Enterprise Users of FreeBSD Report High Satisfaction and Usability

The FreeBSD Enterprise Working Group (EWG) fielded an online survey from April 24 to May 8, 2026 to measure the level of satisfaction among enterprise users of FreeBSD and the “on-the-ground” effectiveness of EWG work over the past three years. We also used the survey to understand current friction points and prioritize the EWG’s ongoing work.

Begun in 2023, the EWG set out to bring clarity to feature and other gaps that could limit enterprise adoption of FreeBSD as a general-purpose enterprise server platform, and to provide a supportive group to help developers close the gaps. 

The group established the following success metrics:

1. Staffed development plans for high priority projects
2. Steady to growing number of WG participants who perform a growing diversity of tasks
3. Feature updates in priority projects
4. Greater utility by current enterprise users ← why we did this survey
5. Increased adoption of FreeBSD as a general purpose enterprise server platform
6. More support for FreeBSD by “critical” enterprise tech & resources, such as XDR vendors, CIS benchmarks

In the November 2025 Update, we documented progress on success metrics 1 and 3. 

This survey measured progress on success metric 4.

Key Findings:

1. Survey respondents give FreeBSD a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 51.6 
2. 86% of respondents report that over the past three years, enterprise usability of FreeBSD has improved (52%) or held steady (34%)
3. Features driving improved enterprise usability most are bhyve and Jails management, Zero Trust and Reproducible Builds, and SBOMs
4. Most critical gaps that will improve enterprise usability going forward are cloud native, third party enterprise app support, and Long Term Support 
5. The EWG should focus on evangelizing FreeBSD in the Enterprise, Creating Docs for Enterprise Users, and distributed file storage support

Let’s dive deeper into each of these findings.

Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 51.6

As the first satisfaction survey dedicated to enterprise FreeBSD users, this NPS score will serve as the benchmark. It’s safe to say we’re setting the bar high. In the tech space, an NPS over 50 is considered excellent.

What is NPS? 

We calculate NPS by asking how likely a respondent is to recommend the subject in question to a friend or colleague. The 0 to 10 scale pins 0 as ‘not likely’ and 10 as ‘extremely likely’. To calculate the score, you sum the percent of respondents that give a 9 or 10, these are your “Promoters” and subtract the sum percents given for 0 through 6, the “Detractors”. Hence the term ‘Net Promoter Score’.

For the 2026 FreeBSD in the Enterprise survey, the equation looks like this:

51.6% + 12.5% - (1.6% x 2 + 3.1% x 3) = 51.6

         64.1         -              12.5                = 51.6

Figure 1: FreeBSD in the Enterprise Survey NPS Results

Improvements in Enterprise Usability

While NPS measures user satisfaction and loyalty, we also wanted to uncover whether enterprise users are finding FreeBSD easier to use. Encouragingly, a majority (52%) of respondents report that FreeBSD is becoming easier to use in the enterprise, and another 34% say it is holding steady, reporting its use is neither easier nor harder. 

As shown in Figure 2, the largest group of respondents (39.1%) report that FreeBSD has become a little easier to use in the enterprise over the past three years while the EWG has been at work. The next largest group (34%) say it’s holding steady. Given tech’s accelerating pace of change, that’s more than treading water. The next largest segment, 12.5% of respondents, say FreeBSD is much easier to use in the enterprise. 14.1% say FreeBSD is a little (7.8%) or much (6.3%) harder to use in the enterprise. Note that this percent nearly perfectly matches the 12.5% of respondents coded as Detractors ← this is the kind of check I like to do that increases my confidence in the fidelity of the report.

Figure 2: Gauging usability of FreeBSD in the Enterprise

The features driving improved usability

We also wanted to know which, if any, of the specific EWG workstreams contributed most to improved usability. This gave me a chance to use the Google Form Skip Logic feature, or what they call “Go to section based on answer”.

Figure 3: Coding skip logic in Google Forms

What is Skip Logic?

One of the fun parts of survey design is thinking not just about the questions you want to answer, but also how to “code” the survey to target specific questions at the best respondents. 

