Comparing pfSense Plus & pfSense CE: Cost and Key Differences Explained

foreign [Music] systems and I want to talk about the differences between pfSense CE and PF sense plus and answer the question that's in the title how much does it cost and it's free for home free for lab which means it's free for your home lab and that has been the case since it was released I wanted to bring this up and put it right here in the front of the video because the question comes up a lot and forums and YouTube comments when people contact us well I was going to run pfSense plus but I didn't have a neck 8 device so I thought I couldn't now if you get a neck 8 device it is free if you want to run it on your own device you have to load pfSense CE and then move over to and get the license for a subscription but that subscription is free as I said for both home and for your lab for pfSense plus now there are some differences we're going to talk about in a moment one of the primary ones is the support you will get with psn's plus pfSense CE the Community Edition is just a project that has support you can find in a forum now let's get to the details of exactly what's different because I put a chart together to make this clear and you can find a link to this down below this is in my forums and we're going to start that this is July of 2023 which means we have pfSense CE 2.7.0 that's been released and PF says plus 2305.1 they're both based on the same FreeBSD 14 PHP version 8.2 they both have ZFS support I want to highlight that because a feature that is not in PFS and CE is boot environments but that doesn't mean it's not based on ZFS the ZFS part is important that you install it with ZFS you can't do an in place like you have to erase it essentially reload it and then use ZFS because if you're coming from an older version where this wasn't available or you use the default installer of a previous version it would have been a different file system so that does require replacement on there now the cost I've left a link here so you can go right to their page where you can get a subscription if you you are running this on your own hardware for the pfSense CE you're going to want to download CE and move over to plus if that's your goal to get to that version and there's a few reasons you might want to do that obviously can purchase support is a big one the project maintainer for both of these is netgate the documentation maintainer for both of these is netgate and netgate has some notes throughout their documentation as I was reading it I went through to make sure that these were correct as of July 2023 on the differences of what features you get if you decide to go to the plus version besides the option for support the boot environments is my favorite so I put it at the top but qat crypto openvpn dco for data Channel offload which is a beta feature openvpn client import this is an import tool to import instead of having to manually set things up AWS VPN wizard ipsec export Apple profile ipsec export Windows Powershell these are some extra export profiles are in there and then that's it they do not limit and this is the other I want to make sure just to line it all up here any other features that are available in pf sense so you can have pfSense Plus or psnce and use high availability VLAN support openvpn wireguard l2tp on and on all the way down it's just green check boxes all the way down that's why I put the red X's up here to show the difference and that's all this is this is the differences right here in July of 2023 for those wondering and to clarify that question now one more difference that's worth noting is that pfSense CE has a longer release Cycles than PF sense plus you're going to get more frequent updates with plus to the base OS but just because there has not been an update does not mean there is a security flaw this is something that is debated way too much in forms where people say well I haven't seen an update therefore there must be some unknown flaws that just aren't being disclosed to us and because they're building it on common open source tools you can look up the versions on there and because netgate is very careful about what does or does not not go into either one of these but PF said CE or pfSense plus you will find that they are very on top of security and some security notices that may be applied to BSD may not apply to pfSense if they don't put that package in there so this is something to consider and neck 8 does have a history of when there's a problem updating that module or doing a point release to address a major security concern you can go back through their history and see they have been very on top of any problem that's been found with the tooling that they have on there and getting that patch rather quickly nonetheless which one are you going to choose pfSense plus psnce leave your comments down below I'm always curious and like And subscribe if you want to see some more content head over to my forums for a more in-depth discussion on this and other topics and see in the next video thanks [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: Lawrence Systems

Views: 25,093

Keywords: LawrenceSystems, pfsense firewall, pfSense Plus & pfSense CE, pfsense plus vs pfsense ce, pfsense plus, pfsense (software), pfsense router, pfsense plus vs pfsense, pfsense plus software, pfsense plus free, network security, pfsense setup, pfsense plus vs community edition

Id: Fa1NAuWDzjs

Length: 5min 17sec (317 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 08 2023