We are building powerful routers from scratch, so we generally don't use this system (we still love it). The system is still relevant if you want to resurrect your old hardware and make it functional again, but if you are building a new router you probably don't want to use tomato on it. Tomato is cool, and we love it, but it's a minimal firmware designed for flashing off-the-shelf routers such as D-Link and Asus.
Manuel Kasper, the author of M0n0wall recommends OPNSense as its successor. System hasn't received any updates since early 2014 and is officially abandoned. It's been one of the most innovative projects in its day, but it's now retired. M0n0wall is the godfather of the most successful operating systems we have today. Today there are many good alternatives, such as OpenWRT. It's mostly unchanged since 2014 and fell far behind other open source competitors. Today DD-WRT is still functional and works, but it's not great or innovative. This is a little controversial recommendation because I know that many users still feel that DD-WRT is good. The website is still up and running, but hasn't been updated in many years. Smoothwall OS has been abandoned and is no longer relevant, or secure. Smoothwall got some good reputation in the early days when it was competing with IPCop.
The official website is dead, but the source code is still out there. The last release was in 2015, and the system is ancient by today's standards. Once popular operating system, included in all "top 10" lists such as this one. You want to avoid such systems because of security reasons - these distros use outdated and have insecure Linux/BSD kernels which can potentially expose you to security exploits. Some Operating Systems have been superseded or simply stopped being maintained and became irrelevant. This is most likely because these "Top 10 Open Source Linux Firewall Software" lists are copied from year to year by non-technical users, without doing the actual comparison. Other comparisons out there are recommending Operating Systems that are long dead or no longer relevant.
Top 10 Open Source Firewall Software to avoid - what you should NOT use. We hear customer feedback daily, if there are performance issues or problems with updates, we hear about it. We don't make any money from any software vendors, which make this recommendation relatively objective.
We install and configure pfSense, OPNSense, OpenWRT, ClearOS, IPFire, and other OSes every day, so we have a good idea which Operating systems work better than others. Over the last year, we have installed and configured most, if not all the distributions out there. Why is our router distro comparison better than others?įor many years we have been selling hardware for building Open Source firewalls and routers. If you are looking to get the most of your hardware appliance, or are building a new firewall, we have done the research for you. It also lists many outdated and irrelevant systems that should be avoided in 2020. Wikipedia has a list of router and firewall distributions, but the list is not useful, because it's inaccurate (as of August 2020) and it doesn't really compare these systems in any useful way. For that reason, we have decided to create a definitive firewall comparison for 2020. However, there are many outdated recommendations on the internet, so it's not an easy choice.
There are countless Free an Open Source Linux/BSD distributions to choose from for your router. This article has been last updated on August 3, 2020.
Best free Linux router and firewall distributions of 2020