Untangle’s App-Store Model: Genuine Flexibility or Slow Budget Drain?

Untangle NG Firewall built its reputation on a clever idea: rather than sell you a security platform with everything bundled into a single high price, give you a free core firewall and let you add paid modules — web antivirus, content filtering, application control, SSL inspection — only as you need them. It is a model that genuinely appeals to organisations with limited budgets and uncertain security requirements.

It is also a model that has aged in interesting ways as the SMB security landscape has matured around it. Here is the honest case for and against, and what to think about if you are evaluating Untangle today.

Untangle Alternative

The case for Untangle’s modular approach

The fundamental appeal is genuine. Most SMBs do not have a clear picture of which security capabilities they will need over the next three years. Buying a fully bundled enterprise UTM — at fully bundled enterprise pricing — to cover features you may never enable is a poor use of budget for a small organisation. Untangle’s model says: pay for the firewall, which everyone needs; pay for additional modules only when you have a concrete reason to enable them.

The model also fits how organisations actually adopt security tools. Capabilities get added in response to specific events: a phishing incident leads to URL filtering being prioritised; launching a customer portal creates a need for application control; remote work adoption drives investment in better VPN and threat detection. Untangle lets organisations match their security investment to those triggers, rather than committing upfront.

The interface and operational experience are also widely praised. Untangle is genuinely usable by IT generalists who do not have networking specialism. The Command Center cloud platform provides centralised management for organisations running multiple Untangle instances. For schools and small businesses with one to a few sites, this combination of incremental capability adoption, usability, and cloud management is a defensible architectural choice.

The case against — what the model actually costs over time

The trouble with modular pricing models is that the marginal cost decision is repeated indefinitely. Each module is individually defensible. Each renewal is individually a small line item. Aggregated across a multi-year deployment, the total spend tends toward the cost of a fully bundled solution — without the predictability that bundled pricing provides.

The Complete bundle for Untangle, which packages the major modules, runs roughly $720 over three years for up to twelve devices and approximately $1,890 per year for up to one hundred devices. For a school or growing SMB, this is real money — money that competes directly with hiring, infrastructure investment, and operational initiatives. Once you reach the point of needing the Complete bundle, the modular flexibility argument becomes less relevant: you are paying for the full stack, just under a different name.

There are also feature gaps in Untangle that the modular model does not address regardless of how much you pay. The platform does not include a Web Application Firewall, a reverse proxy, or a load balancer. For organisations running web-facing applications, these are not optional capabilities — they are core to modern web security architecture. Untangle’s solution is essentially “deploy something else” for those needs, which means the simplicity argument that justified Untangle in the first place starts to weaken.

Finally, the broader trajectory of Untangle’s market presence is a concern worth weighing. Mindshare in the firewall space has been declining, raising legitimate questions about the long-term pace of feature development and the depth of the user community.

The case for the bundled-and-free approach instead

The alternative philosophy is to bundle everything into a single integrated platform from the start, but make the platform itself free rather than paywalling features behind subscription tiers. This is the approach CacheGuard takes — a complete, open-source UTM that ships with every capability included from day one: firewall, IPsec VPN, gateway antivirus, URL filtering with LDAP/AD integration, SSL inspection, Web Application Firewall (powered by ModSecurity and the OWASP Core Rule Set), reverse proxy, load balancer, multi-WAN failover, QoS, web caching, and centralised management for multi-site deployments.

The decision logic shifts significantly when the entire stack is free. There is no incremental pricing decision to make for each capability. There is no risk that the budget will be cut next quarter and a critical security module will need to be turned off. There is no negotiation with finance about which modules are truly essential. You enable what you need, when you need it, with no per-feature cost calculus.

The catch — there always is one — is that this model only works if the integrated bundle genuinely covers your needs. If your organisation specifically requires capabilities the bundle does not include, the modular flexibility of Untangle is a real advantage. CacheGuard, for example, is IPsec-only on the VPN side; if your team needs OpenVPN or SSL VPN access, Untangle has options that CacheGuard does not. CacheGuard does not include intrusion prevention or Active Directory integration via Directory Connector — both Untangle features that some organisations depend on.

The honest synthesis

Stay on Untangle if you are using the free core for basic firewalling and have no near-term plans to add paid modules; if your team specifically values OpenVPN, the Directory Connector, or the IPS capability; or if you have an existing investment in Untangle workflows and migration cost outweighs subscription cost.

Evaluate switching if you are paying for the Complete bundle (or close to it) and the modular flexibility is no longer providing real value; if you have hit feature gaps — particularly WAF or reverse proxy needs — that no Untangle module addresses; or if you are approaching a renewal and want to see what the open-source UTM space looks like in 2026 versus when you originally chose Untangle.

The Untangle decision in 2018 was different from the Untangle decision in 2026. Free, complete, open-source UTM platforms have matured significantly in that time. For many organisations, the modular pricing trade-off that made sense five years ago no longer makes sense today — not because Untangle has gotten worse, but because the alternatives have gotten better.

This article was originally published on the CacheGuard Blog. Visit the original for a complete feature comparison and migration overview.