I’ve played around with each of these a pretty good bit. I run IPCop at home and at a customer site, and pfSense I’ve messed with off and on, and have been impressed by it’s performance and features.
Despite what the title of this post says, however, I don’t think that it’s really fair to compare the two head-to-head. This is because they are fundamentally different in their aims; IPCop is determined to be a good SOHO firewall, and nothing more; pfsense on the other hand, has a decidedly more corporate feel to it. In fact, in the pfsense support forums, people offer feature bounties, where someone will offer money to whomever can develop a certain feature and incorporate it into the image. Now that is progress.
My experience in the IPcop forums has been less than stellar. I once posed a question regarding the ability to use IPcop as a transparent firewall, and was told that there would be no point in doing that with IPcop, since that isn’t what it was designed to do, and that I should try pfsense instead. Another user requested the same thing, and got the same answer. Still another user posed a question about when the 1.5 was coming out, since there were some new features coming out with it, as well as a new kernel. He was shortly ‘accused’ of being a Windows user, called a troll, and the thread locked. I read back over the posts to see if I had missed something inflammatory that he might have said to merit this, but couldn’t find anything unreasonable. That’s fanboyism for you.
I really like IPcop, and think that the core developers and the folks who have volunteered their time to create such cool addons for it have done a terrific job supporting it, but for the corporate user, pfsense seems like the better option.
You know what would be kool?...... 
I agree with your comments on IPCOP forums, whilst the system works well, I too have received undesired and unsubstantiated heat in these forums; from a self described ‘Infrastructure Architect’. This has been pernicious enough to make me consider using other firewall distributions other than IPCOP, such as pfsense. I’m no admin and don’t want to be, but need a solid firewall.
I must thank you for the efforts you have put in penning this site.
I really hope to see the same high-grade blog posts by you in the future as well.
In truth, your creative writing abilities has encouraged me to get my
own, personal website now 😉
I do consider all of the ideas you’ve presented to your post.
They’re really convincing and will certainly work.
Still, the posts are very quick for starters. May you please prolong them a
bit from next time? Thanks for the post.