Introduction¶
- What does pfSense stand for/mean?
- What is pfSense® Plus Software?
- Why FreeBSD?
- Common Deployments
- Interface Naming Terminology
- Finding Information and Getting Help
- Comparison to Commercial Alternatives
- Can pfSense software meet regulatory requirements
- Can I sell pfSense software
- Contact with Netgate Servers
The pfSense® Project is a free open source customized distribution of FreeBSD tailored for use as a firewall and router entirely managed by an easy-to-use web interface. This web interface is known as the web-based GUI configurator, or WebGUI for short. No FreeBSD knowledge is required to deploy and use pfSense software. In fact, the majority of users have never used FreeBSD outside of pfSense software. In addition to being a powerful, flexible firewalling and routing platform, pfSense software includes a long list of related features. The pfSense software package system allows further expandability without adding bloat and potential security vulnerabilities to the base distribution. pfSense software is a popular project with millions of downloads since its inception and hundreds of thousands of active installations. It has been proven successful in countless installations ranging from single computer protection in small home networks to thousands of network devices in large corporations, universities and other organizations.
To download the latest version, see previous versions, or to upgrade follow the guides located on the pfSense downloads page.
Project Inception¶
pfSense software was forked from the m0n0wall open source project in 2004. m0n0wall was focused specifically on providing a firewall/router for embedded devices and was sized for limited hardware resources. Initially pfSense software aimed at providing a firewall/router solution with an expanded set of capabilities on larger PC and server style hardware. pfSense software has continued to evolve over time, providing firewall, router, VPN, IDS/IPS, and more capabilities that work well on hardware from small home office size devices to large service provider size servers.