KerioControl vs SonicWall TZ comparison

Sponsored
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

Fortinet FortiGate
Sponsored
Ranking in Firewalls
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Number of Reviews
314
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) Solutions (2nd), WAN Edge (1st)
KerioControl
Ranking in Firewalls
29th
Average Rating
8.2
Number of Reviews
56
Ranking in other categories
Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) (16th), Unified Threat Management (UTM) (11th)
SonicWall TZ
Ranking in Firewalls
14th
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
79
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2024, in the Firewalls category, the mindshare of Fortinet FortiGate is 22.6%, up from 18.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of KerioControl is 2.5%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SonicWall TZ is 3.5%, up from 2.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Firewalls
Unique Categories:
Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) Solutions
19.7%
WAN Edge
21.4%
Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS)
1.9%
Unified Threat Management (UTM)
8.2%
No other categories found
 

Featured Reviews

AA
May 16, 2018
Good performance, protects network perimeters against attacks
To protect network perimeters Security. The main options feature protection and security against attacks. Reliability and performance, those are key factors. I have only one request and that is to have Fortinet as a market download in Azure.  Less than one year. So far, so good. I'm an…
Timur Assembayev - PeerSpot reviewer
Dec 2, 2022
Easy to configure, user-friendly, and useful online information
There were some issues with our main firewall and it went down. In a short time, I deployed KerioControl and save our business The most valuable features of KerioControl are ease of configuration, user-friendliness, and comfortable to use. It is an all-in-one solution, it comes with many…
VB
Nov 3, 2021
Great throughput, no packet loss, but has feature limitations
Our primary use cases are a site-to-site VPN connection, content filtering and in addition SSL VPN connectivity for remote desktops It provides our organization with very low throughput. The site-to-site VPN connections, content filtering, and in our current remote working situation, SSL VPN…

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"We can detect any attack of viruses or malware at the first point of contact."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiGate are remote access, web filtering, and IPS."
"Its administrative panel is very intuitive and simple. It is simpler than the other solutions that we had. As an administrator, we are always looking for the easiest solution to manage network policies. We are able to filter everything on our network and also use the VPN feature, which is important these days when people are working remotely during COVID."
"I think that the UTM features are the most value, as it truly protects my infrastructure."
"We use a southern institution that's audited for IT security and the reporting that automatically comes off the unit makes it much easier to meet compliance standards and makes it easier as far as the amount of time that has to be spent to compile that information. If you get your reporting set up correctly when you initially set it up, you just select the one you want and hit print. The auditing trail on it is the best feature."
"The most valuable features are the enterprise modeling and the simple interface."
"Virtual Domains (VDOMs) are a feature that we found valuable."
"The reporting you receive out of this appliance is excellent. You will not need an external management system."
"Technical support is good. They respond right away."
"The interface control manager where we can allocate LAN connections to certain VLANs is the most valuable feature. The other feature that's important for us is because obviously everything is remote with MyKerio, as long as the boat has an internet connection, we can log onto the Kerio and get statistics, as well as provide support."
"The most valuable feature is to provide users with the ability to log in to the portal page, keep track of their data usage and perform bandwidth management."
"It has saved a lot of time and it was a secure way of doing it too. We had a whole contact center that worked from home for a period of time and that's a 21 hour a day contact center that we moved, that was spread out across the greater Brisbane region and working on home internet connections. Surprisingly, we didn't have a lot of stability issues anyway on those connections, but Kerio didn't blink, so that was good."
"The tool shows what has been blocked externally. It's very good because once installed and correctly set up, it allows you to work from home as if you are in the office, without any errors or issues. It's very simple to use, click to connect or disconnect."
"The solution is user-friendly."
"One thing we use quite a lot, as well, is the DHCP Server, because we do a lot of work where all our devices need to have static IP addresses. Rather than going around and configuring every box, we do it all through DHCP reservations. It's easier. We've got a record of it. We can manipulate it if we need to change something or change some hardware. It's all easy. Even guys who are not used to using it can pick it up quite quickly."
"When one of the employees of my customers is using the VPN Client, I have created for them that they will always get a message. When the VPN Client connects to Kerio Control from the outside, they will get an email so they know when they are connected and when they are disconnected what is happening to their network."
"The solution is stable."
"User-friendly firewall solution which scales well, is stable, and has high availability."
"The installation is straightforward and took approximately 30 minutes."
"The features that we have found most valuable in SonicWall TZ are the intrusion and brute force attack prevention."
"SonicWall TZ is a very cost-effective solution that provides good security."
"The most valuable features are unified threat management which provides security intelligence and the VPN for both site-to-site and remote access."
"I have found the stability of this product to be excellent."
"The most valuable feature is the protection available, and then ease of use and flexibility."
 

