We compared SonicWall TZ and WatchGuard Firebox across several parameters based on our users' reviews. After reading the collected data, you can find our conclusion below:
Comparison Results: SonicWall TZ is highly praised for its user-friendly interface, robust features, and cost-effectiveness. However, there are areas that need improvement such as reporting, licensing, scalability, and support. On the other hand, WatchGuard Firebox is commended for its comprehensive features, ease of use, and reasonable pricing. However, it also has areas that need improvement including the interface, web blocker feature, reporting, customer support, security, configuration options, scalability, and integration.
"The pricing is great and very reasonable."
"It's great for capturing the traffic and troubleshooting it."
"The application control features, such as Facebook blocking and Spotify blocking, are the most valuable."
"The reporting and monitoring are very good."
"A strong point of FortiGate is the graphical interface is complete and easy to use."
"The most valuable feature is the SSL VPN, as it allows us to connect and it separates this product from other firewalls."
"It does a lot for you for intrusion protection and as an antivirus. The threat management bundle is worth the money. You don't need another company to monitor your web traffic for you. You can do everything yourself on the firewall. You restrict your own black list for people on the firewall. You don't need to pay some other company for another product to do that for you. The firewall can do that for you. So, it's an easy-to-use product for people to be independent. They don't need to rely on other vendors to do what the firewall can do. They can do everything."
"The performance is good."
"I have found the stability of this product to be excellent."
"Ease of management and the VPN integration."
"We are very much happy with the support."
"It protects against intrusion while allowing needed access."
"The installation is straightforward and took approximately 30 minutes."
"The solution boasts good performance and is easy to use."
"The solution's VPN is very good for stability and detecting threats."
"It's been very easy to implement and deploy."
"The most valuable are the VPN and proxy features."
"The most valuable feature of WatchGuard Firebox is the VPN. It's easy to connect to the VPN."
"The policy monitoring and allowing different traffic flows are the most useful features for us; regulating which traffic comes in and out."
"What I found most valuable in WatchGuard Firebox is that it's a functional platform that works, and each of its features works well. The solution also has good reporting and dashboard capabilities. I also find the overall performance of WatchGuard Firebox great."
"All of the features have been valuable. There's nothing on my M270 that I'm not using. If you have remote access, you can see how many users are coming from the outside world to be connected to the systems, through the virus systems that we have behind the firewall, in order to gain access to their files and do their work. We can also see how long they stay online and whether these connections are closed forcefully or for any other reasons, such as a glitch or some kind of misbehavior, to see if internet traffic is optimized and if that particular traffic is under company policies, concerning which websites were visited."
"The most valuable feature for small and medium businesses is the support for various protocol proxies."
"Firebox's best feature is the access portal."
"The most valuable feature is the ease of use of the interface."
"It needs more available central management."
"Scalability is one of the disadvantages. When it comes to scalability, you have to actually change the box. If you want to upgrade it, you need to actually change the existing box and probably you take the system off to other sites."
"Fortinet FortiGate is not very easy to use. The navigation could be improved to make it easier to use."
"Fortinet FortiGate could improve by having a frequent ask questions(FAQ) area for people to receive quick answers to popular questions. Additionally, it would be beneficial to have an SMS notification feature. For example, if you cannot access your email you could receive an SMS message."
"It would be nice if backups could more easily migrate between different models."
"One issue that I have had is that sometimes I need to monitor the traffic, so I need to filter it according to the user and which user is using it the most. I experience a bottleneck most of the time, particularly at the peak time when the number of contracts and users are at maximum."
"They should improve the interface to make it more user-friendly."
"The stability could be a bit better."
"Although the pricing is good, it could always be lower. If we get to pay less, we're happier."
"I can't get the support that I need from SonicWall."
"The price could be better for us in Bolivia."
"The small business line has less PPS throughput."
"Its reporting can be improved. Currently, we cannot directly get the user names. It only shows the IP, which makes it a bit confusing because we need to use the IP to find the user. If we could directly get the name of the user, it would be better."
"Support for SonicWall TZ needs improvement, particularly the time it takes before you're able to speak to a support person, e.g. you have to wait for at least 30 minutes on the phone."
"An additional feature that I would like to see is reporting that includes metrics to give me more information about the number of viruses that it has actually detected and interrupted."
"The solution's pricing could be made cheaper."
"It's very hard to get information from their website, for exactly what I need to do. Sometimes I end up having to open a lot of support tickets... It's a navigational issue which makes it hard to find what I'm looking for and it's just so broad."
"Make WatchGuard Firebox capable of integrating with third-party vendors like FireMon, Splunk, Tenable, etc."
"The performance of the solution's processor needs to be faster."
"The solution needs to improve its accessibility."
"I would like to have a little more control over access points and the ability to see the bandwidth that is passing through a specific access point. We are not able to see that. We can see what traffic is passing through the Firebox itself, but we can't identify if it is coming from a particular access point or not."
"There is room for improvement in the threat protection, data packet inspection, and performance of the solution. Generally, it's just a lower-end product. It does the job but doesn't do it very well."
"Websense is an application that monitors and filters internet traffic. Websense was derived from WatchGuard. But when you go to WatchGuard to actually implement that particular feature, you have to use some type of additional feature and you have to pay for it, unfortunately. I think it should be free or free in the WatchGuard box itself, as an option. It would be nice if they didn't charge us for that."
"The VPN aspect of the WatchGuard Firebox is an area that could potentially benefit from improvement. We encountered difficulties while attempting to integrate Windows 11 laptops into the system, which resulted in unreliable connections. After some research, we discovered that this was primarily due to compatibility issues with Windows 11 and required a patch. However, it was still a challenge as it seemed that even when we tried to keep the laptops on Windows 10, they still exhibited the same issues as Windows 11 machines. Despite WatchGuard attributing the problem to Microsoft, we were eventually able to find a solution and all the machines are now functioning seamlessly."
SonicWall TZ is ranked 12th in Firewalls with 78 reviews while WatchGuard Firebox is ranked 13th in Firewalls with 80 reviews. SonicWall TZ is rated 8.0, while WatchGuard Firebox is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of SonicWall TZ writes "Has efficient user access control feature and good technical support services ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of WatchGuard Firebox writes "Offers a streamlined deployment, intuitive interface and robust security features". SonicWall TZ is most compared with Sophos XG, Netgate pfSense, Meraki MX, SonicWall NSa and Cisco Secure Firewall, whereas WatchGuard Firebox is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Sophos XG, OPNsense, Meraki MX and Cisco Secure Firewall. See our SonicWall TZ vs. WatchGuard Firebox report.
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We monitor all Firewalls reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
