Alright folks, I've been running both in production for different use cases and wanted to share some real-world data for this specific scenario. My team manages a hybrid cloud platform for internal dev teams, and we've standardized on site-to-site VPNs (IPsec IKEv2) to link about 60 branch offices and VPCs back to two hub locations. We tested both OPNsense 23.x and pfSense CE 2.7 over a 6-month period.
Here’s what we observed under a load of ~50-60 persistent tunnels:
**OPNsense Pros for Scale:**
* The **built-in traffic graphs per IPsec tunnel** are a game-changer for quick diagnostics. No more digging through logs just to see if a tunnel is passing traffic.
* **Netflow export** integrated into the firewall itself gave our monitoring stack (Prometheus/Loki) much richer data without needing extra collectors.
* We found the **configuration handling during updates** more consistent. Zero tunnel configs were lost or corrupted across several minor updates.
**pfSense Pros for Scale:**
* **Raw throughput** was about 5-8% higher on identical hardware (Intel X550-T2 NICs, 8-core Xeon). This matters when you're aggregating multiple gigabits of inter-DC traffic.
* The **IPsec status widget** on the dashboard is simpler but shows all tunnels at a glance—faster for an "all up?" check.
* **CARP failover** felt more deterministic during our chaos engineering tests. The failover event for 50+ tunnels was consistently 2-3 seconds faster.
**The Big Gotcha for Both:**
Neither handled the built-in dynamic routing (BGP/OSPF) to our satisfaction at this scale. We ended up deploying external BGP speakers (FRRouting) in containers and using kernel forwarding, treating the firewalls purely as VPN terminators. This was easier to implement on OPNsense due to its plugin structure (os-frr).
For us, the **observability wins of OPNsense** tipped the balance. The ability to quickly correlate tunnel performance with application metrics in Grafana streamlined our SRE workflows. If raw throughput and split-second failover are your absolute top priorities, pfSense is still a beast.
Anyone else run into the dynamic routing limitations? Or found a slick way to manage the config for this many tunnels as code? I’ve got some Ansible playbooks that are… okay, but not great.
—Chris
K8s enthusiast
I'm a junior data engineer at a mid-sized logistics company. We run about 30 site-to-site tunnels for warehouse network links, and I manage the OPNsense box at our primary hub. My experience is more on the monitoring side, feeding data into our warehouse.
- **Diagnostics & Monitoring:** OPNsense's per-tunnel graphs in the GUI saved me hours. I could correlate a drop in warehouse ingest with a specific tunnel's traffic graph dipping at the same time, without touching logs. For 50+ tunnels, that visual triage is huge.
- **Update Stability:** We've done two OPNsense minor updates. All tunnel configs persisted. In a test lab with pfSense, we saw one instance where a 2.7.x update required re-importing a few P2 configs, which was a scare.
- **Hardware Performance:** On our Dell R340 with an Atom C3500, we max out a 1 Gbps pipe per tunnel. The throughput difference OP saw (5-8%) aligns with what I've read; for us, that's not the bottleneck. Our constraint is CPU on cheap hardware, not the software limit.
- **Config Export & Portability:** OPNsense configs are straight XML. I backup via the API to a Git repo. It's trivial to diff changes. I found pfSense's config format a bit more opaque when I tried to script a backup comparison.
I'd pick OPNsense for this scenario, because at 60 tunnels, visibility and config stability become bigger risks than a minor throughput hit. If raw gigabit throughput per tunnel is the absolute requirement, then the choice flips. Tell us: what's your actual traffic load per tunnel, and is your team more CLI-focused or GUI-focused for day-to-day ops?