# OPNsense 71 Hacker News commenters recommended OPNsense and 15 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 13 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 5 years (12 owners). It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule. **Verdict:** Free FreeBSD-based firewall that people run for years with little maintenance. Common caveat: weaker hardware driver support than Linux, and a UI that can be maddening. ## Why people recommend it - Rock solid with little maintenance (4 comments): "Now I do the same mini-PC thing as the OP's article but I just put OpnSense on it. Agree the UI can be maddening at times but the thing is rock solid" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47577521)) "rock solid performance with near zero maintenance beyond adjusting VLANs and setting up a 6in4 tunnel" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48810566)) "You will spend basically 0 time on system maintenance and just focus on the actual networking stuff." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46507596)) - Runs on commodity PC hardware (5 comments): "Pfsense or OPNsense can handle ~5 gbps routing/firewall on a low power AMD or Intel embedded chip" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48833848)) "OPNsense (or other bog-standard-PC FOSS alternatives like VyOS) can be competitive even in TCO" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48811281)) "ones like OPNsense that will run on a vast array of PC hardware" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47403356)) - VPN, VLAN, shaping and firewall features (5 comments): "If you have OPNSense, it has an ACME plugin with Synology action. I use that to automatically renew and push a cert to the NAS." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46897481)) "the functionality made it a worth while investment: traffic shaping, wireguard and the like have been mostly a joy" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47576178)) "there's pfSense or OPNsense with packages like pfBlockerNG-devel for domain blocking and traffic shaping" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46245692)) - Separates routing from wireless (4 comments): "a router with something like OpenWrt or OPNsense + an access point with OpenWrt will do the job" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50016963)) "How about OPNSense on open hardware of your choice, and passing messy wireless to separate AP?" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48809021)) "I run OPNsense with a collection of Unifi radios (local controller) with great success." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45871244)) ## What people warn about - Throughput falls short at 2.5G or 10G (3 comments): "I was never able to get FreeBSD (TrueNAS CORE, OpnSense) to get anywhere near 10 Gbps." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48813988)) "BSD-based opnSense struggles to push 2.5G on modern low-end hardware" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45804205)) "I could never get anywhere near full 10G throughput." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46042285)) - FreeBSD lags Linux hardware support (2 comments): "these run on FreeBSD which seems to lag behind Linux for hardware support" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47635897)) "I had issues with driver compatibility because of the FreeBSD core" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47506980)) - UI is imperfect and changes frustrate (2 comments): "I will concede that the OpnSense UI is far from perfect." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47576741)) "Some recent changes are driving me up the wall though" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47585520)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [OpenWrt](https://hackerapproved.com/p/openwrt.md): 170 recommend - [pfSense](https://hackerapproved.com/p/pfsense.md): 26 recommend - [DD-WRT](https://hackerapproved.com/p/dd-wrt.md): 17 recommend - [MikroTik RouterOS](https://hackerapproved.com/p/mikrotik-routeros.md): 17 recommend - [VyOS](https://hackerapproved.com/p/vyos.md): 13 recommend ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "OPNsense", https://hackerapproved.com/p/opnsense/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).