monowall vs pfsense

Solution 1:

I have used Smoothwall for a long time, though I have been watching pfSense with great anticipation. I am kind of sad that third-party development for smoothwall seems to have largely died out since the great 2.0 days... thus I have been watching other products to see where they are going.

pfSense has an embedded version that is perfect for running from flash media. I think you will ultimately be much happier with it than monowall for what you describe as key criteria above, though I think it also is a touch more advanced so it might take a bit more elbow grease on your part to get it where you like it. But the best thing in my opinion, is that pfSense still seems to be a very active project.

Solution 2:

"Monowall is first and foremost, a routing platform. Nothing more, nothing less. The distribution comes in two flavors, either for embedded systems or for regular PCs."

"pfSense is a hybrid of sorts, that has multiple sources for it’s major components. It was originally derived from monowall, but uses OpenBSD’s ported Packet Filter, a package management system to provide an integrated extensibility to the platform and Alternate Queuing (ALTQ) from FreeBSD"

From here: A little old, but still current.