Categories
  • Linux
  • Operating Systems
  • Linux Distribution
  • Open Source
Website freebsd.org
Details $

NetBSD

Categories
  • Operating Systems
  • Linux
  • Linux Distribution
  • BSD
Website netbsd.org
Details $

FreeBSD videos

FreeBSD 12 Review - Used as my daily OS

More videos:

  • Review - A Look and brief introduction to FreeBSD 12.1
  • Review - I tried FreeBSD! - here's what I think of it

NetBSD videos

A FreeBSD User Tries Out....NetBSD 8.0

More videos:

  • Review - Comparision Video - NetBSD & OpenBSD
  • Tutorial - How to install NetBSD 9.0 plus the Xfce desktop

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to FreeBSD and NetBSD)
Linux
73 73%
27% 27
Operating Systems
76 76%
24% 24
Linux Distribution
76 76%
24% 24
Open Source
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare FreeBSD and NetBSD

FreeBSD Reviews

Best free Linux router and firewall distributions of 2023
OpenBSD and FreeBSD are actively developed and are very capable, but these systems require a high level of understanding of operating system internals and low-level networking to be used as routers.
Source: teklager.se
Avoid The Hack: 11 Best Privacy Friendly Operating Systems (Desktops)
With "Linuxulator," FreeBSD has compatibility with Linux binaries. Linuxulator can run unmodified Linux binaries without using virtual machines or emulation. Additionally, FreeBSD has tens of thousands ported libraries and applications.

NetBSD Reviews

We have no reviews of NetBSD yet.
Be the first one to post

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, FreeBSD should be more popular than NetBSD. It has been mentiond 21 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

FreeBSD mentions (21)

  • I've never used FreeBSD and have some questions
    Aside from being UNIX based, what similarities does it share with Linux? Both have monolithic kernels. Source based build systems are offered (ports, which are like the portage system on Gentoo) as well as binary build systems (pkg, which is like apt, yum, pacman, etc.) Both offer a lot of free software, though more licenses are compatible with FreeBSD like CDDL, which is not compatible Linux. Both let you... Source: 5 months ago
  • FreeBSD turns 30 today!
    There's no mention of a birthday on their site, and its footer says 1995-2023. That must be just the site, because Wikipedia tells me FreeBSD's initial release was indeed, but not quite, 30 years ago, November 1st 1993. Still no birthday. Source: 10 months ago
  • Computer
    I'm not the right person to ask this -- I just run it on whatever I happen to have. But I think sleep and wifi (for example) have issues with different hardware, so you'd have to do your homework. The FreeBSD handbook on freebsd.org is always very helpful to me. You can try it out with a live cd / thumbdrive to see how much supported hardware you've got. My Lenovo X1 from a couple years ago works for what I... Source: 11 months ago
  • Can SGI’s Enthusiast Community Bring IRIX Back to Life?
    People are still actively working on Illumos. The last change was yesterday morning. * https://illumos.org People are still actively working on MirBSD. There's a CVS commit account that can be followed on the FediVerse. * http://www.mirbsd.org It's DragonFly BSD, not Dragon BSD, and the irony of that is that you missed FreeBSD, which is of course still going. * https://dragonflybsd.org * https://freebsd.org As... - Source: Hacker News / 11 months ago
  • X220 and beer. A lovely combo, especially with FreeBSD.
    A open source free and stable Unix-like operating system. Read more at http://freebsd.org. Source: 11 months ago
View more

NetBSD mentions (3)

  • Shit they exist
    The idea of config files is fine, it's the implementation I don't like. I was using NetBSD recently for my senior project and found it fine to use - all the documentation is in one place (well, two - the manpages and netbsd.org). It's when the documentation is nonexistent and you have to search through a million different websites and forum posts to find the one line you have to change - that's what gets me. Linus... Source: over 1 year ago
  • Redox OS 0.7.0
    This is what most of the existing open source operating systems are and it is much easier to contribute to those or fork one that does most of what you want. If you are aiming at a POSIX system then there is a fair amount of work but you at least then get a huge amount of already written software that you can run (IIUC Redox is aiming for this but written in Rust). A structure like Qubes OS would make it easier... - Source: Hacker News / almost 2 years ago
  • Vulnerabilities in billions of Wi-Fi devices let hackers bypass firewalls
    It looks like one of the vulnerabilities involves being able to sneak in a rogue ICMPv6 route advertisement, with rogue DNS entries. It also mentions doing this kind of stuff against NetBSD 7.1, but that's a couple of versions old, so I guess they were concerned about all the random managed access points floating around? Source: almost 3 years ago

What are some alternatives?

When comparing FreeBSD and NetBSD, you can also consider the following products

Arch Linux - You've reached the website for Arch Linux, a lightweight and flexible Linux® distribution that tries to Keep It Simple. Currently we have official packages optimized for the x86-64 architecture.

Ubuntu - Ubuntu is a Debian Linux-based open source operating system for desktop computers.

GhostBSD - GhostBSD is a user friendly desktop operating system based on ...

Linux Mint - Linux Mint is one of the most popular desktop Linux distributions and used by millions of people.

Haiku - Haiku is an open source OS catered specifically to the needs of personal computing.

Debian - Debian is a free distribution of the GNU/Linux operating system.