We compared SonicWall NSa 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 NSa's setup is generally considered easy, while WatchGuard Firebox is described as straightforward and simple. SonicWall NSa offers advanced threat protection and unique features like centralized firewall management, while WatchGuard Firebox is praised for its comprehensive features and user-friendly interface. SonicWall NSa could improve integration and bandwidth monitoring, while WatchGuard Firebox needs enhancements in areas such as interface, web blocker feature, reporting, and customer support. The pricing and licensing for both products are generally reasonable, but SonicWall NSa offers more diverse pricing models.
"It's a user-friendly firewall. Most of the tasks are very simple. It's simple to configure and troubleshoot this firewall."
"Using this product makes the VPN seamless and almost invisible to me in the sense that I don't have to think about it."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiGate are the ability to work in proxy mode, which other solutions, such as Palo Alto cannot. There are some features that are better that come at no extra license or subscriptions cost, such as basic SD-WAN. The DLT is useful, other solutions have the same feature too, such as Palo Alto."
"I think that the UTM features are the most value, as it truly protects my infrastructure."
"The solution is very user-friendly."
"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."
"UTM/NGFW features and FortiCloud for logs and backups are awesome."
"It has improved our security capabilities."
"SonicWall's technical support is very good."
"Overall SonicWall NSa is a good solution for our use case."
"We can do the hosting and security all under one box. The UTM is a good feature."
"It is a brilliant product. It is a Unified Threat Management (UTM) system. It has got about 11 security services that take care of your perimeter security. It takes care of any kind of cyber threats that could come in. It takes care of creating VPNs between two SonicWalls instantly and very easily. It has got spyware in it as well as a firewall. It has also got a gateway antivirus and an application firewall that can block things from outside."
"Support has improved dramatically since their separation from Dell."
"They offer good antivirus solutions."
"The product blocks access when I visit unrecognized websites."
"This product is user-friendly and easy to configure."
"Simple to move settings between WatchGuard boxes."
"I could still keep the data rates really high, up near the two gigahertz data speeds, without compromise on the security perimeters being acted simultaneously."
"WatchGuard Firebox is easy to configure and has a nice user interface."
"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."
"If there is any conflict, the reporting feature will kick out all types of information, which is great."
"It is a scalable solution."
"After conducting several tests I found the antivirus is working very well. Additionally, they have a very interesting feature, DNS WatchGuard, which is checking DNS requests for phishing, among other things, and it has caught a lot of unwanted attempts and attacks."
"HostWatch makes it so I can see, in real-time, activity in the event that there is something weird happening on the network. This simplifies my job."
"I would like to see improvements in the support from Fortinet. Here in the Philippines, whenever we have problems with a Fortinet product, we mostly ask for support from distributors and resellers and not directly from Fortinet."
"It can be a little bit more user-friendly in terms of policy definition and implementation. It seems a little bit complicated, and it could be simplified."
"The solution could be more evenly structured."
"The support from Fortinet FortiGate could improve. They are not easily accessible when we need them. They could improve their response time."
"The non-error conserve mode has room for improvement."
"Stability and technical support are the two major issues I have found with Fortinet."
"The integration with third-party tools may be something that they should work on."
"Fortinet FortiGate could improve by having more capabilities for troubleshooting VPN connections. For example, I do get some feedback about the current status, but I could use some history and logging of important events. The information is logged in our Syslog server, but I could use that information from the device. If they could provide a GUI to have some more insight on what's going with my VPN would be useful."
"There are a few areas that need improvement including the VPN, user management, and reporting."
"The pricing for this product in India is high and the fees should be reduced."
"Potential improvement around the associated VPN cost"
"The stability is not there. The features are there, but they are not stable. They need to improve on this product because I feel that they have launched this product without much R&D."
"We have used other solutions such as pfSense and Linux native firewalls. I prefer SonicWall NSa but if you are going to use something for an enterprise you need another solution."
"The content ID needs to be improved."
"After-sales support and hands-on training facilities are not available in my country."
"SonicWall needs to work on SD-WAN."
"Setup of this solution is complex, it's not plug and play."
"A 12-hour power outage... got our batteries."
"The solution is lacking a professional website, they should be updated more often."
"Reporting is something you've got to set up separately. It's one of those things that you've got to put some time into. One of the options is to set up a local report server, which is what I did. It's not great. It's okay... Some of the stuff is a little complicated to get up and running. Once you do, it becomes very user-friendly and easy to work with, but I find there are some implementation headaches with some of their stuff."
"When working with WatchGuard, specifically in configuring Panda Security on the portal for the first time, it was challenging for me."
"We were able to take from an older configuration, build a new one quickly, and get it up and running, which didn't take long, but there was some pain around it."
"There is room for improvement on the education side, regarding what does what, rather than just throwing it at a person and assuming they know everything about it. A lot of times, you have to call WatchGuard support to get the solution that will work, rather than their just having it published so that you can fix the problem on your own."
"There should be better integration and a way to configure multiple vendors into the same data center in order to offer more flexibility."
SonicWall NSa is ranked 19th in Firewalls with 80 reviews while WatchGuard Firebox is ranked 13th in Firewalls with 79 reviews. SonicWall NSa is rated 7.8, while WatchGuard Firebox is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of SonicWall NSa writes "Great performance and security with reasonable pricing". On the other hand, the top reviewer of WatchGuard Firebox writes "Offers a streamlined deployment, intuitive interface and robust security features". SonicWall NSa is most compared with SonicWall TZ, Meraki MX, Sophos XG, Cisco Secure Firewall and OPNsense, whereas WatchGuard Firebox is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Sophos XG, OPNsense, SonicWall TZ and Zyxel Unified Security Gateway. See our SonicWall NSa vs. WatchGuard Firebox report.
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