Cons

"In the next release, I would like to see the interface simplified to be more user-friendly."
"The price of FortiGate should be reduced because there are some other leading products that are cheaper."
"Quality control on their firmware versions needs improvement. When they introduce new firmware, there tend to be bugs."
"The support from Fortinet FortiGate could improve. They are not easily accessible when we need them. They could improve their response time."
"The Wi-Fi controller needs a lot of improvement."
"They should make the rule sets more understandable for the end user. When you're trying to explain to somebody how a computer network is secured, sometimes it's difficult for an end user or customer to understand. If there was a way to make the terminology more accessible to the end user, the set up could be easier. They should translate the technical jargon to an easily relatable and understandable conversation for the end user, the customer, that would be brilliant. Particularly in an environment where the IT structure is audited regularly, there's always pressure from the auditor to up the standards and up the security and you get your USCERT's that come out and there's a warning about this and the customer will want to lock out so much and when you apply it they run into issue where they can't search the internet or print to their remote office. Of course they can't print to your remote office, they just locked it up. They should make the language more understandable for the customer. If there's a product out there that made the jargon understandable to John Q. Public, I would buy that."
"Its customer service could be better."
"The sniffing packets or packet captures, can be simplified and improved because it's a little confusing."
"They should add wireless features."
"One area that confused me a bit when I was building my current network. I use VLANs to have separate functionality on the network, and the appliance I got was the WiFi model, but I discovered that you can't assign WiFi channels to the VLAN. So, you can have WiFi, but its own subnet. You can't run that over the VLAN. Effectively, I can't use the WiFi facility in the appliance and had to purchase a separate web that supports VLANs. In the end, I had to go to GFI support. They confirmed this is just a limited functionality of that device, as it is a low-end device. I don't know if any of their high-end models have a better facility or not."
"They don't provide content filtering when it comes to search engine results. We had an incident on the network where a blocked site was showing up in search results. We are in a school environment, so we have blocked a site with some of the explicit content so that kids wouldn't see it. When one of them did a search, the results came on the search engine part. When you try to drill down to the website, it blocks, but when you search by image, it brings up all the images. That's one of the reasons why we are looking at Juniper."
"One of the problems we do have causes problems with the VPN. The software slows the throughput down too much. You could have a one-gigabit connection from the internet, and it slows it down to the area of upload and download is extremely slow. There's too much content filtering at that point."
"The security part of the software, like virus scanning, website, traffic monitoring, things like that, can take a beating on the appliance. And when there's a lot of things going on, the system can get bogged down. The actual security functionality of it needs a little bit more work, which I believe they are remedying or attempting to remedy at this time, but that's the downfall at this time."
"If I would suggest anything, it would be to expand on its multifactor authentication to be a little bit more user-friendly. They should do multifactor authentications for the client itself perhaps, rather than served on a webpage, in a page hijack, that might be more user-friendly, but I don't have a lot of complaints about it. It's doing its job. You have to have a certain amount of skills to configure these things anyway, the ones that we use on-site doing point-to-point, and we've been tricked up a few times with their interfaces."
"I would like to be able to inspect https packets for the purpose of virus scanning."
"I find it a bit costly to pay for the products that I am not using. They need to change their model in such a way that you don't have to pay for the products that you are not using. Its local support and scalability are also not good. I am looking forward to a more scalable product that will be able to grow with time and technology."
"The VPN that is available in the new version is a bit bulky and slower in speed."
"I would like to see lower antivirus pricing."
"The solution's cost needs improvement."
"The user support could be improved because you have to go outside to get that kind of support."
"It could be made more user friendly."
"Full monitoring obviously needs to be improved. We need full monitoring covered under the security licensing."
"We have been facing issues with reporting."
"The stability could be a lot better."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is flexible."
"By default, they give SD-WAN along with the firewall. They don't have separate licensing for the SD-WAN functionality. However, they have security licenses that are sold separately on a subscription basis. Customers can consume these security features to protect their users from internet traffic."
"The price of FortiGate support is too expensive."
"The license of Fortinet FortiGate should be reduced."
