We performed a comparison between OPNsense 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."User-friendly and affordable security solution that's recommended for SMB customers. This solution has good technical support."
"The SD-WAN is the most valuable feature."
"Its user interface is good, and it is always working fine."
"The secure web gateway module and the application control module are valuable. HA operations are very easy."
"Whenever I need something, Fortinet improves and updates the software for me."
"The solution is easy to configure and maintain remotely."
"We purchased Fortinet because of the pricing, its functionality, because it met our requirements, and the total cost of ownership over five years was quite reasonable. In the market, Fortinet is rated quite well."
"I have found Fortinet FortiGate to be scalable."
"OPNsense could improve by making the configuration more web-based rather than shell or command-line-based."
"What I like best about OPNsense is that, as a firewall, it's pretty good. I'm quite impressed with it. I had an excellent experience with OPNsense, which helped me achieve the targets I wanted."
"URL blocking, Wireguard, Tail Scale, Engine Blocker, and VPN are the most valuable features for me."
"The IDS and IPS features are valuable. From the usability perspective, there is a lot of good documentation. As IT professionals, we found it very easy to configure the firewall. It was easy to configure and use."
"One of the most valuable features is the network checking. Additionally, the firewall and web filtering functionalities are highly useful."
"The technical support is very good."
"We have been operating here in our lab for several months, and everything appears to be extremely stable."
"The system in general is quite flexible."
"We have not found any vulnerabilities since implementing the solution."
"The product is working okay. The product is working feature-wise."
"SonicWall has USCS and anti-virus at the gateway level. Everything is filtered, and if it detects an intruder, it drops the line."
"We use SonicWall NSa for authenticating MAC (media access control) ID from the PC."
"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."
"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."
"Fortinet FortiGate could improve by having more capabilities for troubleshooting VPN connections. For example, I do get some feedback about the current status, but I could use some history and logging of important events. The information is logged in our Syslog server, but I could use that information from the device. If they could provide a GUI to have some more insight on what's going with my VPN would be useful."
"The solution lacks sufficient filtering."
"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."
"I would suggest that Fortinet add sandboxing to their solution."
"Currently, FortiGate is providing SSL VPN. But they're missing some features that are available in Palo Alto's SSL VPN."
"In some cases, its initial setup could be hard for customers."
"FortiGate should have a better way of detecting and managing the system memory because otherwise if the memory is too low, a system restart is required."
"The solution could be more secure and stable."
"There are a few weaknesses. For example, there is a lack of some features that I have in certain commercial products."
"The reporting part could be better."
"When using the solution at the beginning was difficult. There was a steep learning curve."
"The interface of the solution is an area with shortcomings."
"The interface isn't so friendly user. But we have some technicians here who are quite confident with this tool. OPNSense could maybe add sets of rules so it's simpler to manage different groups with particular needs."
"The user interface could be improved, and the DNS section should be more intuitive."
"An area for improvement in OPNsense is the hardware, which needs to be updated more frequently. DNS blocking is another good feature I want to be added to the solution. pfSense has a peer-blocking feature that I also want to see in OPNsense."
"They should improve IPEs for security in the future."
"SonicWall NSa has occasional bugs, particularly during upgrades, and that's an area for improvement."
"The features I would like to see improve are the dashboard and the UI."
"The user interface could be better."
"A room for improvement in SonicWall NSa is the log server because it could be more user-friendly compared to Fortinet and Palo Alto Networks. My company has many rule sets up for review, so sometimes, my team needs to use Excel for filtering, but the UI cannot support the Excel function."
"The detection of malware can improve in SonicWall NSa."
"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."
"The thing main thing is that there's no user admin and in other firewalls, we can enable the scalable features, but SonicWall doesn't have that feature."
"The dynamics needs to be improved. The solution is not very compatible compared to the market products."
OPNsense is ranked 4th in Firewalls with 17 reviews while SonicWall NSa is ranked 16th in Firewalls with 27 reviews. OPNsense is rated 8.4, while SonicWall NSa is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of OPNsense writes "There are lots of capabilities built-in: Few would be High Availability, Proxy, DNS, Intrusion detection/prevention, content filtering, traffic and bandwidth management with 2factor autn. ". 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". OPNsense is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Sophos XG, Untangle NG Firewall, Sophos UTM and Fortinet FortiGate-VM, whereas SonicWall NSa is most compared with SonicWall TZ, Meraki MX, Sophos XG, Cisco Secure Firewall and Sophos UTM. See our OPNsense vs. SonicWall NSa report.
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