 Tom here for more systems and I want to talk about the differences between PF Sense CE and PF Sense Plus and answer the question that's in the title how much does it cost and it's free for home, free for lab, which means it's free for your home lab and that has been the case since it was released. I wanted to bring this up and put it right here in the front of the video because the question comes up a lot on forums and YouTube comments when people contact us well I was gonna run PF Sense Plus but I didn't have a Neck 8 device so I thought I couldn't. Now if you get a Neck 8 device it is free if you want to run it on your own device you have to load PF Sense CE and then move over to and get the license for a subscription but that subscription is free as I said for both home and for your lab for PF Sense Plus. Now there are some differences we're gonna talk about in a moment one of the primary ones is the support you will get with PF Sense Plus. PF Sense CE the community edition is just a project that has support you can find in the forum. Now let's get to the details of exactly what's different because I put a chart together to make this clear and you can find a link to this down below this is in my forums and we're gonna start that this is July of 2023 which means we have PF Sense CE 2.7.0 that's been released and PF Sense Plus 2305.1 they're both based on the same FreeBSD 14 PHP version 8.2 they both have ZFS support I want to highlight that because a feature that is not in PF Sense CE is boot environments but that doesn't mean it's not based on ZFS. The ZFS part is important that you install it with ZFS you can't do an in place like you have to erase it essentially reload it and then use ZFS because if you're coming from an older version where this wasn't available or you use the default installer of a previous version it would have been a different file system so that does require replacement on there now the cost I've left a link here so you can go right to their page where you can get a subscription if you are running this on your own hardware for the PF Sense CE you're gonna want to download CE and move over to Plus if that's your goal to get to that version and there's a few reasons you might want to do that obviously can purchase support is a big one the project maintainer for both of these is Nekate the documentation maintainer for both of these is Nekate and Nekate has some notes throughout their documentation as I was reading it I went through to make sure that these were correct as of July 2023 on the differences of what features you get if you decide to go to the Plus version besides the option for support the boot environments is my favorite so I put it at the top but QAT crypto open VPN DCO for data channel offload which is a beta feature open VPN client import this is an import tool to import instead of having to mainly set things up AWS VPN wizard IPsec export Apple profile IPsec export Windows PowerShell these are some extra export profiles are in there and then that's it they do not limit and this is the other confusion I want to make sure just to line it all up here any other features that are available in PF Sense so you can have PF Sense Plus or PF Sense CE and use high availability VLAN support open VPN wire guard L2TP on and on all the way down it's just green checkboxes all the way down that's why I put the red X's up here to show the difference and that's all this is this is the differences right here in July of 2023 for those wondering and to clarify that question now one more difference that's worth noting is that PF Sense CE has a longer release cycle than PF Sense Plus you're going to get more frequent updates with plus to the base OS but just because there has not been an update does not mean there is a security flaw this is something that is debated way too much in forms where people say well I haven't seen an update therefore there must be some unknown flaws that just aren't being disclosed to us and because they're building it on common open source tools you can look up the versions on there and because neck gate is very careful about what does or does not go into either one of these with PF Sense CE or PF Sense Plus you will find that they are very on top of security and some security notices that may be applied to BSD may not apply to PF Sense if they don't put that package in there so this is something to consider and neck eight does have a history of when there's a problem updating that module or doing a point release to address a major security concern you can go back through their history and see they have been very on top of any problem that's been found with the tooling that they have on there and getting that patch rather quickly nonetheless which one are you going to choose PF Sense Plus PF Sense CE leave your comments down below I'm always curious and like and subscribe if you want to see some more content head over to my forums for a more in depth discussion on this and other topics and see in the next video. Thanks.