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Bird’s Eye View
pfSense® Plus and 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 security and services platform, including features like firewall, VPN and routing solutions
- Ideal for homes, businesses, educational institutions, government agencies and service providers
- Proven firewall (including IDS/IPS attack prevention, DNS filtering, zero-trust egress) and VPN and routing feature set
- Scales well to the limits of kernel-based packet processing
- Traditional management via intuitive GUI
- Edge or cloud deployment
TNSR is a full-featured high performance router and VPN solution, including features like packet filtering, threat detection, routing protocols, and much more
- 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)
- Automated management via RESTCONF API or CLI
- Edge or cloud deployment
Two Products Separated by Feature Set, Scale, and Manageability
pfSense Plus is ideal for users who need comprehensive firewall, routing, VPN and services capabilities for home, remote / branch office, corporate, or cloud locations. 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, throughput will be limited due to the limitations of kernel-based packet processing.
As throughput needs increase, especially where application (smaller packet) traffic and more robust encryption ciphers (high-performance VPN connections) come into play, TNSR soars in its ability to saturate hundreds of Gbps native or bonded links, nearly impervious to packet size differences. While fully-featured from a routing (including L2, L3, and L4 ACLs, packet filtering, and NAT) and site-to-site IPsec VPN perspective, TNSR does not address common security services use cases like reverse proxy and content filtering, Finally, because TNSR is a high performance software based router solution, it is managed via an intuitive CLI and REST API, the latter of which lends itself to more advanced and automated configuration, management, and monitoring approaches.
