We performed a comparison between OPNsense and SonicWall NSa based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Firewalls solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The SD-WAN feature is the most valuable. This feature evolved from link load balancing. It has helped us in terms of our uptime and privatizing applications whenever we experience an outage. The SD-WAN feature has been a plus for us. Two-factor authentication has allowed us to add more users in terms of remote working. We have two-factor authentication for remote workers to authenticate them before they get on the network."
"The most valuable feature is the ease of configuration."
"The feature I like most is the SD-WAN. It allows you to manage more than one ISP at the same time. And there is a high-availability mode, so if one of your ISPs is down, you still have a backup."
"The stability and scalability of this solution are satisfactory. Its SD-WAN, VPN, and URL filtering features are very useful."
"Unified Threat Management (UTM) features."
"The solution is very user friendly. The user interface in particular is quite nice."
"FortiGate is very simple to manage and easy to use."
"Security solution with a straightforward and quick setup. It's a stable and scalable product."
"The most valuable features in OPNsense are reporting and visibility."
"I have found the solution has some great features overall, such as guest access capabilities, dashboards, and ease of use. There is plenty of documentation and support and it has the plugins that I needed."
"The solution is user-friendly and easy to configure."
"We have been operating here in our lab for several months, and everything appears to be extremely stable."
"It's more secure and more reliable."
"OPNsense is easy to scale when running on the hardware."
"OPNsense could improve by making the configuration more web-based rather than shell or command-line-based."
"It has firewall and VPN capabilities, which are very valuable features."
"SonicWall NS has a lot of valuable features. One of the best SonicWall NSa features is the ability to collect mini routers and get only one user connection."
"Content Filtering and sandboxing are valuable features."
"The most valuable features are that it is reasonably-priced and works well."
"Sometimes I have some queries, and the SonicWall support team resolves my queries."
"Since SonicWall is a UTM, we have enabled all the features: antivirus, IPS, URL filtering, and content filtering. All of these features are working fine."
"Compared to Cisco, SonicWall NSa is much easier to configure."
"The product is working okay. The product is working feature-wise."
"SonicWall has all the usual functions, like LAN configurations, security features, word filters, etc., but it also has the CFS agent, which isn't available in any other firewall. Reporting port support is also there."
"A lack of integration between our data centers."
"It should provide better visibility over the network and more information in the form of reports for the end users. Its installation should also be easier."
"In the future, I would like to see improvements made to cloud-based management."
"I would like to see improvements in the product's application rules."
"The pricing could always be better."
"From a reporting perspective, there's room for improvement. They're providing FortiAnalyzer through which one can get some enhancements, but the visibility and reporting still need slight improvement."
"Fortinet FortiGate could improve by adding FortiAnalyzer to its solution, we should not have to use another solution. FortiAnalyzer can provide more detailed information."
"The initial setup and configuration are not intuitive and require training."
"There are issues with stability and reliability."
"We did not like the fact that you have to configure everything with the graphic user interface. We have used other firewalls, such as FortiGate, that you can configure via code. OPNsense is not easy to integrate. When you are deploying via GitHub or another source repository, this is not possible. That's one thing we didn't like much."
"OPNsense could improve by making the configuration more web-based rather than shell or command-line-based."
"I would like better documentation concerning the provided packages and their integration."
"The ability to set the VPN IP address would be a welcome addition."
"While they do have paid options that actually gives better features, for most of the clients, if they tend to take a paid option will instead opt for Fortinet."
"The scalability needs improvement."
"The interface isn't so friendly user. But we have some technicians here who are quite confident with this tool. OPNSense could maybe add sets of rules so it's simpler to manage different groups with particular needs."
"I'd like to see integration with Microsoft 365 for authentication."
"The pricing for this product in India is high and the fees should be reduced."
"The features I would like to see improve are the dashboard and the UI."
"Overall, Im satisfied with SonicWall NSa, but it would be better if they could add a small terminal to each device. This would help me deal with certain issues by running a small bot onto any PC."
"The anti-spam requires a specific Java version on the server side (do not update it, otherwise it will break)."
"A room for improvement in SonicWall NSa is the log server because it could be more user-friendly compared to Fortinet and Palo Alto Networks. My company has many rule sets up for review, so sometimes, my team needs to use Excel for filtering, but the UI cannot support the Excel function."
"One area for improvement in SonicWall NSa is the GUI. It isn't easy to understand. The support for SonicWall NSa is mediocre, which is another area for improvement."
"The implementation for VLANs is a little bit cumbersome. It would be good to make that a little bit easier."
OPNsense is ranked 3rd in Firewalls with 36 reviews while SonicWall NSa is ranked 19th in Firewalls with 80 reviews. OPNsense is rated 8.4, while SonicWall NSa is rated 7.8. The top reviewer of OPNsense writes "Robust network security and management offering a user-friendly interface, open-source flexibility, and cost-effectiveness, with challenges regarding initial setup and the absence of official support". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SonicWall NSa writes "Great performance and security with reasonable pricing". OPNsense is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Sophos XG, Untangle NG Firewall, Sophos UTM and IPFire, whereas SonicWall NSa is most compared with SonicWall TZ, Meraki MX, Sophos XG, Cisco Secure Firewall and Check Point NGFW. See our OPNsense vs. SonicWall NSa report.
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