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.
"You can create multiple Virtual Domains (VDOMs), which are treated as separate firewall instances."
"It's a user-friendly firewall. Most of the tasks are very simple. It's simple to configure and troubleshoot this firewall."
"The application control features, such as Facebook blocking and Spotify blocking, are the most valuable."
"FortiGate firewalls are user-friendly, and I like the security profiling features."
"We were looking for the VPN feature and controlling the inflow and outflow of all the traffic within the site and across the sites. We are also using it for the VPN and VLANs."
"In terms of security, we have not experienced any security flaws or loopholes, and it has proven to be quite stable."
"FortiGate has a very strong unified threat management system."
"SSL-VPN is very useful for us and has been very reliable."
"The most valuable feature of SonicWall NSa is the control aspect of the solution."
"Overall SonicWall NSa is a good solution for our use case."
"Our old firewall was running as HA (High Availability) on two different but identical rack mounted servers. Moving to SonicWall allowed the company to move to one unit, yet accommodate more connections because it had sixteen ports and handled fail-over better than the old firewall solution."
"The basic firewall rules of the solution are great."
"The stability is better than other products."
"It has good reporting, the reporting is marvelous."
"Sometimes I have some queries, and the SonicWall support team resolves my queries."
"We have utilized all the features. The most valuable are the URL filtering by category, DMZ zoning, load balancing and site-to-site VPN."
"The set up of the VPN is pretty straightforward. Being able to build VPNs on the fly for certain users, if need be, is also valuable."
"The main reason we went with it was the security protocols. They were more robust on this device."
"Firebox's best feature is the access portal."
"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."
"The ports that I have assigned appear to be unattainable to outside 'mal-actors,' unless they have an address registered on the internet that this thing is expecting. That's a layer of security."
"As a whole, it has a very low requirement for ongoing interaction. It's very self-sufficient. If properly patched, it has very high reliability. The total cost of ownership once deployed is very low."
"Because we bought two firewalls... we need a central place to manage the policies and deploy them to both devices. It's good that it provides a system management console that is able to manipulate and manage policies in one place and deploy them to different locations."
"There are no problems with the technical support. If a problem occurs it gets resolved immediately with our technical support partners."
"I would like reporting to be improved and should offer a lot more tools to monitor the products."
"The way everything is set up could be easier. Currently, people need a lot of experience and knowledge to administer it and to link it to devices."
"Monitoring and reporting could be better."
"The firmware needs improvement because there are bugs when a new release comes through. Sometimes, the configuration changes, and it's a bit harder to see where the fail is. The first time that you have the firmware, it tends to have some issues, and it's better to wait a bit to update the equipment."
"I think the only issue that needs improvement is the interface."
"They are doing good, but they can improve the distributor assignment. The availability of the product and the timeline of delivery are the main things. The distribution should be swift, and the distributor should not reach out to end customers directly. They should work as a distributor. There should also be one more local distributor. Currently, there is only one distributor in Pakistan, and the rest of them are in UAE. It is difficult to work with only one distributor. Sometimes, you don't get along with the same distributor, and that's why they should have one more distributor. Their licensing should also be improved. The activation or renewal of the product should be done from the date of renewal, not from the date on which the license expired."
"In the balance between links feature normally you can just choose one option to balance. It would be better for the solution to have more than one option, preferably three."
"It would be nice if backups could more easily migrate between different models."
"It only has a single power interface, which has limitations in terms of high availability."
"They are not ready for managed security services. Their Cloud GMS product is weak, barely out of beta (buggy)."
"The problem primarily with SonicWall is it's a Unix box. And it's all software, all the activities, blocking, censoring, everything has to happen in the software. If you start hitting the box with a lot of sessions it slows down and that's not what I expect from a firewall."
"The only thing that we would want would be single-pane management, which it has, but the GMS is not very good. It's purely the management of multiple devices for multiple customers, that's the only thing that it's lacking."
"There are a few areas that need improvement including the VPN, user management, and reporting."
"The dynamics needs to be improved. The solution is not very compatible compared to the market products."
"The cost could be lower. There could also be more flexibility for smaller companies."
"The solution can be a bit expensive."
"The usability could be better, but it is definitely manageable. If we have to go to a backup internet connection, that could be a little bit easier."
"The solution is lacking a professional website, they should be updated more often."
"The data loss protection works well, but it could be easier to configure. The complexity of data loss protection makes it a more difficult feature to fully leverage. Better integration with third-party, two-factor authentication would be advantageous."
"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 only downside is that it is missing an API, that you can use to easily collect information from it."
"Sometimes, the writing rules are a little confusing in how am I doing them."
"We would like to see granular notification settings and more advanced filtering in traffic monitoring."
"The way Secure Sign-On authentication is happening needs to be improved. When the Secure Sign-On portal is turned on, anybody who comes into the campus, whether he or she is a staff member or a guest, has to go past the initial portal. One of the shortcomings is the username. It shouldn't allow permutations or combinations with upper or lower cases. For example, when there is a username abc, it shouldn't allow ABC or Abc. It should not allow the same username, but currently, two separate people can go in. Therefore, its authentication or validation should be improved, and the case sensitiveness should be picked up. If I have restricted someone to two devices, they shouldn't be able to use different combinations of the same username and get into the third or fourth device. It shouldn't allow different combinations of alphabets to be used to log in."
SonicWall NSa is ranked 19th in Firewalls with 80 reviews while WatchGuard Firebox is ranked 13th in Firewalls with 80 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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