About Firewall Compare
What this site covers
Firewall Compare puts prosumer firewall platforms side by side using their own documentation, release notes and published throughput figures. Where a comparison depends on a vendor's benchmark, the review says whose benchmark it is.
- OPNsense, pfSense and UniFi feature comparison
- Hardware and mini-PC sizing for a given line rate
- IDS/IPS options and their performance cost
- WireGuard and IPsec VPN support
- Licensing and free-tier terms, including which ones have quietly ended
- Sealed appliances against self-built firewalls
- Migration between platforms
14 articles are published so far. New ones are announced on the RSS feed.
Where to start
The firewall platform spec matrix and picker is the fastest way in: eight platforms laid out across 18 normalized attributes, with a seven-question picker that ranks them against your requirements. From there, the two most-read articles are OPNsense vs pfSense in 2026 and the best homelab firewall in 2026. If a platform's licensing rather than its features is what sent you looking, pfSense alternatives tracks which free tiers still exist.
How these articles are produced
Articles here are researched from primary sources: vendor and project documentation, published standards and specifications, research papers and preprints, and measurements published by whoever took them. Drafts are produced with AI assistance and then edited against those cited sources before anything is published.
No article on this site is based on first-hand testing in a private lab, and nothing here should be read as a measurement report of its own. Where a number appears, it comes from a source that is named, so you can check the original instead of taking this site's word for it.
Everything is published under a single editorial byline. That byline is a publishing identity for the site, not a claim about a named individual, and it does not carry professional credentials.
Corrections
Corrections are welcome. If something here is wrong, out of date, or attributed to the wrong source, email contact@firewallcompare.com with the page address and what it should say. Substantive corrections are made in the article itself rather than quietly dropped.
How this site is funded
Some product links on this site are Amazon affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate this site earns from qualifying purchases, at no additional cost to you. Product recommendations are drawn from published specifications and manufacturer documentation, not from commission rates and not from first-hand testing. The disclosure page sets this out in full.
Contact
Email: contact@firewallcompare.com
Site: firewallcompare.com
Published by: Firewall Compare Editorial
See also the privacy policy, the terms of use, and the editorial disclosure.