Endian Firewall Community vs NethSecurity

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.

NethSecurity is an OpenWrt-based unified threat management solution for small and medium-sized businesses. It combines firewall, multi-WAN, content filtering, deep packet inspection, intrusion prevention, and VPN capabilities, including IPsec, OpenVPN, and WireGuard. Multi-WAN can balance connections, while traffic shaping applies minimum and maximum bandwidth settings. Threat Shield blocks known malicious IP addresses using named blocklists and confidence scores. NethSecurity is an open-source project and is currently available only for x86-64 systems; minimum requirements are 1 vCPU/core, 1 GB RAM, 1 GB disk, and two Ethernet cards. Its optional Controller runs on NethServer 8 and manages multiple installations remotely. Without a subscription, it can register up to three community firewalls; with a valid subscription, there is no unit limit, but only subscribed firewalls can be registered. Nightly automatic cloud backup is subscription-only. A 30-day trial activates the Business plan, but commercial support cannot be requested during the trial. Professional support response time is one business day during specified Italian business hours, excluding Italian holidays.