Hiya, just getting into networking and recently completed my Tp-link Omada stack, which I’m very pleased with. Have heard great thing about all three mentioned services above, but struggle to understand which to go for. Do they have different use cases? Is one easier than the other? Which one is recommended to begin with?
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pfSense and OPNsense are firewalls. OpenWRT is router firmware. They’re all open source - to varying degrees - and they all have overlapping features and functionality.
Quick breakdown:
So the question of pfSense or OPNsense is either/or - you’d typically pick one or the other. Note that I’m staying away from the political comments that will invariably come up around this comparison. It’s enough to know that both have commercial offerings in addition to their open source versions and people have strong opinions one way or the other.
Either one of either pfSense or OPNsense in conjunction with OpenWRT is common, with OpenWRT on the wireless devices and pfSense/OPNsense at the egress to WAN. In your case, Omada already does what OpenWRT would do - along with some very limited versions of what you could do with pfSense or OPNsense.
It’s worth noting that folks often deploy these three open source tools as a method to regain control rather than using a third party cloud based solution like Omada. No judgement, just saying that Omada is the polar opposite of the ‘selfhosted’ esthetic.
Just fyi; I am using the Omada system without using the cloud option, it is also selfhostable :) But thanks for the info/writeup!
You are using the cloud though. They control it not you. If they push a bad update or decide to start selling your data there is nothing you can do
They what and what?? Generally the Omada-stack devices are just on-premises hardware that you control. If you enable automatic firmware updates, then yeah, “if they push a bad update” and all (similar to a Linux distro with auto updates enabled). To improve operations, and enable certain features, there is the “cloud-based controller” software (appliance), which is named weirdly, because it generally does not live in the cloud - you can self-host on-premises, though its core software component is a black box and not (F)OSS (also available as an actual hardware appliance). There have been instances of the devices “phoning home”, though you might be able to limit that to some extent with firewall rules.
My point is that you do not control it. If you want full untethered control, go with OpenWRT and possibly OPNsense as a firewall
Clap clap clap. Great explanation