An open firewall, rebuilt from the ground up.
FreeSense is a free, community-driven firewall and router operating system. It takes the proven ideas of the open-source pfSense® CE project and rebuilds them as a fully open, independently maintained distribution — modern, transparent, and free of vendor lock-in.
Why FreeSense exists
Great firewall software should be something you can read, trust, and rebuild yourself — not a black box tied to one vendor's cloud and roadmap. FreeSense exists to keep that promise: every part of the system, down to the build pipeline that produces the official images, is public and Apache-2.0 licensed. No accounts, no activation, no phone-home.
We track FreeBSD 16-CURRENT closely, so the base you run has the newest kernel, drivers and security fixes rather than a snapshot from years ago — while still shipping as signed, tested images you can rely on.
How it's built
FreeSense is built entirely from source, in the open, on a reproducible pipeline. There are no hidden patches and no proprietary tooling — the whole thing runs from public repositories.
Frozen upstream
Each release seals exact source, ports, OS-definition, and FreeBSD revisions with a frozen set of upstream package sources, so the build cannot drift between stages.
Automated builds
The world, kernel, and curated package catalog are built on clean runners — with our own FreeBSD hardware for larger releases — then signed with the project key.
Signed delivery
Installed systems make anonymous HTTPS reads to pkg.freesense.org for the signed update manifest, repository metadata, and packages. They send no device ID, telemetry, configuration, or usage report to the project.
freesense ·freesense-system-ports ·freesense-packages ·freesense-os-base
Independent & de-vendored
We kept everything that makes the firewall great and removed everything that tied it to a single vendor's infrastructure.
✓ Kept & improved
- The full firewall, NAT, VPN & routing stack
- The package manager and plugin ecosystem
- The battle-tested pf packet filter
- A familiar, now-modernised web GUI
✕ Removed
- Vendor registration & activation prompts
- Dashboard & config phone-home telemetry
- Automatic cloud config-backup upload
- Proprietary repo client & update settings
- Paid-support and store upsells in the GUI
Attribution
FreeSense is an independent, community-maintained derivative of pfSense® CE, which is itself derived from m0n0wall and built on theFreeBSD operating system. We're grateful to those projects and their contributors, and we retain their copyright and license notices as required by the Apache-2.0 license.
FreeSense is an independent project and is not affiliated with or endorsed by the pfSense project. “pfSense” and “FreeBSD” are trademarks of their respective owners.
Full license & attribution →See it for yourself
Download an image, or read the source line by line.