Best Free Linux Firewalls of 2017

ClearOS

ClearOS is by far the sleekest looking firewall distro in this roundup. It's obvious that a lot of time and care has gone into developing the interface.

IPCop

This distro, while entirely separate from IPFire, also uses helpful colour-coding to represent different connections. Green is for LAN, red for the internet, orange for DMZ, and blue for wireless clients.

OPNsense

OPNsense is an easy-to-use open source firewall based on FreeBSD 10.1 to ensure long-term support. Obviously enough, the project’s name is derived from the words 'open' and 'sense', standing for: ‘Open source makes sense.’

IPFire

IPFire is a Linux firewall distro focusing on user-friendliness and easy setup without compromising your security, supporting some useful features such as intrusion detection. IPFire takes a serious approach to security by using an SPI (Stateful Packet Inspection) Firewall built on top of netfilter. 

pfSense

Like OPNsense, pfSense is based on FreeBSD and designed specifically to work as a firewall and router. As we’ve mentioned already, the fork between these two projects was controversial and pfSense still has many loyal users. Updates are released quarterly. 

Smoothwall Express

Smoothwall Express is probably the most well-known firewall distro. To test this, we did a quick poll of 20 Linux geeks, asking them to name a firewall distro. 19 of them came up with Smoothwall first.