Introduction
FreeSense is a free and open-source firewall and router operating system. It gives you a complete web-managed firewall — rules, NAT, VPNs, DHCP, DNS, traffic shaping, monitoring, and a package manager — on a hardened FreeBSD base.
Open from top to bottom
Section titled “Open from top to bottom”FreeSense is a fully open derivative of pfSense® CE, itself derived from m0n0wall and built on FreeBSD. Everything is public and Apache-2.0 licensed:
- the base operating system and web GUI,
- the package recipes,
- and the entire build pipeline.
You can build the whole system yourself from source, or run the official signed images. There is no proprietary core and no vendor lock-in.
How it’s built
Section titled “How it’s built”The OS is rebuilt automatically from upstream FreeBSD sources plus a small overlay of FreeSense
packages. Builds run on GitHub, and the resulting packages are signed and published to the official
repository at pkg.freesense.org. Installer images are published to downloads.freesense.org.
Release channels
Section titled “Release channels”FreeSense offers two channels so you can balance stability against freshness:
- Stable — tested release builds, recommended for production.
- Development — bleeding-edge snapshots that track the latest FreeBSD and features.
See Updates & release channels for how updates are delivered and how to switch.