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OPNsense pros and cons

Vendor: OPNsense

4.1 out of 5

47 reviews
95% willing to recommend

Pros & Cons summary

OPNsense is a reliable, open-source firewall and VPN solution valued for its affordability and user-friendliness, suitable for small to medium-sized enterprises. Despite its scalability, it struggles with handling large voice traffic, VPN functionalities, and integration with virtual servers. Monthly updates enhance its stability, yet monitoring and reporting features lack clarity in documentation. While technical support for the free version lags, configuring a proxy is essential for intrusion detection and antivirus capabilities.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

OPNsense is highly reliable and provides strong firewall and VPN capabilities.

It is very scalable and suitable for small to medium-sized companies.

The pricing of OPNsense is unbeatable compared to other firewalls on the market.

The system is open-source, stable, and receives monthly updates.

Users appreciate its user-friendly nature and cost-effectiveness for enterprise setups.

CONS

To use Intrusion detection and Antivirus Plugin, configuring a proxy is necessary; without it, the ClamAV antivirus plugin cannot be used.

The monitoring and reporting aspects are complicated and could benefit from improved technical documentation.

OPNsense shows integration issues with virtual servers and has problems handling different environments.

Technical support for the free version is lacking; they tend to ignore users of the free version.

There are scalability issues, especially concerning large volumes of voice traffic and VPN functionalities.

OPNsense Pros review quotes

Moutaz Sheikh Alard

ISO 27001 Lead Implementer at a consultancy with 11-50 employees

Sep 9, 2025

OPNsense impacts my projects and home network positively because its cost-effectiveness is perfect for lab and enterprise setup without expensive licensing, and the flexibility, easy VLAN and DMZ configuration supports different zones such as web servers, mail servers, and log servers.

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HF

Senior Solutions Engineer at a educational organization with 201-500 employees

Sep 18, 2025

YouTube provides video explanations, and that brings you to speed, instead of sitting down and reading a 200-page document on the product.

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Mahmoud Suleiman

Senior IT Infrastructure Engineer at a real estate/law firm with 11-50 employees

Sep 7, 2025

We saved up to half a million Egyptian pounds, which is nearly $100,000 yearly on licensing or subscription using this kind of software, and the network attacks reduced by approximately 60% after using that, even without customizing the custom configuration yet.

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Richard Chamberlain

Administrator at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

Sep 4, 2025

OPNsense definitely gives me peace of mind and helps my workflow because of the network isolation, as I can have multiple subnets without having to worry about one affecting the other.

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PM

IT Manager at a comms service provider with 201-500 employees

Mar 10, 2026

Based on my experience, the main benefits OPNsense provides for me are due to the limitation in getting financials to implement the most marketable solutions available in the market, which pushed me to find other open-source-related or cheaper solutions, and that is how I came upon OPNsense and pfSense, but OPNsense was the choice in this decision, providing a simple but also effective solution on a low budget.

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ENOCH AMARH ANNOR ATTOH

Cyber Defense Incident Responder at a comms service provider with 11-50 employees

May 18, 2026

For the initial setup of OPNsense, I find that it is very simple.

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DK

Dhirender Kumar

IT Executive at M.V.electrosystems

Mar 20, 2026

I find everything valuable in OPNsense; the configuration and reporting aspects are what we require, reporting on user access and data consumed is fascinating in OPNsense, and the configuration offers a clear idea of everything that I have configured in DHCP.

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reviewer1027455

Senior Network Engineer at a comms service provider with 11-50 employees

Nov 15, 2024

OPNsense is very stable, easy to upgrade, and maintain.

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CA

Chirosca Alecsandru

Owner at Networks srl

Jul 26, 2024

I mostly rely on the solution's network intrusion detection and prevention system, along with other systems, CMs, and log management.

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Network and Programming Specialist at Twentytwo Integration

Jun 11, 2024

The tool's integration is more like a button press.

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Show 10 more reviews (out of 44)

OPNsense Cons review quotes

Moutaz Sheikh Alard

ISO 27001 Lead Implementer at a consultancy with 11-50 employees

Sep 9, 2025

The documentation should be clearer because I faced some difficulties navigating many options.

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HF

Senior Solutions Engineer at a educational organization with 201-500 employees

Sep 18, 2025

Pricing in my opinion is just too expensive. It makes no sense. It moves in the direction of a monopoly.

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Mahmoud Suleiman

Senior IT Infrastructure Engineer at a real estate/law firm with 11-50 employees

Sep 7, 2025

OPNsense can be improved by making it more user-friendly, as its current UI is not that user-friendly when compared to paid software such as Sophos.

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Free Report: OPNsense Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about OPNsense. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: May 2026.

896,563 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Richard Chamberlain

Administrator at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

Sep 4, 2025

OPNsense could be improved with a better wizard, as when I first installed it, it seemed difficult to know where to go.

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PM

IT Manager at a comms service provider with 201-500 employees

Mar 10, 2026

I confirm that I am currently still working with OPNsense and still using their product. However, because of the hardware that I am using, sometimes it ends up freezing quite often, especially the interfaces, most of the busy interfaces.

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ENOCH AMARH ANNOR ATTOH

Cyber Defense Incident Responder at a comms service provider with 11-50 employees

May 18, 2026

My mark for OPNsense technical support is a four for the free version since they do not care when they realize you are using the free version; they just ghost on you.

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DK

Dhirender Kumar

IT Executive at M.V.electrosystems

Mar 20, 2026

To use Intrusion detection and Antivirus Plugin it is necessary to configure proxy; without a proxy, you cannot use the ClamAV antivirus plugin.

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reviewer1027455

Senior Network Engineer at a comms service provider with 11-50 employees

Nov 15, 2024

OPNsense struggles to handle large volumes of voice traffic, indicating scalability issues in that specific use case.

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CA

Chirosca Alecsandru

Owner at Networks srl

Jul 26, 2024

SD-WAN (software-defined wide area network) is integrated into some restricted service providers for OPNSense.

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Network and Programming Specialist at Twentytwo Integration

Jun 11, 2024

pfSense has better performance and quicker updates.

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Show 10 more reviews (out of 44)

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Product Categories

Product Categories

Popular Comparisons

Popular Comparisons

Fortinet FortiGate vs OPNsense

Netgate pfSense vs OPNsense

Sophos Firewall vs OPNsense

Cisco Secure Firewall vs OPNsense

Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls vs OPNsense

WatchGuard Firebox vs OPNsense

Check Point Quantum Force (NGFW) vs OPNsense

Cisco Meraki MX vs OPNsense

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Azure Firewall vs OPNsense

Palo Alto Networks VM-Series vs OPNsense

Fortinet FortiGate-VM vs OPNsense

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See all alternatives

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