Three respected names, three different bargains. Untangle trades some features for the friendliest dashboard in the business; pfSense and OPNsense give every feature free and charge you in learning curve instead. Here is the comparison without a sales pitch.
Ask which free firewall is best and you will get three fan clubs shouting. The truthful answer is a trade: Untangle (now Arista NG Firewall) is the easiest to run and rents its advanced apps; OPNsense and pfSense CE include those features free and expect more of the admin. This page lays out where each genuinely wins, the hidden costs on both sides, and how to choose for your office.
Usability. The rack-of-apps dashboard is the easiest of the three for a non-specialist to understand, and the reports are readable by an office owner, not just an engineer. For a small business where the "network team" is one busy person who also does everything else, that clarity is a security feature in itself — a firewall nobody understands gets misconfigured. Add the one-vendor update path and optional subscription support under Arista, and Untangle is the lowest-friction start. The video's recommendation makes sense precisely for this audience.
Feature freedom. In OPNsense and pfSense Community Edition, things like WireGuard, IPsec, multi-WAN failover and detailed traffic shaping are simply included — no per-app subscriptions, because the projects are fully open source. If you know in advance that you need two internet lines with failover and site-to-site VPN, the open-source pair gives you those on day one for zero licence cost. The trade is effort: interfaces assume networking knowledge, the vocabulary is raw, and when something breaks at 9 pm, your support is documentation, forums, or a paid support plan you arrange yourself.
Neither side is "free" once you count honestly. Untangle's hidden cost is the subscription creep: the apps you grow into are rented yearly, priced on device count. The open-source side's hidden cost is your time: learning curve, community-driven troubleshooting, and the discipline of tracking updates yourself. Hardware costs are identical — all three want two NICs and a healthy box. The mature question is not "which is free?" but "which currency do I have — a modest subscription budget, or an engineer's hours?" Offices with an IT person often pick the open-source route; offices without one usually get more real security from the dashboard they actually understand.
Match the tool to your next two years, not your next two weeks. Need basic protection, owner VPN and clear reports, with nobody technical on staff — Untangle free core, exactly as the video shows. Need multi-WAN or site-to-site soon and you (or your IT support person) are comfortable with networking — OPNsense or pfSense. Facing audits that demand vendor support contracts — price the Untangle/Arista subscription against commercial support for the others and compare totals. And whichever you choose, the skills transfer: rules, zones, VPN and reports work the same in principle everywhere, so starting with the friendly one is never wasted time.
Watch the Untangle tour in the video, then make the final call with this comparison.
▶️ Watch Full VideoOPNsense and pfSense Community Edition — their full feature sets, including WireGuard, IPsec and multi-WAN failover, are open source and free. Untangle's core is free, but its advanced apps are subscriptions. All three still cost you hardware and somebody's time.
Untangle, honestly. Its app-rack dashboard and readable reports are designed for non-specialists, and a firewall you understand is safer than a powerful one you avoid touching. If you later gain skills or hire IT support, migrating is normal and the concepts carry over.
Not automatically — there is no shared import format, so a migration means rebuilding rules by hand. That is a few hours of work, not a disaster, and it is another reason to keep your configuration documented whichever platform you start on.