I decided to ask anyone who reported that their experience with FreeBSD in the enterprise has become easier over the past three years “What has helped you the most? Rank these items by helpfulness to you, with 1 being most helpful and 7 least.” (There are two pearls of wisdom in here from Polly Staman, my survey sherpa. First is “close all questions that you can” meaning if you have a decent idea of the universe of likely responses, list them as response options instead of just giving people a text box. This will make the results more meaningful and MUCH easier to analyze, especially as the response count climbs. Second, if it makes sense, force people to rank the options, as this gives you greater clarity on the options’ relative importance.) 

Sylve is the champion!

As we see in Figure 4, there’s one clear, undisputed heavyweight champion here. Let’s hear it for Sylve bhyve and Jails manageability! This is a great opportunity for the entire FreeBSD community to take a victory lap: Hayzam Sherif, the maintainer of Sylve, the FreeBSD Foundation for recognizing the importance of bhyve manageability to enterprise adoption and providing funding to support  the development of Sylve, and the FreeBSD community that has rallied around Hayzam and this project. Sylve now counts nearly 1,000 GitHub stars and 14 contributors. Anyone looking for a great case study in community-driven enterprise open source should look right here.   

Figure 4: Among respondents who said FreeBSD has become easier to use in the enterprise, rank these items by helpfulness to you, 1 being most helpful and 7 least

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Software supply chain transparency and verifiability

Zero Trust / Reproducible Builds and SBOM, ranking second and third, were key parts of the modernization work funded by the Sovereign Tech Agency. These capabilities, which are mostly in place now and will be fully available by FreeBSD 16, support enterprise users by improving software supply-chain verifiability and transparency. FreeBSD release artifacts can now be built reproducibly and without root privileges, including installer, memstick, VM, and cloud images, reducing privileged operations in the build pipeline while making identical source inputs produce byte-for-byte identical outputs. 

The FreeBSD SBOM effort builds a source-focused framework around SPDX Lite 3.0.1 JSON-LD generation, SPDX-License-Identifier coverage, and SBOM metadata. For enterprises and FreeBSD-based vendors preparing for the CRA, these support auditing and compliance review. 

FreeBSD’s integrated operating-system model gives its supply-chain work a clear artifact-level focus. Because the kernel, base system, release tools, and release artifacts are developed within a single OS project, reproducibility and no-root release engineering can be applied to the complete images that enterprises and vendors actually deploy, including ISO, memstick, VM, and cloud disk images. This is a distinction from the Linux ecosystem, where comparable supply-chain work (like other things) is spread across kernel, distribution build systems, package archives, container pipelines, and vendor-specific release processes. The point is not that one model is categorically better, but that FreeBSD’s project structure may make it easier to discuss transparency and verifiability at the level of complete operating-system release artifacts. This seems like a very fertile area for additional research, ideally by a disinterested party.

Most critical gaps

Just as with the previous section, I asked all the respondents that said FreeBSD has become harder to use to rank what would make it better. 

Figure 5: Thinking about what would improve FreeBSD for you, how important is progress in each of the following areas, with 1 being most important and 7 being least important

Cloud Native crowned ‘most wanted’ capability

As detailed in the November 2025 EWG Update, Cloud Native officially graduated from the EWG with the creation of its own dedicated Cloud Native Container Technologies WG. I join the bi-weekly meetings when I can, and the group is making steady progress. If you’re reading this and you can help by contributing time or funding to accelerate FreeBSD cloud native efforts, please join the next meeting.  

Ecosystem

Second and third most wanted are what I’d call “ecosystem” capabilities. These aren’t features to be built into FreeBSD per se, but rather they refer to broader support needed to make FreeBSD go down easier in complex environments.

Third party (enterprise) apps

This one is a bit of a chicken and egg situation, but there are concrete steps the FreeBSD community can take now.

