Untangle vs IPCop

[xnic]

Good day all,

I am undecided between implementing IPCop or Untangle. This is for a SMB usage (40 users). The main thing that I need is support and web/content filter. We are willing to pay for annual recurring fee - that is not an issue. Just need to know which is better ? (advantages & disadvantages).

Thanks for your support.

[pstacks]

Good day all,

I am undecided between implementing IPCop or Untangle. This is for a SMB usage (40 users). The main thing that I need is support and web/content filter. We are willing to pay for annual recurring fee - that is not an issue. Just need to know which is better ? (advantages & disadvantages).

Thanks for your support.

xnic,

I have used both (IP Cop several years ago and several instances of Untangle presently). I like IP Cop. It was stable, performed well and was fairly easy to implement. I heard about Untangle from a friend and have been using it since 2009. It has greatly improved in performance and versatility. Untangle has several free offerings that would well suit an SMB network. I have several installed in offices the size you speak of with mail and other public servers behind them. If you have multiple offices OpenVPN is a great benefit. Some of the pay-for features are handy; especially if you have AD, for monitoring and policy on internet use by employees.

My vote would be for Untangle.

pstacks

[hescominsoon]

ipcop doesn't have the featureset nor the security of UT. If you want the ipcop like stuff hit ipfire which is reliably updated..ipcop really isn't viable anymore.

[sky-knight]

IPCop is a router OS with minimal firewalling capacity. Untangle is a UTM with features that are so simple, yet so profound and deep it's hard to get your brain around it.

If you're asking what's "better" I'm going to say, "it depends". But I suspect you're asking the question to start with because you don't know what the difference between a router, and a UTM is.

[YeOldeStonecat]

Untangle is a full UTM product.
IPCop is not a UTM product...it's more like m0n0wall or PFSense..just a firewall.
IPCop does have an add-on called "Copfilter" which bring in a couple of lightweight UTM features...but honestly they're too basic and not very effective
Take a look at a distro called "Endian"....it has its roots in Copfilter...but it's much more groomed and matured...quite a good product...and it's actually a full UTM.

However, Untangle gives you more features. Just requires a bit more power to run on and decent compatible hardware that is fully supported.

[NTzeek]

If you are looking for support and web/content filtering (as stated) I think that Untangle is a very good solution. I use untangle and SonicWall. If I did use PFsense or ipfire I would use untangle for the additional UTM capability. As sky-night mentioned the simplicity and depth of Untangle is very impressive. The interface is intuitive and powerful, a great use of affordances and organization. I use SonicWall when I need failover, but as an old thread and some good input from sky-night show, the ability to install untangle on higher quality hardware offsets the lack of failover ability for now. I believe failover is soon to come as well.

The web and content filtering in Untangle is much simpler than SonicWall, which means the challenging implementations on SW are easily configured on UT. If you are using AD then the AD integration on UT is also superior and makes reports, permissions and filtering based upon policy simple and reliable. When I have to go back into a UT implementation I don't even look at my documentation. When I go back in to a SW implementation I wouldn't dare go in there without reviewing documentation.