Top 10 Best Open Source Firewall in 2025

According to cybersecuritynews IpFire is among the best open source firewalls 2025

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Smoothwall is NOT free open-source, at least, not the smoothwall.com one. The free open-source one is smoothwall.org and the last time it was updated/any movement registered on it, was 2014. It is one of the reasons I moved to IPFire.

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it should be reported to the newspaper that wrote the article

True, I just wanted to mention it here. Apologies if it was inappropriate.

Good point.
I think the article on the given page was written with the help of AI. :wink:

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ClearOS has not been updated since July '22 and has unpatched critical security vulnerabilities. The iso they offer is from 2021 and it is impossible to update it or register it. Their Marketplace does not work any more.

hi
you have test this Introduction — NethSecurity documentation is new firewalls for x86/64

Hi all,

was a little around the compilation of the netify thing → Compilation error on IPFire build system (#80) · Issues · Netify / Netify Public / Netify Agent · GitLab . The license thing killed my fun a little. According to the whole nDPI thing, am have currently some better perspectives in stuff like here → GitHub - utoni/nDPId: Tiny nDPI based deep packet inspection daemons / toolkit. which is for sure more work but i like the open part of it and a possible try to make use it for what needs else which is seriouse a more difficult topic.

Nevertheless @tratru , thanks for posting this. In my opinion IPFire IS in the the top 10 :blush: .

Best,

Erik

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Hi @gw-ipfire

I looked at the firewall you reported, apart from some features that IPFire does not have and that are interesting.
but to the detriment it does not seem to me that it is open, other thing some functions are paid even for the community version
let me add my personal observation, I think it is in bad taste to advertise a third party product on the IPFire site

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Considering the list provided in the article… IpFire do not came out that nicely…

If a unskilled and unknowledge writer’s article deliver this “best”… who knows something but don’t knows IPFire could pass over without a flinch.

For instance… ClearOS is still CentOS 7 based (so out of support since july 2024) and the link don’t work.

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I don’t really understand on what they even base their ranking.

In the old “Top 10 Best Open-Source Firewall to Protect Your Enterprise Network 2024” (see below) they ranked e.g. Perimeter 81 at 1.
This year, it only made the 7th place.
Maybe because a lot has changed? Doesn’t seem like it, the text provided is either very close to the old one or just the same.
The feature-table is the exact same.

IPFire got a better ranking than last year 6. → 5., but still has the same table content.
I don’t really know, if the author(s) tried researching, but “Limited Commercial support” is one of the points they are criticizing. If you head over to IPFire Support companies can find a large number of commercial support options.
Furthermore I don’t really understand what “Dependency on Open-Source Components” means and why this would be bad in an Open Source Firewall. Maybe someone understands that and can explain it to me…

Regarding some other listed Firewalls:
1: pfSense “open source”
7: IPCop is rather dead, the latest stable is from 2019, but you need to download the 2015 version before that, install it and then upgrade to the 2019 stable.
9: Smoothwall (Mark already covered that) I could imagine they just provided a wrong link. In the Rating from 2024 the link points to the .org site…
10: ClearOS (see post 6 by Nick)

They basically copied their old article, changed the title picture (all firewall pictures are old, they don’t even feature the new IPFire website, which had it’s 1st Birthday on 12th of January 2024 (:partying_face:)), some of the texts (not all of them), copied the tables and - of course - changed the year.
I don’t know, if they even tried looking up all the FW’s again for 2025, or if they just wanted the clicks with minimal workload.

Nevertheless IPFire is in the top 5 and got 1 place better than last year. If this continues, we’ll be happy in 2029!

–
Here’s the 2024 ranking I mentioned 10 Best Open Source Firewall for 2023 - Cyber Security News (The Link says 2023, the post is from 2023, the site says 2024, the snapshot is from Feb. 2024)

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hello @Ric9’s observation is right and correct
so much so that this morning I wrote an email pointing out some things, such as ipcop not being supported and Smoothwall not being open
let’s see if they correct or write to me
maybe if some other user reports the same thing
email editors@cybersecuritynews.com

If you remove the ones behind a pay wall. The list gets very small.
Then remove the FreeBSD firewalls.
What’s left?

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I emailed them yesterday about ClearOS. I have detailed knowledge as I was the last “developer” standing and I left in July '22. I had been maintaining it on my own by then for over 2 years. In that time development was minimal as I am not a PHP programmer and it took me ages to understand how bits were working. I was largely doing upstream updates, bug fixes where I could and minor enhancements, as well as customer support.

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IMVHO if no actual problem/incentive is delivered to the editor, being told “you’re writing it incorrect” won’t deliver any “edited” version.

And even advertaisers… wel… AFAIK they care about numbers, not correctnes. (mostly)

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Seems like a fake article written by AI. It lists IPFire as having this feature:

Multiple WAN links can be used for redundancy or load balancing.

Which I don’t think is accurate.

The 2023/2024 articles, which are more or less the same, pre-date mainstream AI, I believe.

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Regardless, it is written carelessly with no obvious effort to check for accuracy.

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hi
I don’t advertise I test the various firwall open source and half open source :grinning:

I think wan fail over for dialup is available?

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