We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Firewall 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."We are a visual effects company, and there have been a number of high profile security issues in our industry. This has brought us to a higher standard of security, which our clients are very keen on these days."
"The SD-WAN is the most valuable feature."
"Fortinet FortiGate protects against internet-based threats, both internal and external. It is scalable, stable, easy to use, and easy to install."
"The solution is easy to configure and maintain remotely."
"FortiGate has a strong security topic which allows all of the Fortinet devices to communicate and share information which makes their security more powerful."
"One of the nice things about FortiGate is that it can be deployed on the cloud or on-premises. You can actually do both. That's the biggest reason why I stick with this solution as opposed to something like Cisco Meraki. Another nice thing is that I can log directly into a FortiGate or get to it through their FortiCloud access products. They're pretty reliable and consistent. One of the reasons why I started using the product was their single pane of management. I can deploy their line of firewalls in conjunction with their switching and access points, and I can manage the entire network from one interface. I don't have to log into one interface for the firewall, another one for the access points, and another one for the switches. These firewalls have access point controller functionality built right into the system, so I don't even have to purchase additional devices to manage them."
"The scalability is good in Fortinet FortiGate."
"The solution is very user friendly. The user interface in particular is quite nice."
"One of the most valuable features is the GUI front end, which is very easy to use. But I'm also a command-line guy, and being able to access the device via command-line for advanced troubleshooting is quite important."
"So far, it has been very stable."
"Cisco ASA provides us with very good application visibility and control."
"Firepower has been used for quite a few enterprise clients. Most of our clients are Fortune 500 and Firepower is used to improve their end to end firewall functionality."
"Stability is perfect. I haven't had any problems."
"The grouping of the solutions helps save time. If you have a problem and you have a high-level overview of the system, you can easily dig deeper into the problem. For example, I can check to see why ASA isn't working but the reason for the outage is actually because of Duo. I can spend a lot of time working in the wrong direction because I didn't have an overview."
"In v9.8 you are able to do active/backup HA with ASAv (Adaptive Security Virtual Appliance) deployed on MS Azure."
"FMC is very good in terms of giving a lot of visibility into what the firewall is seeing, what it's stopping, and what it's letting through. It lets the administrator have a little bit of knowledge of what's coming in or out of the device. It's excellent."
"The most valuable features are flexibility, ease of setup, and it's a good product cost-wise."
"The functionality is the same whether it is on hardware or a virtual appliance. The interface is the same. It's nice that it's standardized."
"Overall SonicWall NSa is a good solution for our use case."
"The most valuable feature of SonicWall NSa is the control aspect of the solution."
"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."
"The product is working okay. The product is working feature-wise."
"I like this solution because we are focused on VPN and have many brands that need to link a VPN and have security, like ransomware, spyware, and basic protection."
"This product could be improved with Active directory integration and better handling in IPsec and GRE Tunnels."
"Technical support needs to be improved."
"The feedback that I have received is that the performance could be better, and the user experience is not as good compared to a previous solution we used. It could be more user-friendly. Of course, it still works fine for our operations."
"The cloud features and integration could be improved."
"The solution is very expensive."
"There are SD-WAN network monitoring, SD-WAN features, Industrial Databases, Internet of Things, Detection, etc., however, we do have not licenses for those features. We thought that if you bought a product, you should have all of the features it offers. Why should you need to make so many extra purchases to enable features? They should have one price for the entire offering."
"As far as wanting more scalability or things in the network diagram, it's going to cost you."
"Some features of Fortinet FortiGate are actually fee enabled that are inconvenient for deploying in production. Other issues relate to isolation with Cisco products and your server."
"In the past though, colleagues have had issues during the upgrade process. The failover didn't work and production was down."
"We have more than one Cisco firewall and it is difficult for me to integrate both on the single UI."
"It can probably provide a holistic view of different appliances because many customers do not have only one brand, besides the traditional SNMP protocols, to cover all their devices. There are some specific requirements in terms of configurations or actions that sometimes have to be done in a very manual way because of the different versions or brands in a customer's infrastructure. It could also have some additional analytics capabilities. It has some very interesting ways to monitor the traffic and identify false positives from the architecture and the environment. It would be good if there is a way to patch with some other industry-specific solutions and synchronize some of the information, such as what other customers experience in their operations and probably share some additional information that could be leveraged or shared among the industry. Such information would be something interesting to see. It could have AI capabilities related to how the appliances could benefit from learning the current environment and different exposures."
"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."
"Most users do not have awareness of this product's functionality and features. Cisco should do something to make them aware of them. That would be quite excellent and useful to organizations that are still using legacy data-center-security products."
"We would like to see improvement in recovery. If there is an issue that forces us to do recovery, we have to restart or reboot. In addition, sometimes we have downtime during the maintenance windows. If Cisco could enhance this, so that upgrades would not necessarily require downtime, that would be helpful."
"UTM features would be nice or some NextGen features."
"Cisco ASA is starting to get old and Firepower is taking over. All the good things happening are with Firepower."
"There are a few areas that need improvement including the VPN, user management, and reporting."
"We also use the Sophos Firewall for web configuration, which we don't have in SonicWall. Only Sophos has those options. If SonicWall included that feature, that would be a benefit for us."
"The implementation for VLANs is a little bit cumbersome. It would be good to make that a little bit easier."
"It is very modular and with native resources which are much lower than its competitors."
"An area for improvement would be SonicWall NSa's integration with antiviruses."
"When it comes to security I think all of the features are currently open to improvement."
"The detection of malware can improve in SonicWall NSa."
"SonicWall NSa needs to make their product more user-friendly."
Cisco Secure Firewall is ranked 4th in Firewalls with 404 reviews while SonicWall NSa is ranked 20th in Firewalls with 77 reviews. Cisco Secure Firewall is rated 8.2, while SonicWall NSa is rated 7.8. The top reviewer of Cisco Secure Firewall writes "Highlights and helps us catch Zero-day vulnerabilities traveling across our network". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SonicWall NSa writes "Great performance and security with reasonable pricing". Cisco Secure Firewall is most compared with Palo Alto Networks WildFire, Netgate pfSense, Meraki MX, Sophos XG and Huawei NGFW, whereas SonicWall NSa is most compared with SonicWall TZ, Meraki MX, Sophos XG, Netgate pfSense and WatchGuard Firebox. See our Cisco Secure Firewall vs. SonicWall NSa report.
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