We performed a comparison between Fortinet FortiGate vs SonicWall NSa based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Fortinet FortiGate has the winning edge in this comparison. Customers are more satisfied with Fortinet FortiGate’s scalability, robust features, and ROI.
"It can expand easily."
"Overall security features and performance routing is good."
"From the firewall perspective, the rules and policies are very sufficient and easy to use."
"Initial setup is straightforward. There weren't too many issues with setting it up. It takes one hour or so."
"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 URL filtering."
"Fortinet FortiGate has many valuable features, such as IDS, and intrusion detection. It has security features that are in part with the technologies that are available in the market."
"It is easy to use. We chose this product for the possibility to have virtual domains (VDOMs). We are building another company in the group, and we would like to split the firewalling rules and policies between these two companies. Each company would be able to manage its own policies and security rules, which is an advantage of Fortinet FortiGate. We can define VDOMs, and every company can manage its own VDOM as if it has its own physical firewall, but in fact, we would be using the same physical appliance because we are also using the same internet lines. So, it allows us to reuse the existing resources without the disadvantage of having to compromise on policies and security. Each company can choose its own way of working."
"The most valuable features to us are the security services which is a critical factor in our deployment. Today we need to have all the security services enabled because firewalls are not enough."
"Overall SonicWall NSa is a good solution for our use case."
"They offer good antivirus solutions."
"User-friendly with good security and application control."
"The features I found most valuable are email security and web filtering."
"Easy to scale solution that provides advanced threat protection. Their technical support is very good, very knowledgeable, and easy to reach."
"We use SonicWall NSa for authenticating MAC (media access control) ID from the PC."
"I like that SonicWall NSa is a stable product. It's also a scalable product."
"The cloud features and integration could be improved."
"The support we receive when we need to upgrade is not satisfactory and has room for improvement."
"Fortinet should focus on enhancing the capabilities of FortiGate by consolidating its various products, such as FortiGate Cloud, FortiManager, and FortiAnalyzer."
"Fortigate's hardware capacities could be improved."
"When we cluster the two Fortinet FortiGate boxes together we have some issues."
"Fortinet FortiGate could improve by adding enhancements to FortiMail, FortiSOAR, and FortiDeceptor."
"I would like reporting to be improved and should offer a lot more tools to monitor the products."
"A sandbox would be good in order to be able to inspect the emails containing spam and be able to validate the emails that contain malware, prior to delivering to the customer."
"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."
"SonicWall NSa has occasional bugs, particularly during upgrades, and that's an area for improvement."
"When it comes to security I think all of the features are currently open to improvement."
"The security standards for space and point of view should be improved so that the solution deploys in critical areas."
"We have security as a service, and they make recommendations about adding to the denylist and other things. That part could be more accessible and more user-friendly. I'd like to see SonicWall add a user-friendly interface where our internal team can drag and drop everything."
"It is not scalable. If your enterprise is growing hard then you have to buy another, bigger product. Maybe if you use it virtually it is more scalable."
"SonicWall NSa doesn't have a proxy. It also needs a quota management feature in specific scenarios where you must limit user bandwidth for a particular day."
"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."
Fortinet FortiGate is ranked 1st in Firewalls with 108 reviews while SonicWall NSa is ranked 16th in Firewalls with 27 reviews. Fortinet FortiGate is rated 8.4, while SonicWall NSa is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Fortinet FortiGate writes "Efficient, user-friendly, and affordable". 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". Fortinet FortiGate is most compared with Sophos XG, Cisco Secure Firewall, Netgate pfSense and Meraki MX, whereas SonicWall NSa is most compared with SonicWall TZ, Meraki MX, Sophos XG, Cisco Secure Firewall and WatchGuard Firebox. See our Fortinet FortiGate vs. SonicWall NSa report.
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