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What's the differences between OpenSwan and StrongSwan? All I found is compartation between outdated FreeSwan and testing version of OpenSwan - i.e. current stable of OpenSwan is 2.6 (3.0 is comparation) and current stable for StrongSwan is 4.4 (4.1.7 in comparation) which seems grossly unfare (there is no point in comparing Windows 98 with Ubuntu 10.10 or Mac OS X 10.7 with Slackware 8.0).

From websites StrongSwan seems to be better maintained while OpenSwan seems to be more popular.

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Both OpenSwan and StrongSwan are forks for continued development after FreeS/WAN project closed up shop. However, most of the Linux distributions have moved more towards IPsec-Tools since then.

You can use either one for IPsec on Linux, but unless you have a specific need for them, or you are trying to maintain configuration compatibility with older FreeS/WAN setups, you are probably better off using IPsec-Tools and Racoon (ISAKMP daemon from IPsec-Tools) for any new Linux IPSec Setups.

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Red Hat 6 has moved away from IPSec-Tools and uses OpenSwan now. I still agree with this answer, though. – joechip Jul 29 '11 at 10:38
Interesting, I hadn't realized they were doing that. I'll have to look into the changes. (Thanks for the tip.) – Christopher Cashell Aug 1 '11 at 21:12
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