Software Alternatives & Reviews

pfSense VS Icinga

Compare pfSense VS Icinga and see what are their differences

pfSense logo pfSense

pfSense is a free and open source firewall and router that also features unified threat management, load balancing, multi WAN, and more

Icinga logo Icinga

Icinga is a fork of Nagios and is backward compatible.
  • pfSense Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-09-20
  • Icinga Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-23

pfSense videos

pfsense Firewall Setup and Features in Depth Version 2.4

More videos:

  • Review - Pfsense: 5 Reasons to Use It
  • Review - Netgate SG-3100 Teardown / Speedtest / Review of this powerful pfsense packet pusher!

Icinga videos

Bernd Erk - Why favour Icinga over Nagios

More videos:

  • Review - Using The Icinga Linux Monitoring Wizard

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to pfSense and Icinga)
Cyber Security
100 100%
0% 0
Monitoring Tools
59 59%
41% 41
Log Management
0 0%
100% 100
Perimeter Security And Firewalls

User comments

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Reviews

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

pfSense Reviews

The top 10 alternatives to OpenVPN
Netgate offers secure networking solutions, including pfSense Plus and TNSR software, which provide firewall, router, and VPN functionalities. These solutions cater to personal users, professional users, and organizations seeking secure and reliable internet connectivity.
Best pfSense Software Alternatives and Competitors
pfSense Software firewall is a robust, open-source security solution that is compatible with any hardware and can be tailored to meet your specific needs. It is a widely used technology, and many individuals seek dependable, popular software solutions with multi-device support, multiple concurrent connections, and protocol selections. Despite its usefulness, pfSense has...
The Best Open Source Router OS Software for Large or Small Networks
pfSense is a free and open-source router and firewall operating system based on the FreeBSD operating system. It is designed to be used on standard x86 hardware and can be deployed as a virtual machine or on dedicated hardware. pfSense offers advanced features and capabilities that are typically found in commercial routers and firewalls, making it an ideal solution for small...
Best free Linux router and firewall distributions of 2023
pfSense is one of the most popular operating systems today. It's a BSD-based system, similar to OPNSense, but with a longer history. pfSense started in 2004, and since then, it has grown to be the most well-known open-source platform in the industry. Although it gradually loses users to OPNsense, it's still an excellent system for new users because it has the most extensive...
Source: teklager.se
11 Best pfsense Alternatives To Secure Your Network
Unlike those of other available pfSense competitors, its capabilities allow it to be compared to commercial firewalls. You can also customize the pfSense firewall to match your needs based on the level of security and protection you want, as well as your specialist knowledge.

Icinga Reviews

The Best Open Source Network Monitoring Tools in 2023
Description: Icinga is an open source network monitoring tool that measures network availability and performance. Through a web interface, your enterprise can observe hosts and applications across your entire network infrastructure. The tool is natively scalable and can easily be configured to work with every kind of device. There are also a handful of Icinga modules for...
10 Best Zabbix Alternatives
Icinga is a popular enterprise-grade open-source tool for IT infrastructure and application monitoring. It checks the availability of your network resources, notifies you of outages, and generates performance data for reporting. Icinga was originally created as a fork of the Nagios Core application in 2009. The goal is to improve upon the groundwork laid by Nagios, including...
10 Best Open Source Monitoring Software for IT Infrastructure
Icinga, which began as Nagios Fork in 2009, got freed from the constraints of a fork and crafted Icinga 2, which is faster, easier to configure, more comfortable to scale significantly better.
Source: geekflare.com
13 Best Nagios Alternatives for Networks, Servers, IT Systems Monitoring
Icinga2 started as a fork of Nagios and became an expansive network monitoring solution even for enterprise-grade needs.
Best Open Source Network Monitoring Tools and Software (Linux/Windows)
The fact that you still have to use text-based configuration files coupled with the robustness of Icinga, means that there is also a steep learning curve for Icinga as with Nagios. On the plus side, Icinga has very detailed documentation to help you along the way.

