OpenSnitch
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GNU/Linux application firewall that filters outbound connections interactively and blocks ads, trackers, or malware domains system-wide.
opensnitchd --rules-directory /etc/opensnitch/rules --config /etc/opensnitch/custom_config.yaml
Summary
OpenSnitch is an open-source GNU/Linux application firewall that filters outbound connections interactively, prompting on new network activity and letting you build rules from those decisions, including system-wide blocking of ads, trackers, and malware domains. It runs as a daemon paired with a GUIGUIA graphical user interface, controls such as windows, buttons and menus. It lets people use software visually rather than entering commands., and can also manage multiple nodes from one centralized interface, with configuration of the underlying nftables firewall and integration into a SIEMSIEMSecurity information and event management, collecting logs from many systems and correlating events to find suspicious activity. Analysts use it to investigate alerts and incidents. for logging. This suits Linux users and system administrators who want visibility into what applications are phoning home, rather than a perimeter-only firewall. It sits in the network-defense space alongside other host-based application firewalls, occupying the niche Little Snitch fills on macOS. First committed in 2017, with 123 contributors and 311 commits in the past year across 13 releases, it is under active development, though the most recent release was 249 days ago.
GNU/Linux application firewall that filters outbound connections interactively and blocks ads, trackers, or malware domains system-wide.
How OpenSnitch helps
Which of my applications are making outbound connections I never approved?
prompts interactively on new network activity and lets you build an allow or deny rule from that decision, so nothing phones home silently again
Which domains on this machine are ads, trackers, or known malware hosts?
matches outbound connections against block lists applied system-wide, stopping the connection before it leaves the host
Is my system firewall configured the way I think it is?
reads and writes the underlying nftables configuration from the GUI, including the input policy and which inbound services are allowed
Are all the machines I manage enforcing the same outbound rules?
centralizes multiple daemon nodes in one GUI so their rule sets and activity can be reviewed and edited from a single place
Can my security logging pipeline see what this host's applications are doing on the network?
forwards connection and rule events into a SIEM, so outbound activity is queryable alongside other log sources instead of staying local to the machine
Languages
Command line
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Score card
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Shipping velocity releases a month, last 12 months
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Documentation quality release-notes rubric, 0–100
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Breaking-change discipline how rarely a release breaks users, and notice given
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Maintenance risk quiet time against its own cadence, maintainers
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Innovation & surface new capabilities, API and MCP surface
- Community health
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Contributor trend distinct committers, this year against last
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Maintainer concentration bus factor now against a year ago
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Issue backlog trend issues closed per issue opened, 12 months
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Responsiveness median time to a maintainer’s first reply
Nine scores for OpenSnitch, each built from the releases, notes and API history this site tracks — and, on Researcher and Business, where it stands among every measured tool in its category and how that has moved.
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Blank means never measured; nothing here is a filled-in zero.
Peer standings are included with Researcher and Business. See how this tool ranks against its competitors, using data we don't publish anywhere else.
See plans →Each score is 0–100 on a published rubric, derived from data this site already shows. A dimension we cannot measure says so — it is never scored 0 and never enters a rank.
How this is scored
- Shipping velocity — releases a month over the last 12 months, on a log scale where 16 a month scores 100. Needs 3 releases in the window.
- Documentation quality — the release-notes rubric published on the analytics page, unchanged.
- Breaking-change discipline — the share of releases carrying a breaking change (none scores 100, half or more scores 0). Only projects that label breaking changes are measured: a clean record cannot be told from an unlabelled one.
- Maintenance risk — quiet time measured against the tool's own release cadence (quiet longer than 90 days and three typical gaps scores 0), plus the number of active maintainers and whether contributors are growing, where known. Higher is lower risk.
- Innovation & surface — new capabilities in the feature ledger this year, API and MCP operations added, and the share of commits that are features: the mean of whichever we hold.
- Community health (open-source tools only) — each is a direction, not a size: contributors this year against last, the bus factor now against a year ago, and issues closed per issue opened, where steady scores 50, doubled 100 and halved 0; plus the median time to a maintainer's first reply (an hour scores about 100, a month or more 0). A commercial card has no repository and carries none of the four.
- Documented delivery (commercial tools) — when a vendor's documented new capabilities have slowed against its own baseline, that counts against the overall standing as heavily as two low dimensions. Steady delivery, or too little history to judge, leaves the standing alone; it is never a sixth score.
- Open-source tools are scored on repository signals; commercial tools on their published changelog. Ranks compare tools within one category and one profile and need at least five measured peers; the overall standing needs three ranked dimensions. Best-in-breed or consolidator is a shape, not a quality, and is never scored.
Release-note detail over time
See how much detail OpenSnitch puts in its release notes, quarter by quarter, and compare it with tracked tools in the same category. This history uses up to ten retained, reviewed notes per tool; sparse or blank older quarters may reflect that limit.
Checking release-note history…
Releases
16 entries
No entries match these filters.
- December 20251
- August 20251
- May 20251
- December 20241
- July 20241
- February 20241
- November 20231
- August 20232
- July 20231
- June 20231
- July 20221
- April 20221
- February 20221
- September 20211
- December 20201
Project health
Issue, contributor and maintainer activity in evilsocket/opensnitch, 2023-10 – 2026-09, as of 2026-09-25. Twelve-month figures first; the trend lines run the whole window.
- Contributors 13 −8 vs prior 12 months
- Maintainers 1 +0 joined · −0 left, last 12 months
- Bus factor 1 committers behind half the commits
- Community-filed 100% of issues opened, last 12 months
- Median time to close 46 days first maintainer reply 30 hours
- Open backlog 170 of 944 issues ever filed
- Issues opened / month 6 · 0 communitymaintainers
- Open backlog 170
- Contributors / month 0
- Commits / month 0
- Stars 14,075
- bugs 54%
- features 35%
- other 11%
Counts from the project's public repository and git history; no individuals are identified. Maintainers are the committers covering 80% of the last year's commits. how we measure this
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