"There are no issues that we are aware of. It does its job silently in the background."
"A good intrusion prevention system and filtering."
"The most important feature is the intensive way you can troubleshoot Cisco Firepower Firewalls. You can go to the bit level to see why traffic is not handled in the correct way, and the majority of the time it's a networking issue and not a firewall issue. You can solve any problem without Cisco TAC help, because you can go very deeply under the hood to find out how traffic is flowing and whether it is not flowing as expected. That is something I have never seen with other brands."
"I have access to the web version of Cisco Talos to see the reputation of IP addresses. I find this very helpful. It provides important information for my company to obtain the reputation of IP addresses. The information in Talos is quite complete."
"One of the most valuable features is the AMP. It's very good and very reliable when it comes to malicious activities, websites, and viruses."
"The most valuable feature is the access control list (ACL)."
"The integration of network and workload micro-segmentation helps a lot to provide unified segmentation policies across east-west and north-south traffic. One concrete example is with Cisco ACI for the data center. Not only are we doing what is called a service graph on the ACI to make sure that we can filter traffic east-west between two endpoints in the same network, but when we go north-south or east-west, we can then leverage what we have on the network with SGTs on Cisco ISE. Once you build your matrix, it is very easy to filter in and out on east-west or north-south traffic."
"The customer service/technical support is very good with this solution."
"The system in general is quite flexible."
"The most valuable features are reporting, the Sensei plugin, and firewall capabilities."
"OPNsense is easy to scale when running on the hardware."
"The most valuable features in OPNsense are reporting and visibility."
"The solution is good for a basic firewall for a small business or for home use."
"The interface and the dashboard are the most valuable features of this solution."
"The graphic user interface is very good and it is user-friendly which makes the product easy-to-use."
"The VPN server feature is the most valuable. It is integrated with Radius and AAA for doing accounting and authentication. Insight view is also an important feature for me at this time. It allows me to assess our network traffic. I also like the firewall feature. The BSD kernel has a packet filter. It is one of the most solid frameworks for firewalls. Its user interface is one of the best interfaces I have used."
"The most valuable features of this solution are intrusion detection, intrusion prevention, and the advanced capture client, which provides live traffic analysis."
"The most valuable feature is the sandbox."
"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."
"The most valuable features are the VPN, SSL VPN, and IPSec VPN."
"The technical support is very good."
"Compared to Cisco, SonicWall NSa is much easier to configure."
"It's very flexible and meets our customer's needs."
"This product has kept us safe and we haven't had any breaches."
"The initial setup can be a bit complex for those unfamiliar with the solution."
"The initial setup could be simplified, as it can be complex for new users."
"FlexConfig is there as a bridge for features that are not yet natively integrated into Firepower. It is a way of allowing you to be able to configure things that wouldn't otherwise be possible until the development team can add them into Firepower's native capability. There is still some work that needs to be done around FlexConfig. There are still quite a few complex things, like policy-based routing, that have to be done in FlexConfig, and it doesn't always work perfectly. Sometimes, there are some glitches. It is recommended that you configure FlexConfig policies with Cisco TAC. It would be good to see Cisco accelerate some of those configurations that you can only do in FlexConfig into the platform, so that they are there natively."
"One of the few things that are brought up is that for the overall management, it would be great to have a cloud instance of that. And not only just a cloud instance, but one of the areas that we've looked at is using an HA type of cloud. To have the ability to have a device file within a cloud. If we had an issue with one, the other one would pick up automatically."
"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."
"We're getting support but there's a big delay until we get a response from their technical team. They're in the USA and we're in Africa, so that's the difficulty. When they're in the office, they respond."
"Web filtering needs improvement because sometimes the URL is miscategorized."
"The price and SD-WAN capabilities are the areas that need improvement."
"The logging could improve in OPNsense."
"While they do have paid options that actually gives better features, for most of the clients, if they tend to take a paid option will instead opt for Fortinet."
"There should be more technical documentation."
"There are issues with stability and reliability."
"I would like to see better SD-WAN performance."
"The ability to set the VPN IP address would be a welcome addition."
"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 solution could be more secure."
"There are a few areas that need improvement including the VPN, user management, and reporting."
"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."
"SonicWall does not support DynDNS, yet this is an important feature for smaller companies that do not have a static IP address."
"I would like to have a built-in vulnerability scanner in the firewall. It would be great to have such functionality. Its price could also be better. It would also be good to have a local warehouse. It doesn't get damaged a lot, but if a customer needs a replacement, currently, it has to come from Miami or Mexico, which can take a few days. It would be better if they have a local warehouse from where we can just pick replacements and quickly solve a client's needs in terms of replacing equipment. It would be great to have it locally instead of waiting for it from Mexico or the USA."
"The reporting and monitoring are a bit complex and should be easier in SonicWall NSa because other firewalls I have experienced have been more simple, such as Palo Alto. We are able to receive a clear view of our network. As a general user with little experience, it would be difficult for them to handle."
"I would like U.S.-based technical support."
"The product likely isn't a good fit for a large organization."
"Needs a more detailed reporting feature."
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OPNsense is ranked 13th in Firewalls with 11 reviews while SonicWall NSa is ranked 17th in Firewalls with 38 reviews. OPNsense is rated 8.0, while SonicWall NSa is rated 7.8. The top reviewer of OPNsense writes "A solution that detects and blocks malicious content with good reporting and visibility, but the reliability needs improvement". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SonicWall NSa writes "A rugged solution capable of defeating advanced threats". OPNsense is most compared with pfSense, Untangle NG Firewall, Sophos XG, Sophos UTM and Zyxel Unified Security Gateway, whereas SonicWall NSa is most compared with Meraki MX, Fortinet FortiGate, WatchGuard Firebox, SonicWall TZ and Barracuda CloudGen Firewall. See our OPNsense vs. SonicWall NSa report.
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