"This is not a cheap solution but it isn't expensive, either. It's a good solution for the right price."
"Its pricing is competitive with other solutions."
"It is cost-effective, and provides a good value for your money. The pricing, and license renewal, is very reasonable for us."
"They need to be competitive with other solutions."
"KerioControl's pricing is reasonable. The license for KerioControl is annual. It's difficult to specify an exact cost since it varies depending on the number of users and additional software combined with it. For example, a basic box might cover 25 users, but licenses can be purchased starting from 10 users."
"The biggest advice that I could probably give people is when you buy the solution be prepared to either buy the unlimited license or buy more licenses than you think. Each user license gives you one employee and each a user gives you five devices. In the world nowadays where everybody has a cellphone, tablet, desktop, and laptop, that's four devices. You still get one more device per person. That covers your servers and back-ends."
"The price is fine."
"We have to pay approximately EUR 175 for the product."
"It's very affordable."
"The yearly maintenance fee is a bit high for the Kerio Control Boxes. The end of life for the devices is kind of short. It seems like they're making you upgrade within a short period of time. They should at least allow five years, but it seems like they are changing their end of life to be shorter to generate revenue."
"Licensing is easier with Kerio Control. With FortiGate, we realized the licensing is really hectic, because if you skip one year, you have to back pay that year. If you skip two years, you have to back pay two years. With Kerio Control, if a license expires, one year later you can just reactivate and go on."
"My advice is to use your own hardware, and do not use theirs."
"License renewals come in around $35,000 to $45,000."
"The license that we purchased is good for three years."
"It is a bit expensive. We have to purchase the license and the reporting part separately, which makes it a bit pricey. This is the main reason why we have thought of moving to another firewall. It would be good if they combine both of these."
"It is highly priced and has a slow performance compared to other firewalls."
"You need to purchase multiple licenses to manage multiple devices which is cost-prohibitive for the value you would receive."
"The licensing scheme of SonicWall TZ is cost-effective. It's an affordable product, but some competitors, e.g. Sophos and Fortinet offer more competitive pricing."
"The product pricing is relatively good, compared to other products, including the licenses."
"Its price is very high, which makes it difficult to convince the clients to buy this solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
21%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Computer Software Company
24%
Media Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Computer Software Company
19%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Retailer
6%
Construction Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Which is the better NGFW: Fortinet Fortigate or Cisco Firepower?
When you compare these firewalls you can identify them with different features, advantages, practices and usage a...
What is the biggest difference between Sophos XG and FortiGate?
From my experience regarding both the Sophos and FortiGate firewalls, I personally would rather use FortiGate. I know...
What are the biggest technical differences between Sophos UTM and Fortinet FortiGate?
As a solution, Sophos UTM offers a lot of functionality, it scales well, and the stability and performance are quite ...
What do you like most about KerioControl?
The solution provides feasibility regarding cyber privacy.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for KerioControl?
KerioControl's pricing is reasonable. The license for KerioControl is annual. It's difficult to specify an exact cost...
What needs improvement with KerioControl?
I would like to see geo-IP filtering added to the filtering rules. Incorporating these rules would be very beneficial...
Would you choose Fortinet Fortigate or Sonicwall TZ?
I’ll say it depends on your needs. Fortinet FortiGate and SonicWall TZ are both next-gen firewalls (NGFW) with simila...
What do you like most about SonicWall TZ?
The most valuable feature of SonicWall TZ is the double authentication, where it asks for one password and again asks...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SonicWall TZ?
The firewall with the servers costs about 80 pounds a month. We get the device, and it is replaced every two or three...
 

Also Known As

FortiGate 60b, FortiGate 60c, FortiGate 80c, FortiGate 50b, FortiGate 200b, FortiGate 110c, FortiGate
No data available
Dell SonicWALL TZ
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

1. Amazon Web Services 2. Microsoft 3. IBM 4. Cisco 5. Dell 6. HP 7. Oracle 8. Verizon 9. AT&T 10. T-Mobile 11. Sprint 12. Vodafone 13. Orange 14. BT Group 15. Telstra 16. Deutsche Telekom 17. Comcast 18. Time Warner Cable 19. CenturyLink 20. NTT Communications 21. Tata Communications 22. SoftBank 23. China Mobile 24. Singtel 25. Telus 26. Rogers Communications 27. Bell Canada 28. Telkom Indonesia 29. Telkom South Africa 30. Telmex 31. Telia Company 32. Telkom Kenya
Triton Technical, McDonald's
AeroM_xico Delta TechOps, Unimat
Find out what your peers are saying about KerioControl vs. SonicWall TZ and other solutions. Updated: July 2024.
793,295 professionals have used our research since 2012.