We performed a comparison between Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls 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 initial setup of Fortinet FortiGate was straightforward."
"It's user-friendly and easy to operate."
"Our security improved from being able to put in rules and close off unwanted traffic."
"The most valuable feature is the VDOM, which allows the customer to have multiple firewalls in a single campus."
"You can purchase switches and you don't need to do anything with them. You just put in the firewall and the switches get all the policies and rules that you already have in the firewall. With Fortinet, you just connect the FortiSwitch to the Fortinet and that's it."
"It's a user-friendly firewall. Most of the tasks are very simple. It's simple to configure and troubleshoot this firewall."
"The technical support is great."
"I like Fortinet's cloud management. It allows me to manage all my devices in different branches for three cloud accounts. Even though I use on-prem devices, I can manage everything on the cloud."
"It's very important that Palo Alto NG Firewalls embed machine learning into the core of the firewall to provide inline, real-time attack prevention. That increases our security posture... The firewall is able to capture it and flag it and it is easy to mitigate as soon as we see something like that happening, to secure the environment more, in real time."
"IoT security is most valuable in the current version. Content IDs, DDoS protection, zone protection, and DLP are the most prominent features in Palo Alto Networks NG Firewall. It is easier to configure than other solutions."
"I like the sandbox feature, and it's very good. It kills each malware deployment in the sense of signatures within five minutes. So, we can secure our network and infrastructure very well within the stipulated time. The WildFire functionality is very good because a few files are also getting blocked. It's critical as malware attacks are also getting ignored, and the logging is very well maintained in this firewall. The most valuable solutions in this field are application-based firewalls. That is the main criteria of the firewall and functionality. We can get all the logs related to this and each and every packet. I like that the firewall is working as an application. The application-based entity we have deployed is well maintained and working very well. We were able to find lots of vulnerabilities when we deployed it, but we could not disclose all. But there were vulnerabilities we could block by updating the firewall and taking actions on clientside machines. So, we got to know that we have lots of vulnerabilities inside the organization too, and we took lots of steps and resolved the number of vulnerabilities. Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is an all-in-one solution. It provides every entity log, which is a very good functionality of this firewall. It gives every packet and aspect that the firewall is performing through its logs, and it does it very well. This firewall's unified platform helped eliminate multiple network security tools. If anyone uses P2P sites, cryptocurrency websites, or any illegal sites, we can block it easily. It gives us a proper alert for these kinds of sites, and it properly secures our network. Monitoring is the best thing we are doing here, and we can block this kind of vulnerability as soon as it comes to us."
"Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls have a very nice interface for logging and monitoring. I find it easy to navigate and use, and the interface is organized as well. I can find answers within a couple of hours and have seen time savings."
"The most valuable features include the different security zones and the ability to identify applications not only by port numbers but by the applications themselves... And with the single-pass architecture, it provides a good trade-off between security and network performance. It provides good security and good network throughput."
"The ease of use and the ease of configuration of our policies are the most valuable features."
"DNS Security is a good feature because, in the real world with web threats, you can block all web threats and bad sites. DNS Security helps to prevent those threats. It's also very helpful with Zero-day attacks because DNS Security blocks all DNS requests before any antivirus would know that such requests contain a virus or a threat to your PC or your network."
"Prisma Access is the most valuable feature of Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls."
"It's very simple to use and the support is great."
"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."
"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."
"SonicWall's technical support is very good."
"It is able to fulfill my requirements. It protects our network environment. It has control over IPS, signatures, and it can also manage bandwidth and mapping. It is also stable and has good support."
"Support has improved dramatically since their separation from Dell."
"The product is simple to manage."
"SonicWall provides endpoint security with advanced protection. Moreover, SonicWall includes access points and additional features."
"The graphical user interface of Fortinet's FortiGate product does not function well with text-based interfaces."
"The Web-filter in this solution is not very good."
"The solution could be more user friendly."
"Fortinet could improve the windows opener or the virtual IP solutions for opening windows. The virtual IP settings need improvement as firewalls are trending in new development directions."
"The debugging and troubleshooting has room for improvement."
"I would like to see a more intuitive dashboard."
"I would like reporting to be improved and should offer a lot more tools to monitor the products."
"NGN, reporting and controls."
"The level of control and granularity in terms of rule customization could be enhanced. However, compared to our previous solution, Palo Alto provides much better drill-down capabilities."
"I would like the option to be able to block the traffic from a specific country in a few clicks."
"It's not so easy to scale out your security capabilities."
"Based on the features that I have seen so far, I do not see any room for improvement, but they can improve their CLI documentation. I haven't really seen much when it comes to CLI documentation."
"Could also use better customer support."
"I would like to see better integration with IoT technologies."
"The stability, scalability for enterprise-level organizations, and technical documentation have room for improvement."
"Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls don't provide a unified platform that natively integrates all security capabilities. It's missing some features for geofencing and understanding locations."
"Do not even consider NetExtender - probably one of the most horrific, nightmare grade Java-based VPN clients. We have but all given up trying to make it work reliably."
"The reporting feature could be better because most of the companies want to have the analytics included, which is something that you have to buy separately."
"Some of the configurations could be better."
"The logging, reporting, and storage capacity size could improve in a future release."
"The web interface administration of SonicWall NSa could be improved. Compared to Sophos and FortiGate, making rules is easier with those systems."
"They should consider upgrading the capabilities within the GUI."
"It would help us a lot of SonicWall sent us more information about the latest updates and things that are changing."
"The scalability is something that should be improved."
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Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is ranked 6th in Firewalls with 162 reviews while SonicWall NSa is ranked 19th in Firewalls with 80 reviews. Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is rated 8.6, while SonicWall NSa is rated 7.8. The top reviewer of Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls writes "We get reports back from WildFire on a minute-by-minute basis". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SonicWall NSa writes "Great performance and security with reasonable pricing". Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is most compared with Check Point NGFW, Azure Firewall, Meraki MX, Sophos XG and Netgate pfSense, whereas SonicWall NSa is most compared with SonicWall TZ, Meraki MX, Sophos XG, Cisco Secure Firewall and Juniper SRX Series Firewall. See our Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls vs. SonicWall NSa report.
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