Cilium vs pfSense

Overview

pfSense

Stacks109

Followers95

Votes0

Cilium

Stacks38

Followers81

Votes1

GitHub Stars22.8K

Forks3.4K

Cilium vs pfSense: What are the differences?

Installation and Purpose: Cilium is focused on providing network and security overlay for containerized environments, whereas pfSense is a robust, open-source firewall and router platform designed for general networking purposes.
Feature Set: Cilium leverages eBPF (extended Berkeley Packet Filter) for efficient network visibility and security enforcement at the Linux kernel level, while pfSense offers a wide range of features including VPN, NAT, firewall rules, and traffic monitoring tools.
Scalability and Performance: Cilium is highly scalable and suitable for large-scale Kubernetes clusters, with features like fast packet processing and load balancing, while pfSense is known for its stability and performance in smaller to mid-sized network deployments.
Community and Support: Cilium has a relatively newer but active community with a focus on modern cloud-native technologies, whereas pfSense has a well-established community with extensive documentation and user forums for support.
Integration with Ecosystem: Cilium integrates well with container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes to provide network visibility and security, while pfSense can be integrated with various third-party plugins and extensions to enhance its functionality in different network environments.
Cost and Licensing: Cilium is available under the Apache License 2.0, making it free to use and modify, while pfSense is offered under the GNU General Public License (GPL) and has additional features available through a paid support subscription model.

In Summary, Cilium and pfSense differ in their focus on containerized environments and general networking, feature sets, scalability, community support, ecosystem integration, and licensing models.

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CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Detailed Comparison

pfSense	Cilium
It is an open source firewall/router computer software distribution based on FreeBSD. It is installed on a physical computer or a virtual machine to make a dedicated firewall/router for a network.	Open source software for providing and transparently securing network connectivity and loadbalancing between application workloads such as application containers or processes.
Stateful Packet Inspection (SPI); GeoIP blocking	Identity Based Security - Cilium visibility and security policies are based on the container orchestrator identity (e.g., Kubernetes labels). Never again worry about network subnets or container IP addresses when writing security policies, auditing, or troubleshooting.; Blazing Performance - BPF is the underlying Linux superpower to do the heavy lifting on the datapath by providing sandboxed programmability of the Linux kernel with incredible performance.; API-Protocol Visibility + Security - Traditional firewalls only see and filter packets based on network headers like IP address and ports. Cilium can do this as well, but also understands and filters the individual HTTP, gRPC, and Kafka requests that stitch microservices together.; Designed for Scale - Cilium was designed for scale, with no node-to-node interactions required when new pods are deployed, and all coordination through a highly scalable key-value store.
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 22.8K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 3.4K
Stacks 109	Stacks 38
Followers 95	Followers 81
Votes 0	Votes 1
Pros & Cons
No community feedback yet	Pros 1 Sidecarless
Integrations
Squid OpenVPN OpenLDAP	Kafka gRPC Istio Docker Kubernetes Apache Mesos

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Related Comparisons

Cilium vs pfSense: What are the differences?

Installation and Purpose: Cilium is focused on providing network and security overlay for containerized environments, whereas pfSense is a robust, open-source firewall and router platform designed for general networking purposes.
Feature Set: Cilium leverages eBPF (extended Berkeley Packet Filter) for efficient network visibility and security enforcement at the Linux kernel level, while pfSense offers a wide range of features including VPN, NAT, firewall rules, and traffic monitoring tools.
Scalability and Performance: Cilium is highly scalable and suitable for large-scale Kubernetes clusters, with features like fast packet processing and load balancing, while pfSense is known for its stability and performance in smaller to mid-sized network deployments.
Community and Support: Cilium has a relatively newer but active community with a focus on modern cloud-native technologies, whereas pfSense has a well-established community with extensive documentation and user forums for support.
Integration with Ecosystem: Cilium integrates well with container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes to provide network visibility and security, while pfSense can be integrated with various third-party plugins and extensions to enhance its functionality in different network environments.
Cost and Licensing: Cilium is available under the Apache License 2.0, making it free to use and modify, while pfSense is offered under the GNU General Public License (GPL) and has additional features available through a paid support subscription model.

In Summary, Cilium and pfSense differ in their focus on containerized environments and general networking, feature sets, scalability, community support, ecosystem integration, and licensing models.

Cilium vs pfSense

Overview