Alternatives to Firestarter for all platforms with any license

  • Comodo Free Firewall

    Secure your system against internal attacks such as Trojan viruses / malicious software and external attacks by hackers. Safeguard your personal data through a simple...

    Free Windows

    No features added Add a feature

    Comodo Free Firewall icon

  • TinyWall

    TinyWall is a free software to harden and control the advanced firewall built into Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8. TinyWall includes a combination of features...

    Free Windows

    No features added Add a feature

    TinyWall icon

  • Gufw

    Gufw is an easy, intuitive way to manage your Linux firewall. It supports common tasks such as allowing or blocking pre-configured, common p2p, or individual ports...

    Free Open Source Linux

    Peer-To-Peer Add a feature

    Gufw icon

  • ufw

    Ufw stands for Uncomplicated Firewall, and is program for managing a netfilter firewall. It provides a command line interface and aims to be uncomplicated and easy to...

    Free Open Source Linux

    No features added Add a feature

  • ZoneAlarm Free Firewall

    ZoneAlarm Free Firewall blocks hackers from infiltrating your home PC by hiding your computer from unsolicited network traffic. By detecting and preventing intrusions...

    Freemium Windows

    No features added Add a feature

    ZoneAlarm Free Firewall icon

  • OpenSnitch

    OpenSnitch is a GNU/Linux port of the Little Snitch application firewall.

    Free Open Source Linux

    No features added Add a feature

    OpenSnitch icon

  • Filseclab Personal Firewall

    Filseclab Personal Firewall Professional Edition is one of the most important software of Filseclab, it is very easy to use and also very powerful. It can provide more...

    • Discontinued The last update was released on July 29th, 2005.

    Free Windows

    No features added Add a feature

    Filseclab Personal Firewall icon

  • Nufw

    NuFW is a GPL extension to Netfilter (that is Linux firewall). It adds identity-based filtering, i.e. it is possible to create firewall rules dependent on the user. ...

    Free Open Source Linux netfilter

    Rule based Add a feature

    Nufw icon

  • netfilter

    Netfilter software comprises iptables, ipset, conntrack-tools, libnetfilter and more. It is the core of Linux firewalls and NAT. It consists of a set of hooks inside...

    Free Open Source Linux

    No features added Add a feature

    netfilter icon

  • Wallix Pro Firewall

    Wallix Pro Firewall prevents intruders from accessing your computer and that’s the main objective for a computer firewall. It automatically detects and blocks attacks...

    • Discontinued Website now longer exists to provide download. Program is still available on other sites.

    Free Windows

    No features added Add a feature

    Wallix Pro Firewall icon

  • Core Force

    CORE FORCE is a free comprehensive endpoint security solution for Windows 2000 and Windows XP systems. CORE FORCE provides inbound and outbound stateful packet...

    • Discontinued Last modification date: 10/25/05. See https://www.coresecurity.com/grid/index-open-source-tools

    Free Open Source Windows

    No features added Add a feature

  • Guarddog

    Guarddog is a firewall configuration utility for Linux systems. Guarddog is aimed at two groups of users. Novice to intermediate users who are not experts in TCP/IP...

    Free Open Source Linux

    No features added Add a feature

    Guarddog icon

  • DefenseWall

    DefenseWall is a sandboxing-style personal firewall solution that wins when your anti-virus fails. DefenseWall is based on a sandboxing approach that uses rights...

    Commercial Windows

    No features added Add a feature

    DefenseWall icon

Platforms

Show 4 less popular platforms

License

Firestarter Comments

Firestarter discontinued

Comment by landroni
about Firestarter · Feb 2012 · Helpful Not helpful 1 Helpful Report as spam

Firestarter is as discontinued as it gets: the last release dates 2005.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/firestarter/files/firestarter/

Please as mark as such

reply
OmgItsTheSmartGuy · Feb 2012

Well, Firestarter's documentation was updated in 2010 (bottom of the page), which implies that they still intend to support it. So I wouldn't consider it discontinued outright.

landroni · Feb 2012

Not according to the Manual itself. If you opened the PDF, you will notice 2005-01-07 as the date. Also, the copyright notice is for 2004. Often open-source projects die out if there are no releases for 2-3 years. For this given project there were no releases for at least 7 years: it's probably bug-ridden with security vulnerabilities, a bad sign for a firewall.

This said, I have no dog in this fight. :)

OmgItsTheSmartGuy · Feb 2012

To be honest, I'm reluctant to make a judgement on whether or not an application is discontinued, unless the creators themselves declare that they've discontinued it.

landroni · Dec 2013

May I kindly renew my request to mark Small Firestarter iconFirestarter as discontinued?

For example, I was very surprised to see Small Impressive iconImpressive marked as discontinued, with the following message:
"This application has been discontinued ?
Doesn't seem to have been in active development since October 2010."

I know for a fact that Small Impressive iconImpressive hasn't been discontinued, and a new release is just around the corner. Its last release was on 2010-10-17, but its SVN repo was really busy these past months. Personally, I thought that it was quite a stretch to call Impressive "discontinued". By comparison, Small Firestarter iconFirestarter was last released in 2005. If Impressive was tagged as discontinued for a 3-year absence, surely Firestarter deserves to be discontinued for an 8-year absence.

Either way, it seems to me that there is no clear AlternativeTo policy on what constitutes a discontinued app. Can this be fixed? (Or guidelines clarified?)

[Edited by landroni, December 22]

OmgItsTheSmartGuy · Jan 2014

Yeah, we don't really have official guidelines for what determines whether an app is "discontinued" or not. Personally, I don't like to pass judgment unless I can get obvious developer confirmation that an app has been discontinued, though some of my fellow moderators have differing standards. This is probably something that should be addressed, but so far, I guess it just hasn't been a big enough problem.

Anyways, I've removed the "discontinued" notice for Impressive. I'm still reluctant to mark Firestarter as discontinued. Their documentation continues to be updated, and sourceforge says that the app was last updated on June 2013 (though I have no idea exactly what they updated). http://sourceforge.net/projects/firestarter/

landroni · Jan 2014

Thanks for looking into this.

I think that the SF "Last Update: 2013-06-03" says something about the SF website (some content was updated, maybe), but I wouldn't put too much value on that specific date. I have been heading a different project on SF, and for the life of me I never understood why SF was updating that date as I knew I didn't do anything significant to the code or the site.


Comment by Aaron
about Firestarter · Jun 2011 · Helpful Not helpful Report as spam

I always use this program, I have it boot up with my computer and it can block very well and just does a nice job.

reply