We performed a comparison between Check Point CloudGuard Network Security 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.
"Since the product is stable, we do not have to spend additional money to buy other firewalls. Once deployed, we can use the product for a long time. Thus, it is cost effective."
"The most important feature is the intensive way you can troubleshoot Cisco Firepower Firewalls. You can go to the bit level to see why traffic is not handled in the correct way, and the majority of the time it's a networking issue and not a firewall issue. You can solve any problem without Cisco TAC help, because you can go very deeply under the hood to find out how traffic is flowing and whether it is not flowing as expected. That is something I have never seen with other brands."
"Firepower NGFW has improved my organization in several ways. Before, we were trying to stamp out security threats and issues, it was a one-off type of way to attack it. I spent a lot of manpower trying to track down the individual issues or flare-ups that we would see. With Cisco's Firepower Management, we're able to have that push up to basically one monitor and one UI and be able to track that and stop threats immediately. It also gives us a little more granularity on what those threats might be."
"We found the initial setup to be easy."
"The most valuable feature is the access control list (ACL)."
"You do not have to do everything through a command line which makes it a lot easier to apply rules."
"The most valuable features of this solution are the integrations and IPS throughput."
"The feature set is fine and is rarely a problem."
"Check Point CloudGuard is quick to deploy and easy for the customer to use."
"The solution could improve to have a DLP feature."
"One of the main characteristics that Check Point CloudGuard Network Security has given us is granularity and visibility."
"The Capsule solution and application filters are the most valuable. It is pretty straightforward to implement, and it also has good stability and scalability. Their technical support is also really good."
"It really is a pretty complete solution."
"Check Point has pretty simple solutions, like the virtual appliance which you just download and it is imported into VMware and you just start using it."
"It improves the availability of engineers to carry out projects."
"I like the firewall and the virtual machine. I also like that it's compatible with Amazon Web Services and Azure."
"The antivirus and items of that nature were quite helpful to have."
"SD-WAN is a good feature."
"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."
"SonicWall's sales support is much better than other vendors'."
"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."
"The product is working okay. The product is working feature-wise."
"The DPI-SSL is the solution's most valuable aspect. It's handy."
"The most valuable feature of SonicWall NSa is the control aspect of the solution."
"I would like it to have faster deployment times. A typical deployment could take two to three minutes. Sometimes, it depends on the situation. It is better than it was in the past, but it could always use improvement."
"We're getting support but there's a big delay until we get a response from their technical team. They're in the USA and we're in Africa, so that's the difficulty. When they're in the office, they respond."
"The Firepower FTD code is missing some old ASA firewalls codes. It's a small thing. But Firepower software isn't missing things that are essential, anymore."
"Cisco makes horrible UIs, so the interface is something that should be improved."
"The initial setup was a bit complex. It wasn't a major challenge, but due to our requirements and network, it was not very straightforward but still easy enough."
"The performance should be improved."
"The ability to better integrate with other tools would be an improvement."
"I think they need to review their whole UI because it feels like it was created by a whole bunch of different teams of developers who didn't fully talk to each other. The net policy screen is just a mess. It should look like the firewall policy screen, and they should both act the same, but they don't. I feel like it's two different buildings or programming, who don't talk to each other, and that really annoys me."
"For major upgrades, it's still necessary to destroy the VMs and re-create them again. Doing that would mean new public IPs as well."
"Easier optimization techniques can definitely help with better performance of the OS, as using the vanilla software doesn't actually showcase the real capability of the software."
"Micro-Segmentation functionality for EAST-WEST traffic is not native and requires integration with a third-party OEM."
"The solution lacks the capability to scale effectively."
"What I would like for future updates would be faster updates to apply, and perhaps a greater presence in the local language for the regions of Latin America."
"This application can be more integrated with web application firewalls. Better integrations would provide more granularity, which would be helpful for focusing on the application itself and preventing attacks. It would be good to include the cross-domain search. If you have multiple firewalls that are managed on the same platform and you want to check who is using some particular objects or where a specific ID is being used, it should provide an option for this kind of search instead of having to check one by one on each firewall."
"At the cost level, the solution is somewhat expensive."
"I would like to see a step-by-step initial installation of the firewall. That would be really helpful. Like in Oracle appliances, when you start it asks you, what's your current IP address? An initial setup should be a step by step and intuitive process. You click on "begin," it asks you some simple questions. You fill in the blanks - your current IP address, what you want to do, you want to set up a site to site VPN, for example, that kind of thing. That would be the smartest thing to have."
"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."
"Potential improvement around the associated VPN cost"
"It only has a single power interface, which has limitations in terms of high availability."
"Competitors provide SSL encryption licenses for free, whereas SonicWall only provides two licenses by default, but you have to pay for the rest of the licenses."
"The reporting and monitoring are a bit complex and should be easier in SonicWall NSa because other firewalls I have experienced have been more simple, such as Palo Alto. We are able to receive a clear view of our network. As a general user with little experience, it would be difficult for them to handle."
"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."
"Initially, it may be difficult for some people to learn and become acquainted with it."
"I'd like to see integration with Microsoft 365 for authentication."
More Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall Pricing and Cost Advice →
More Check Point CloudGuard Network Security Pricing and Cost Advice →
Check Point CloudGuard Network Security is ranked 10th in Firewalls with 31 reviews while SonicWall NSa is ranked 15th in Firewalls with 36 reviews. Check Point CloudGuard Network Security is rated 8.4, while SonicWall NSa is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Check Point CloudGuard Network Security writes "You can have everything under a single pane of glass". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SonicWall NSa writes "Easy to scale advanced threat protection solution with knowledgeable technical support, but has occasional bugs". Check Point CloudGuard Network Security is most compared with Azure Firewall, VMware NSX, Fortinet FortiGate, Sophos XG and Cisco Secure Workload, whereas SonicWall NSa is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate, Meraki MX, SonicWall TZ, Sophos XG and Sophos UTM. See our Check Point CloudGuard Network Security vs. SonicWall NSa report.
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