Endian Firewall Community vs IPFire

Endian Firewall Community is a free, open-source Linux firewall for home networks, small networks, home labs, and learning environments. It provides stateful protection for network resources, with firewall rules that can apply in both directions. SSL and IPsec VPN support remote access and links between locations. Email security addresses spam, phishing, and other malicious email, while antivirus covers web and email traffic. Its intrusion prevention system analyzes traffic flows for internal and external threats. Multi-WAN can support failover or simultaneous connections, and quality of service can prioritize traffic such as VoIP, web, and email. Built-in reports cover live and historical network traffic, plus daily, weekly, and monthly web usage. The Community Edition uses an open-source GPL license and costs nothing. Its web filtering allowance is 1.8 million URLs, with one anti-spam engine and one antivirus engine. Application control, advanced content security, high availability, and centralized management are unavailable. Community users do not receive professional support.

IPFire is a free, open-source firewall and security platform for networks from home offices to global enterprises. Its Linux Netfilter-based firewall supports network zones, port forwarding, NAT, and stateful packet inspection. VPN options include IPsec, WireGuard, and OpenVPN for site-to-site or remote access. A Suricata-powered intrusion prevention system detects and blocks malicious traffic using updated rule sets. IPFire includes a Squid web proxy with optional URL filtering through URLFilter or SquidGuard, and uses Red, Green, Blue, and Orange zones for roles such as trusted networks, DMZs, and Wi-Fi. Its web interface monitors bandwidth, connections, and intrusion attempts. Proxy authentication can use Microsoft Windows Active Directory, LDAP, or RADIUS. The download page offers x86_64 and aarch64 images for bare metal, virtual machines, embedded hardware, USB sticks, and SD cards; cloud images are available for AWS, Exoscale, and other providers. The project says it releases frequent security updates. Documentation, forums, mailing lists, and a bug tracker are available, and Lightning Wire Labs offers professional support.