Version: 8.7.2
Rating: 5
Date: 2026-07-15
Country: United States
Votes: 3
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Eh, It's got issues: upgrades are a nightmare, shifting interfaces, etc. Great UI however, simplified. Used it a few years back, but due to hardware-related issues at the time, I had to find another solution. They've come a long way since; however, changing interfaces (where my WAN got swapped with LAN) after a mere reboot was a deal breaker for me. I need consistent, reliable results. This is the only router distro where I encountered this particular situation.
Tried then upgrading to the 8.8 beta after the above, and it was worse; the system initially wouldn't even come up right. Had to reboot 3-4 times before it finally came back up "correctly," and it shifted interfaces again! (Although this time it was apparently noted in the beta notes, I already had a sour experience from the prior situation). Ended up wiping and going to another distro.
The 5 at least get them points for an excellent UI experience and simpler firewall rules writing experience; the underlying reliability and stability are where they lost all the points, especially given they have the already mature openwrt base. Installing it to a drive is far and away easier than OpenWrt, which they are based on. OpenWrt could learn a lesson on the installer and UI aspects of NethSecurity. However, I cannot recommend NethSecurity to anyone, given my own experience was rather bad.
Not to mention, given it works with OpenWrt, there's no simple way to install packages like with OpenWrt. UCI commands were hit and miss in terms of working; their documentation is either outdated, as half the commands I literally copied and pasted from there to configure things didn't even work (8.7.2 stable). Attempts to install packages were a bust, not even sure the package manager worked!
48 hours of nonstop issues. Had no choice but to move on.
I'll wait for the project to mature a lot more before I consider it again. The underlying OpenWrt base is appealing, but the fact that it barely worked beyond the webUI and the lack of stability and reliability was cause enough for me to move on. Another issue I experienced with rt8125 2.5gb cards (4-port and 2-port) and 10gb Solarflare cards was weird latency spikes. As I monitor my network, noticed at least LAN connections to the router were horrendous in terms of latency; spikes were random, sometimes even drops.
Having come from IPFire (I'd recommend it to anyone just starting out with router distros, but I have more advanced uses I needed to move from), it was odd; I didn't get those issues above from the hardware. I moved instead to OPNsense (after some work to get the 8125 NICs going, it works exactly as I need it to). Given I work from home, I REQUIRE a stable connection. ISP thankfully already provides that as it's a smaller regional one.
To sum up, Nethsecurity has serious work to do to improve and become more stable. It might explain why it hasn't taken off quite like the others and rarely receives a mention in other publications. If they could fix the issues above alone, they'd be a bigger player. But interface roulette and performance issues are not things ANYONE running a network wants to deal with. I would've even subscribed to the services they have, but without the core experience being any good, I can't justify the costs even as low as they are.
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