Let's now turn our attention to nftables, the new kid on the block. So, what does nftables bring to the table? (Yes, the pun was intended.):

• You can now forget about needing separate daemons and utilities for all of the different networking components. The functionality of iptables, ip6tables, ebtables, and arptables is now all combined in one neat package. The nft utility is now the only firewall utility that you'll need.
• With nftables, you can create multidimensional trees to display your rulesets. This makes troubleshooting vastly easier, because it's now easier to trace a packet all the way through all of the rules.
• With iptables, you have the filter, NAT, mangle, and security tables installed by default, whether or not you use each one. With nftables, you only create the tables that you intend to use, resulting in enhanced performance.
• Unlike iptables, you can specify multiple actions in one rule, instead of having to create multiple rules for each action.
• Unlike iptables, new rules get added atomically. (That's a fancy way of saying that there's no longer a need to reload the entire ruleset in order to just add one rule.)
• nftables has its own built-in scripting engine, allowing you to write scripts that are more efficient and more human-readable.
• If you already have lots of iptables scripts that you still need to use, you can install a set of utilities that will help you convert them to nftables format.