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Untangle for home use

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abailey

Very Senior Member
I have not seen this posted (though it may have been somewhere) but Untangle has released licensing for home use. You can get their complete Untangle package for $50 a year, and less if you do multi year. That is an incredible price for a home UTM. I am currently running a Zyxel USG40 and love it but I have already run into its limitations. If you have all the UTM stuff turned on, depending on what your doing online, it can run as low as 25Mb/s. It just does not have the processing power. Also the UTM renewal price for the USG40 is almost $250 a year. For home use you could get nice hardware for $400 (or less) that can run Untangle at much higher speeds and much less in license cost per year. I have never tried Untangle but I think I may load up a trial version and see how it compares to my Zyxel USG40.
Anyone have any thoughts on Untangle, and would it be good for home use?
 
There are dozen's of posts on here about Untangle, I think it's a fine UTM (although I have not played around with the new NG version) although the NG Firewall Free is a bit limited. I just visited the website and was unable to find anything about this $50/year plan. The only one I found was a $50/mo plan.

Even at the $50/year price I would be hardpressed to move away from PFSense/Sophos UTM which are overall much better IMHO.
 
On their site if you click the pull down for number of devices, the first option is Home. Anyway thanks for the reply. I did look at Pfense and Sophos, they just look more complicated (at least more complicated than is needed for home use). Untangle looked easier, but then again I have not played with it yet.
 
I've played with all 3x...and tons more.
As you've probably seen from my posts here...I love Untangle. We use it at a LOT of our clients. But even the free version is a darned fine UTM....much better than a plain NAT router. I strongly encourage our clients (we do IT consulting/support/services for businesses) to get a UTM, in my opinion...plain NAT routers should be extinct/no longer used for business networks.

Anyways....Sophos has a free full blown version of their UTM for home use only. It's a nice, matured package. I just installed their most recent version about 3 weeks ago on a Datto Alto unit piece of hardware (by Zotac).

PFSense is not a UTM. It is a very fast router capable of excellent QoS features, and you can install a couple of add-ons to make it a little bit UTM-ish..but IMO those add-ons are not very effective.

Untangles product is very powerful, incredibly more powerful than Sophos when you add-on features or need complicated network setups. But for the free version for home use...it can still be run in a simple mode with the free apps..and it's very effective.

ClearOS is another distro that makes for a great UTM at the edge. It has some server features (e-mail server, file server, web server) too..but you don't have to enable those.
 
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