We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Firewall and Sonicwall TZ based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Of the two solutions, Sonicwall TZ seems to be the more desirable product because of its easy deployment, great set of features, and affordable price.
"The multi-tenancy feature is most valuable. It integrates very well with FortiManager and FortiAnalyzer."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiGate are the rules and quality of service."
"This solution has helped our organization by having strong functions and a reliable firewall."
"User-friendly and affordable security solution that's recommended for SMB customers. This solution has good technical support."
"The most valuable feature of Fortinet FortiGate is the simple configuration."
"FortiGate has a strong security topic which allows all of the Fortinet devices to communicate and share information which makes their security more powerful."
"Fortinet FortiGate is user-friendly and affordable."
"The integration with Active Directory is one of the good features. Most of the customers are now looking for the Single Sign-on feature. So, being able to integrate Active Directory with the firewall is useful. It is also easy."
"It helped us a lot with our VPNs for the home office during COVID. There has been more security and flexibility for VPNs and other applications."
"The most valuable feature is the anti-malware protection. It protects the endpoints on my network."
"It has definitely improved our organization. It gives us remote connectivity, helps workers connect remotely, and also gives us good connectivity to our other branches."
"AnyConnect has been very helpful, along with the ability to use LDAP for authentication."
"The primary benefits of using Cisco Secure solutions are time-saving, a robust API, and convenience for the security team."
"The VPN is our most widely used feature for Cisco Secure Firewall. Since we were forced into a hybrid working situation by COVID a few years back, VPN is the widely used feature because everybody is working remotely for our agency. So it came in very handy."
"We find all of its features very useful. Its main features are policies and access lists. We use both of them, and we also use routing."
"Its efficiency and security are the most important. We are more efficient and more secure."
"The site-to-site VPN connections, content filtering, and in our current remote working situation, SSL VPN remote desktop connectivity are the most valuable features."
"The most common feature in the firewall, apart from that traditional firewall, would be the security services, like application control, URL filtering, Gateway Anti-Virus, and IPS protection. These are the essential features in the firewalls which I think, has to be enabled and properly used at every network infrastructure."
"It is a scalable solution."
"From our point of view, the most valuable feature was the ease of deployment."
"The feature with SonicWall that I have found most valuable is that all the models have the same interface. We don't need to learn different interfaces in the smaller or bigger models."
"The VPN is quite useful for us, as well as the ATP."
"SonicWall TZ think it's a good, solid, and stable product."
"Offers the right amount of control without being incredibly convoluted and frustrating."
"The support we receive when we need to upgrade is not satisfactory and has room for improvement."
"Fortinet FortiGate is a stable solution. However, my issue is the performance only. When I use all the profiles, this affects the performance. From the beginning, I should have had a better sizing of the box."
"With the addition of some features, it is possible that FortiGate can be used in all verticals."
"Fortinet FortiGate needs to improve to be on par with its competitors, such as Palo Alto and Sophos. They are the market leaders. Fortinet FortiGate needs to improve its capabilities. However, we are happy with Fortinet FortiGate."
"The cloud features and integration could be improved."
"I would like to see improvements with the antivirus and IPS as they are not working properly all the time."
"I don't really have anything negative to say as far as Fortinet firewalls are concerned. If anything, they can support a user a little bit better. They can stop being so time-sensitive about how much time the support call has taken, and they can help you do it yourself."
"They have to just improve its performance when we enable all UTM features. When you enable all the features, the performance of FortiGate, as well as of Sophos and SonicWall, goes down."
"Firepower's user experience should be a little bit better."
"Changes you make in the GUI sometimes do not reflect in the command line and vice versa."
"I'm not very familiar with the largest Firepower models, but competitors like Palo Alto seem to have a more capable engine to do, for instance, TLS/SSL decryption. As I understand, Firepower doesn't let you export the decrypted traffic so that, for instance, the security department can look at the traffic or inspect traffic. It's all in the box. I've heard rumors that this is something Cisco is working on, but it isn't yet available."
"Its user interface is good, but it could be better. Currently, you have to know what to do before you can manage a device. If you don't know what to do, you can mess things up. There are some devices that are easier, such as FortiGate. The user interface of FortiGate is more intuitive. It is very easy to log in and configure things."
"Cisco's inspection visibility could be better."
"We see a lot of vendors in the market with a lot of niche products. I understand that it's difficult to cover everything, but making it more open for integration with other vendors would be a value add for Cisco."
"Cisco ASDM is a problem because it is old."
"One thing that Cisco could improve is the GUI. The graphic user interface should be more user-friendly."
"It could probably be more user-friendly, and it could be more scalable with releases and subscriptions."
"In terms of what needs to be improved, I would say better load balancing and data filtering."
"I would like to see lower antivirus pricing."
"The user support could be improved because you have to go outside to get that kind of support."
"The cost of the solution has room for improvement."
"Sonic Analyzer could be improved. It's difficult to manage and not very intuitive."
"The products' reporting can be improved."
"Pricing could be lowered slightly."
Cisco Secure Firewall is ranked 3rd in Firewalls with 118 reviews while SonicWall TZ is ranked 10th in Firewalls with 28 reviews. Cisco Secure Firewall is rated 8.4, while SonicWall TZ is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Cisco Secure Firewall writes "The ability to implement dynamic policies for dynamic environments is important, given the fluidity in the world of security". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SonicWall TZ writes "Multifeatured firewall solution with a user-friendly interface, high availability, scalability, and stability". Cisco Secure Firewall is most compared with Meraki MX, Palo Alto Networks WildFire, Netgate pfSense, Juniper SRX Series Firewall and OPNsense, whereas SonicWall TZ is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Sophos XG, SonicWall NSa, Meraki MX and OPNsense. See our Cisco Secure Firewall vs. SonicWall TZ 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.