1. This is a place where loud and steady advocacy by FreeBSD users is absolutely essential. Demand that your suppliers support FreeBSD.
2. Continued/increased collaboration across UNIXs (the BSDs, Illumos, MacOS) could also really make a difference. Imagine a world where an app that works on any UNIX works on them all! Maybe this is something The Open Group can take on (tag Andras Szakal)
3. Enterprise app makers whose solutions are based on FreeBSD should step up and support FreeBSD as a target platform. This will make it easier for FreeBSD proponents to get CISO approval.
4. Finally, enterprises should be more flexible with their requirements, such as by broadening approved app lists to include functionally-equivalent open source alternatives. For example, open source XDR / SIEM Wazuh has a FreeBSD port from the community, but too many CISOs exclusively require closed source XDR/SIEM solutions that usually don’t include FreeBSD support. CISOs take note, an embrace of platform diversity boosts enterprise security and sovereignty.  

Long Term Support

With the shortening of the FreeBSD release cycles, an LTS offer roughly similar to the Linux LTS offerings from Canonical, Red Hat, and SuSE would reduce friction. Klara, the provider of enterprise development and support services for FreeBSD and OpenZFS, is accepting expressions of interest in a new LTS offering launching this fall.  

Current focus for the EWG

Respondents provided guidance on what would be most helpful for the EWG to focus on now, with most of the options falling in a pretty narrow band.

Figure 6: What are the most (5) and least (1) important things for the EWG to work on now?

Evangelizing FreeBSD for enterprise use

The desire for more evangelizing of FreeBSD come up often, so I wasn’t surprised that this emerged as the top priority for the EWG to focus on. My sense is the community has been improving in this regard over the past several years. There is also an interesting tension in this community on this point. The permissive “no strings attached” license seems to have created a culture that values, I’ll say, privacy, for lack of a better term. And like other highly-technical communities, there is a strong aversion to “fluffy” marketing. The downside to this is that it can lead to materials that work really well for existing users and very poorly for potential users–the quintessential “preaching to the choir” syndrome. All of this makes figuring out how to conduct the needed evangelism tricky. I will say that many of the FreeBSD Foundation's recent efforts seem right on the money, though they are, as they should be, spread across the entirety of the community, and not focused exclusively on enterprise use.    

What the EWG is doing

All “Promoter” survey respondents were offered the option to provide their email address if they are willing to help evangelize FreeBSD in the Enterprise. We received a good number, and I will be contacting them once I’ve got a plan for how to run the advocacy program. I’m also interested in collaborating with others in the community that may be interested in helping organize and execute an enterprise-focused advocacy program. 

Beyond this, my plea is to simply tell your story. When I was at the Node.js Foundation, I worked with the late great Mikael Rogers on a YouTube Series called Enterprise Conversations. The format was super simple and honestly I think it works great. So, if nothing else, just write a LinkedIn Post with answers to these questions, or record yourself answering them:

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1. Describe your company, your role and the team you’re on. In other words, “what would you say you do here at Initech?”
   
   1. How long has the team been in place?
2. When did FreeBSD come into your stack and how does it fit in today?
3. What in particular about FreeBSD makes it good for the use case(s) described in #2?
4. Anything else to add? For example you can mention upstream contributions, participation or attendance at BSD conferences, future plans…
   
   

There’s no real wrong way. Submit a talk to a conference, write a post on LinkedIn, or contact the FreeBSD Foundation to provide a testimonial. 

Enterprise user docs

The FreeBSD Handbook receives all kinds of well-deserved praise. What I hear in this result is that, for purposes of using FreeBSD in the enterprise, a set of configuration guides and how-tos specifically focused on common enterprise use cases would be an important supplement. I am willing to put effort into this, and if anyone is able to help fund this effort, it would allow me to contract a writer to assist. Others in the community are also working on this as well, such as members of the Cloud Native WG, and so my role may end up being in part an editorial one. 

Distributed file storage

This comes up a lot in relation to cloud native workloads, and as such is a shared area of focus between the EWG and the Cloud Native WG. If this interests you and you’d like to help, please join the next Cloud Native WG meeting.

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