I use pfSense CE, and rely on DNS entries to be automatically created for DHCP addresses. That worked fine for more than a decade, until they made Kea the default a couple of years ago (or did they just put a bunch of notices in the interface that old DHCPd was deprecated? It's been long enough that I don't remember).

Anyway, at the time Kea (at least in pfSense) wasn't able to do that, which caused things to break for me for a bit. It's a small thing (and, I mean, totally fair with free software) but the fact that they pushed an update to Kea before Kea (again, at least in pfSense) was at feature parity rubbed me the wrong way and has kept me from using it since then.

(edit: on the off chance anyone cares, I decided to check and it looks like this issue has been fixed as of pfSense CE 2.8.)

I don't follow pfsense too much but my understanding is OPNsense typically brings in package updates faster as they have a more frequent update cycle. I can't speak too much to bugs as I haven't migrated to Kea but imo some core functionality wasn't there until recently. And Dnsmasq seems like a better fit for me anyway, which is where I'll migrate to.

From the 25.1.6 OPNsense May update notes:

> Last but not least: Kea DHCPv6 is here. And with it full DHCP and router advertisement support in Dnsmasq to bridge the gap for ISC users who do not need or want Kea. We are going to make Dnsmasq DHCP the default in new installations starting with 25.7, too. ISC DHCP will still be around as a core component in 25.7 but likely moves to plugins for 26.1 next year.

https://docs.opnsense.org/releases/CE_25.1.html#may-08-2025

I've been using it on opnsense since the first version it was released in. I aggressively switched because wanted to ditch my weird setup to do multi subnets (forwarding though a l3 switch). Haven't had any issues.