Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Shorewall VS OPNsense

Compare Shorewall VS OPNsense and see what are their differences

Shorewall logo Shorewall

The Shoreline Firewall, more commonly known as “Shorewall”, is high-level tool for configuring...

OPNsense logo OPNsense

OPNsense® you next open source firewall. Free Download. High-end Security Made Easy™. Offers Intrusion Prevention, Captive Portal, Traffic Shaping and more.
  • Shorewall Landing page
    Landing page //
    2019-06-17
  • OPNsense Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-12-26

Shorewall videos

Shorewall sobre CentOS 7.7

OPNsense videos

Introduction to OPNSense firewall the PFsense fork. Overview

More videos:

  • Review - pfSense vs OPNsense
  • Review - ✅ OPNsense Install - not what i was expecting!

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Shorewall and OPNsense)
Monitoring Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Operating Systems
0 0%
100% 100
Cyber Security
22 22%
78% 78
Perimeter Security And Firewalls

User comments

Share your experience with using Shorewall and OPNsense. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
Log in or Post with

Reviews

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

Shorewall Reviews

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

OPNsense Reviews

Best pfSense Software Alternatives and Competitors
OPNsense is the best open-source and free firewall alternative to pfSense Software. OPNsense is a user-friendly, open-source, FreeBSD firewall and router. Most of the same capabilities are available in this fork of pfSense Software. It distinguishes itself from other firewalls by combining highly sophisticated features with an open-source system. First, the OPNsense firewall...
The Best Open Source Router OS Software for Large or Small Networks
OPNsense is an open-source router OS software that is based on FreeBSD. It is designed to be used as a firewall, router, and VPN gateway, and it includes a range of advanced networking features. OPNsense is a fork of the pfSense project, and it is actively maintained by the OPNsense community.
Best free Linux router and firewall distributions of 2023
OPNsense makes the top of the list in 2023 because, for the last four years of maintaining this list, it has proved to be one of the most quickly developing operating systems on the market. It's an easy to use, mature system with a slick UI. OPNSense includes most, if not all, features found in expensive enterprise commercial firewalls. It has the quality of a commercial...
Source: teklager.se
11 Best pfsense Alternatives To Secure Your Network
By screening out unnecessary network traffic and malicious apps, firewall software protects networks and computers from attacks. For safeguarding your secure network from malware attacks and unauthorized access, OPNsenseis arguably top on our list of pfSense alternatives.
Top 7 pfSense Alternatives
OPNSense is a rising star in the router software arena. It is powered by HardenedBSD, which is a security-oriented fork of FreeBSD. Its current development pace is rapid, and it’s packed with features. It also has one of the best user interfaces of all of these options. Like a lot of these options, its primary weakness is its Wi-Fi support. A lot of OPNSense users started...

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, OPNsense seems to be a lot more popular than Shorewall. While we know about 94 links to OPNsense, we've tracked only 6 mentions of Shorewall. 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.

Shorewall mentions (6)

  • DHCP is not blocked by ufw/iptables
    All mentioned items have side-channel borked firewall and route rules in the past. Some bugs intermittently silently block local daemon instances from (re)loading like magic (some bugs only happen when the system is brought up). If your daily tasks include something less borked, than consider yourself very lucky you live without systemd. If I recall, ufw was intended for simple workstation rule sets. Personally,... - Source: Hacker News / 10 months ago
  • Life After Shorewall: Replacement Options?
    I've been using Shorewall for the last decade or so on everything from custom OpenWRT firewall/gateway solutions to servers running Debian or Ubuntu. It's great software that makes managing iptables/netfilter a breeze. Alas after many years, Mr. Eastep has retired and it doesn't appear the project is maintained by a new person or team. Source: about 1 year ago
  • Tunneling private networked host to the internet through public-facing server?
    Shorewall (https://shorewall.org/) can do the job easily. Source: over 1 year ago
  • How to hairpin a whole network segment?
    Despite administrating Linux machines since 1994, I have never really looked closely at iptables because I was using shorewall and the briefly firehol. Source: over 1 year ago
  • dog: An open source firewall management system for packs of firewalls (iptables)
    You should just use https://shorewall.org/. Source: almost 3 years ago
View more

OPNsense mentions (94)

  • How to bypass public IP and NAT
    Firmware's like Asuswrt-Merlin or OpenWRT can support dynamic-dns, or you can do like I do and run something like OPNsense in an x86 VM with a NIC passed through, or buy an inexpensive firewall appliance (up to 500mbps/1gbps/10gbps). Source: 5 months ago
  • Stop ISP from getting into my Router
    The easiest solution is to buy your own router, set it up, disable the router functionality on the Fritzbox 7590 and plug your router into it. It'll be cheaper and easier than a Cisco Firewall, but if you want to go the dedicated firewall route then I would recommenced OPNsense. Source: 5 months ago
  • OpenBSD Innovations
    BSDs may not have a significant presence on desktops, but they're well known in the networking world for their reliability. They also were the foundation used to build OSes for specific applications. OpnSense and XigmaNAS, for example, are two excellent FreeBSD based applications aimed at firewalling/security and NAS/services. https://opnsense.org/ https://xigmanas.com/xnaswp/. - Source: Hacker News / 10 months ago
  • Switches That You Actually Own
    For switches? OpenWrt supports a few models toward the lower end, and SONiC support a bunch at the higher-end datacenter ToR market, but none of these options are SME production-ready like Linux servers or OPNsense firewalls. Source: 11 months ago
  • Having to pay postage to ship back a DoA product sucks from a customer perspective
    That’s a stupid policy, and it looks like one of my UDMs is defective. I’m an idiot for not just buying good quality open boxes and putting https://opnsense.org/ on them. 🤦🏻‍♂️. Source: 11 months ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Shorewall and OPNsense, you can also consider the following products

ufw - Ufw stands for Uncomplicated Firewall, and is program for managing a netfilter firewall.

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

YaST - YaST is the installation and configuration tool for https://alternativeto.

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

ferm - ferm is a tool to maintain complex firewalls, without having the trouble to rewrite the complex...

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