TNSR vs pfSense Software (2024)

Which solution is right for your needs?

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Bird’s Eye View

pfSense^® Plusand TNSR^® are both excellent secure networking software solutions. And, while they share some common ground, they are more different than alike in terms of feature set, performance, scalability, manageability, and targeted users.

pfSense Plus is a fully-featured firewall, VPN and router solution

Ideal for homes, businesses, educational institutions, government agencies and service providers
Proven firewall (including IDS/IPS attack prevention, proxy, content filtering) and VPN and router feature set
Scales well to the limits of kernel-based packet processing
Traditional management via GUI and/or CLI
Edge or cloud deployment

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TNSR is a high-performance VPN and router solution

Ideal for enterprise-class businesses, educational institutions, government agencies and service providers
High-performance router and site-to-site VPN solution
Extraordinary scale by leveraging Vector Packet Processing (VPP) and Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK)
Automated management via RESTCONF API or CLI
Edge or cloud deployment

Get Started with TNSR

Two Products Separated by Feature Set, Scale, and Manageability

pfSense Plus is ideal for users who need comprehensive firewall, routing and VPN capabilities for home, remote / branch office, corporate, or cloud locations. As well, it is easy to manage and has time-tested resilience and reliability.

Performance wise, pfSense can nearly saturate 1-10 Gbps WAN links when forwarding Iperf, or even IMIX, traffic. While the product is deployed across every vertical and continent for more demanding firewall and VPN applications, WAN link throughput will decline due to the limitations of kernel-based packet processing.

As throughput needs increase, especially where application (smaller packet) traffic and more robust encryption ciphers are used (high-performance VPN connections) come into play, TNSR soars in its ability to saturate 1,10, 40, and 50 Gbps native or bonded WAN links, nearly impervious to packet size. While fully-featured from an edge routing (including L2, L3, and L4 ACLs) and site-to-site IPsec VPN perspective, TNSR does not address common firewall use cases like iDS/IPS, content filtering. Finally, TNSR - as a high-performance router-based solution - is not equipped with a GUI, but rather a CLI and API, the latter of which lends itself to more advanced and automated configuration, management, and monitoring approaches.

A Rundown of Technical Specifications

A high-level comparison table is shown below. More detailed feature lists for pfSense software and TNSR software are here and here respectively. Product documentation provides the most definitive feature detail.

Feature	pfSense+ Software	TNSR Software
Target Market	Firewall/Router/VPN solutions for Homes, Businesses, and Service Providers	High-performance router solutions for Businesses and Service Providers
Lifespan	Project started 2004 First release 2006 Netgate controlling interest 2012	Introduced May 2018
Router	BGP OSPF Configurable static routing Static ARP IPv4/IPv6 IPv6 network prefix translation IPv6 router advertisem*nts Multiple IP addresses per interface	BGP OSPFv3 (OSPF6) RIPv2 Static Routing Static ARP IPv4/IPv6 BFD with dynamic routing Carrier-grade NAT (CGN or CGNAT) ECMP VRF VRF-lite
Network Services	DHCP server DNS Resolver NTP Server Dynamic DNS NAT mapping (inbound/outbound) 1:1 NAT Outbound NAT NPT Reverse proxy DNS forwarding Wake-on-LAN PPPoE Server	DHCP client/server DNS Resolver NTP Server Port Forwards 1:1 NAT Outbound NAT NPT NAT44 NAT-T CG-NAT (MAP-T/MAP-E)
VPN and Tunneling	IPsec Site-to-site IPsec Remote Access OpenVPN Site-to-site OpenVPN Remote Access VLAN support (802.1q) 802.1ad VLAN (QinQ) Bridging LAG GRE	IPsec site-to-site (Multi-core routed) WireGuard^® VPN Public Key Infrastructure IKEv2 DHGroups (Groups 1-24, and 31) Encryption ( 3DES, AES-128-CBC, AES-192-CBC, AES-256-CBC, AES-ICV16-GCM-128, AES-ICV16-GCM-192, AES-ICV16-GCM-256, Camellia-128,Camellia-192, Camellia-256 and CHACHA20-POLY1305) GRE VXLAN- Bridging 802.1q, 802.1ad VLAN (QinQ) Tap Loopback LAG SPAN/ERSPAN memif
Firewall	Stateful Packet Inspection (SPI) GeoIP blocking Anti-Spoofing Time based rules Captive portal guest network Connection limits	L2 MAC/IP ACLs L3 ACLs L4 ACLs
IDS/IPS	Snort-based packet analyzer Layer 7 application detection Multiple rules sources and categories Emerging threats database IP blacklist database Pre-set rule profiles Per-interface configuration Suppressing false positive alerts Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) Optional open-source packages for application blocking	Integrate with your preferred vendor via the TNSR RESTful API Integration guidance is availablehere
Proxy and Content Filtering	HTTP and HTTPS proxy Non Transparent or Transparent caching proxy Domain/URL filtering Anti-virus filtering SafeSearch for search engines HTTPS URL and content screening Website access reporting Domain Name blacklisting (DNSBL) Usage reporting
Data Plane / Packet Processing	Kernel-based processing	TNSR is not kernel-based processing TNSR leverages Vector Packet Processing (VPP) and Data Plane Developer Kit (DPDK) to deliver substantially greater packet-processing performance and throughput.
User Management	Local user and group database User and group-based privileges Optional automatic account expiration External RADIUS authentication Automatic lockout after repeated attempts	Local user database User and group-based management via NETCONF Access Control Model (NACM) RESTCONF External RADIUS authentication
High Availability	Common Address Redundancy Protocol (CARP) Dual-node only	Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP) VRRP Interface tracking Multi-node
Performance	L3 Forwarding: 36.7 Gbps iPerf packets L3 Forwarding (pfSense Plus 24.03 on a Netgate 8300) Firewall: 26.8Gbps iPerf packets through a 10K ACL Firewall (pfSense Plus 24.03 on a Netgate 8300) IPsec: 14.6 Gbps iPerf packets through an AES-128-GCM IPSec VPN tunnel (pfSense Plus 24.03 on a Netgate 8300)	L3 Forwarding: 110Gbps iPerf packets L3 Forwarding (TNSR 24.06 on a Netgate 8300) ACL Firewall: 108 Gbps iPerf packets through a 10K ACL Firewall (TNSR 24.06 on a Netgate 8300) IPsec: 47 Gbps iPerf packets through an AES-128-GCM IPSec VPN tunnel (TNSR 24.06 on a Netgate 8300)
Manageability	GUI Console Port	CLI RESTCONF API SNMP Prometheus Exporter IPFIX Exporter Link Layer Discovery Protocol (LLDP)
Open Source Scope	Source code available (pfSense CE)	Underlying open-source projects provide source code TNSR is only available as a binary
Commercialization	Free Binaries - pfSense CE Chargeable Binaries - pfSense Plus	Chargeable Binaries

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