Welcome to the home page of the pfSense project!

pfSense is a free, open source customized distribution of FreeBSD tailored for use as a firewall and router. In addition to being a powerful, flexible firewalling and routing platform, it includes a long list of related features and a package system allowing further expandability without adding bloat and potential security vulnerabilities to the base distribution. pfSense is a popular project with more than 1 million downloads since its inception, and proven in countless installations ranging from small home networks protecting a single computer to large corporations, universities and other organizations protecting thousands of network devices. 

This project started in 2004 as a fork of the m0n0wall project, but focused towards full PC installations rather than the embedded hardware focus of m0n0wall. We also offer an embedded image for Compact Flash based installations now. The two projects have since diverged significantly. 

We've grown to become one of the most widely used network firewalls in the world, with in excess of 167,000 known live installs  as of April 2013.  

New to the project?

For those new to the project, we recommend reading the Common Deployments and Features page, and checking out the Screenshot Gallery.