So apparently I’m late to the party and just found out that Plus is free for home users. I’ve been running CE for a while now, and it’s configured how I need. It doesn’t appear that I need any of the advertised additional features of Plus. So it would appear the only advantage would be access to more frequent updates? However possible with the disadvantage of having to deal with something phoning home to a license server if I have to change anything?
Should I “upgrade”? Or is this a case of don’t fix what ain’t broke, and stick with CE? (I did watch Tom’s Video comparing the two)
I would say if you are happy with CE and have all the tools you need on your current system there is no real reason to upgrade, I upgraded to Plus to look around but unless your looking for support from Netgate or a feature like ZFS boot states there is no security or functionality reason to upgrade. so I guess your sentence probably sums it up pretty well it is not broken so there is no real reason to fix it.
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The ZFS boot environments is a really nice feature of plus.
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So I read the documentation, and it seems to say it will handle all packages installed. However they also say they recommend removing all installed packages first. Can I just upgrade with everything in place? What’s the odds I have to reinstall?
Should work, but even if you remove the packages it’s not really an issue because the settings are still there so when you re-install them it will work fine.
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Ok, I decided to update. I installed CE using a ZFS filesystem anyways, so that was already good to go. I left all my packages installed. Figured if something went wrong I would just reinstall and try again (No big deal). No problems with the update with the packages installed.
pfblockerng, has changed some, so my config didn’t directly translate, but it didn’t break anything. Just I had to setup some things in the newer version. As someone who knows just enough to be dangerous, I prefer and found the updated version much easier to work with.
Everything is working great. Seems like the update was worth doing honestly. Now I’ll go find some wood to knock on hope I didn’t jinx myself…
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… tis the reason why I have reluctantly started to learn opnsense and will never upgrade to plus apart from my business customers for whome its a no brainer
love pfsense but this forking is classic sneeky “free for now licence” tactic, a underhand way of undermining the ethos of opensource
oh well, money talks 
lol… @hs6666, its still free and I’m not sure where you get your information that it its going to change. Netgate hasn’t said that it will be a “Free for now license”, so to speculate and say that it is without any facts is pure ignorance. If you like opnsense then use it! Otherwise don’t make statements that aren’t true and how you feel about them and their license structure for home and lab use.
… sorry, to clarify, more than likely there will always be a free version, its a tried and tested legitmate business model… what it looks like several years from now is anyone’s guess 
Harry