I’ve always wondered about OPNsense and if it could offer some of the things I often wanted in pfSense but could not easily achieve, and so far I have been very pleasantly pleased with the installation & configuration.

Home Assistant integration (pfSense did have a HACS integration, but it required additional hacks to setup).

Official API (pfSense had unofficial APIs and hacks, but nothing full-featured).

Event-based automation (pfSense had a Watchdog package that would restart services, but was limited).

TOTP Two Factor authentication login (pfSense may now support this?).

Reports (pfSense has some summary statistics & status pages, but no all-in-one way to generate reports on a wide range of network statistics).

A search for settings (IMO, the pfSense menus were poorly organized).Full-featured email notifications (pfSense had some email notifications but they were severely limited).However, as you will see below, I would first recommend OPNsense for a few main reasons…

pfSense is a great solution for any networking enthusiast, and I would not hesitate to recommend it. I am not leaving pfSense because I didn’t like the project, but because I wanted to try something new that is more committed to an Open Source future. I don’t have anything against up-selling additional features, but IMO up-selling additional features can lead to a neglected core product. I try to stay away from the arguments about which software is ‘more’ open source friendly, but I do like to support the projects that are committed to a FOSS (Free and Open Source) model without up-selling additional features. I’ve been happily using pfSense for a few years now and have generally been quite happy with it’s performance and feature set, however I learned recently that the installation files that can be downloaded from the pfSense website is not the same code that is open sourced on Github.

Install ffmpeg homeassistant