Social recommendations and mentions

pfSense might be a bit more popular than Icinga. We know about 10 links to it since March 2021 and only 8 links to Icinga. 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.

pfSense mentions (10)

  • Need some help on setting up home network
    Https://pfsense.org (netgate hardware is used in businesses). Source: about 1 year ago
  • Is pfsense.org down, or is it just me?
    I am having trouble seeing available packages, updating pkg, or getting a response from pfsense.org. Is anyone else seeing this or am I going to spend the rest of my day chasing bugs? Source: over 1 year ago
  • Help with VLAN
    From the PIA Client to pfsense.org PING pfsense.org (208.123.73.69) from 10.6.112.128: 56 data bytes 64 bytes from 208.123.73.69: icmp_seq=0 ttl=49 time=49.455 ms 64 bytes from 208.123.73.69: icmp_seq=1 ttl=49 time=51.927 ms 64 bytes from 208.123.73.69: icmp_seq=2 ttl=49 time=49.333 ms 64 bytes from 208.123.73.69: icmp_seq=3 ttl=49 time=49.133 ms 64 bytes from 208.123.73.69: icmp_seq=4 ttl=49 time=49.027 ms ... Source: over 1 year ago
  • Can Surveillance Station record offsite cameras ?
    The above setup is critical to a reliable system. I'd use enterprise quality routers for a store and home connection. I personally use https://pfsense.org but there are many to choose from and several open source. Source: over 1 year ago
  • Exposing Synology to web: best/practical practices?
    What I would do is put that thing in DMZ and install a good router behind it like https://www.pfsense.org. No affiliation, just been my router for many years. There's also it's sibling https://opnsense.org. There are many, just get a enterprise quality router. Source: over 1 year ago
View more

Icinga mentions (8)

  • What do you use to visualize your topology?
    Two manually updated svg maps on nagvis that integrate with our icinga checks, one for the transport system nodes and one for the routers. Source: about 1 year ago
  • SSLPing permanently goes out of service
    Might be a bit of an overkill if you just want to check the certificates, but I'm using Icinga (formerly known as Nagios) to keep track of all of the systems - including webpage certificates. Source: about 2 years ago
  • What "legacy" software are you still forced to use in 2022 that you wish would die?
    Some of it can be migrated rather easily to Icinga https://icinga.com/. Icinga forked from Nagios many years ago, they rewrote the engine and have done a nice WebUI. It is able to support e.g. Business branches using "satellites" that act as proxy to the main server/ server cluster. I was one of the two guys doing the setup for a company with multiple branch offices/ factories and during the time I was there it... Source: over 2 years ago
  • Is there any program that can alert you of a stalled Plex Server?
    Personally I run https://icinga.com/ (to all my services, including Plex) and it polls every 5sec and after 5 fails in a row it sends me an email. Source: over 2 years ago
  • Linux is dead, long-live Docker monoculture
    Fast forward 12 years and I have Icinga2 collectors in each datacenter using check_by_ssh to run check_systemd, all front-ended by Thruk. The TIG stack is something on my list of things to look into at some point, but with Dynatrace available to do all the fancy application monitoring, there's no rush. Source: over 2 years ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing pfSense and Icinga, you can also consider the following products

MikroTik RouterOS - The main product of MikroTik is a Linux-based operating system known as MikroTik RouterOS.

Zabbix - Track, record, alert and visualize performance and availability of IT resources

OPNsense - OPNsense® you next open source firewall. Free Download. High-end Security Made Easy™. Offers Intrusion Prevention, Captive Portal, Traffic Shaping and more.

Nagios - Complete monitoring and alerting for servers, switches, applications, and services

OpenWrt - OpenWrt is an open-source firmware based on Linux for wireless routers

Datadog - See metrics from all of your apps, tools & services in one place with Datadog's cloud monitoring as a service solution. Try it for free.