Introduction

Welcome to the OPNsense documentation & wiki project! The documentation is work in progress and is updated frequently. If you would like to contribute in anyway, please take a look at our ‘How to Contribute’.

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Welcome to OPNsense’s documentation!

OPNsense® is an open source, easy-to-use and easy-to-build FreeBSD based firewall and routing platform.

OPNsense includes most of the features available in expensive commercial firewalls, and more in many cases. It brings the rich feature set of commercial offerings with the benefits of open and verifiable sources.

Mission Statement

Give users, developers and businesses a friendly, stable and transparent environment. Make OPNsense the most widely used open source security platform. The project’s name is derived from open and sense and stands for: “Open (source) makes sense.”
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Feature set

The feature set of OPNsense includes high-end features such as forward caching proxy, traffic shaping, intrusion detection and easy OpenVPN client setup. The latest release is based upon FreeBSD 10.1 for long-term support and uses a newly developed MVC-framework based on Phalcon. OPNsense’s focus on security brings unique features such as the option to use LibreSSL instead of OpenSSL (selectable in the GUI) and a custom version based on HardenedBSD.

The robust and reliable update mechanism gives OPNsense the ability to provide important security updates in a timely fashion.

OPNsense Core Features

  • Traffic Shaper
  • Captive portal
    • Voucher support
    • Template manager
    • Multi zone support
  • Forward Caching Proxy
    • Transparent mode supported
    • Blacklist support
  • Virtual Private Network
    • Site to site
    • Road warrior
    • IPsec
    • OpenVPN
    • Legacy PPTP support
  • High Availability & Hardware Failover
    • Includes configuration synchronization & synchronized state tables
    • Can be combined with Traffic Shaping
  • Intrusion Detection and Inline Prevention
    • Build-in support for Emerging Treats rules
    • Simple setup by use of rule categories
    • Scheduler for period automatic updates
  • Build-in reporting and monitoring tools
    • System Health, the modern take on RRD Graphs
    • Packet Capture
  • Support for plugins
  • DNS Server & DNS Forwarder
  • DHCP Server and Relay
  • Dynamic DNS
  • Backup & Restore
    • Encrypted cloud backup to Google Drive
    • Configuration history with colored diff support
    • Local drive backup & restore
  • Stateful inspection firewall
  • Granular control over state table
  • 802.1Q VLAN support
  • and more..