When comparing FreeBSD vs CentOS, the Slant community recommends FreeBSD for most people. In the question“What are the best server OSes?” FreeBSD is ranked 3rd while CentOS is ranked 4th. The most important reason people chose FreeBSD is:
Ports provide a wide collection of software which are easy to build, install and modify. They contain recipes and patches to build various software, so you can simply run "make && make install" to build and install the software. You may also keep local patches and it would be picked up automatically. It also allows you to use the latest software even if you are not using the latest version of the operating system.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Powerful ports collection
Ports provide a wide collection of software which are easy to build, install and modify. They contain recipes and patches to build various software, so you can simply run "make && make install" to build and install the software. You may also keep local patches and it would be picked up automatically. It also allows you to use the latest software even if you are not using the latest version of the operating system.
Pro Batteries included
Base system contains basic developer tools, including compiler, debugger and system utilities.
Pro Jails mechanism
Jails allow for partitioning a system into several independent "mini-systems", a feature not found in many of the popular OS choices.
Pro Stable updates
Pro Great philosophy
FreeBSD won't change everything from a version to another, it tries to keep and maintain old tools as long as possible, and won't replace half the system every two versions like GNU/Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, Arch or Fedora does. everything is stable and also pretty minimal. FreeBSD is designed for performance.
Pro Greatly favours stability over anything else
CentOS favours stability over being up-to date. For this reason it ships with packages that may be up to two years behind in order to ensure stability over everything else.
Using older versions for packages means that they have been thoroughly tested and used in production for quite some time, and are ensured to play well with each-other.
This strategy has paid off quite a lot in the past. One example is the Heartbleed bug which left CentOS unaffected since it was using a two-year old OpenSSL library which did not have the bug.
Pro Applications don't have to take into account potentially breaking changes in libraries
Since CentOS backports all updates and bug fixes to older versions in order to maintain package compatibility across releases, applications hosted on Red Hat Linux don't have to worry about potential breaking changes in libraries they use, especially language libraries.
Pro Good long term support
Pro Built-in disaster recovery solutions through clusters
CentOS has several built-in solutions for disaster recovery. For example, it comes with pacemaker which can be configured to manage multi-site and and stretch clusters across multiple geographical locations for disaster recovery and scalability. It can also be configured to trigger notifications when the status of a managed cluster changes by using enhanced pacemaker alerts.
Pro Supports multiple PHP versions
You can install multiple PHP versions and have them available for different users.
Pro Built-in support for containers
Comes with built-in management tools for containers (Atomic CLI, Cockpit) and a container runtime in the form of Docker engine.
Cons
Con Pathetic third-party application support
Need to run Photoshop? No luck. Even most software that's portable to Linux will have a hard time running on FreeBSD. You're stuck with ONLY running the free software.
Con Inferior driver support for workstations
Lack of drivers for some modern personal devices.
Con Not for beginners
If a user needs an easy way to navigate around the filesystem, a text only Unix-derivative is not his best choice.