We performed a comparison between Palo Alto Networks VM-Series 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."The most valuable feature is the ease of use."
"Virtual Domains (VDOMs) are a feature that we found valuable."
"It's very good and very stable for businesses. It works very well."
"Security solution with a straightforward and quick setup. It's a stable and scalable product."
"The most valuable feature of FortiGate is FortiView which provides proactive monitoring."
"Some of the key features of the solution is that it has good reporting, you can receive many details from the connection, for example, clients and website information."
"The pipe filter application is an outstanding feature."
"The multi-tenancy feature is most valuable. It integrates very well with FortiManager and FortiAnalyzer."
"The most valuable feature is that you can control your traffic flowing out and coming it, allowing you to apply malware and threat protection, as well as vulnerability checks."
"Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is easy to maintain...From a security point of view, I find Palo Alto Networks VM-Series to be a better product compared to the other solutions in the market."
"We now know a lot more detail about what our users are doing on the network."
"It is nice to have a rock solid security platform that we can count on."
"It has a good performance which helps you with the stability of your virtual environment."
"We use the product on our Azure network firewalls."
"The most effective features of the solution for threat prevention are Layer 7 inspection, SSL decryption, IPS, and the web filtering profile."
"The most effective features for threat prevention are application-based prevention and WildFire. These features cover various threats, such as ransomware, malware, etc. They provide real-time visibility. By applying appropriate policies, threats can be blocked."
"The most valuable features are the VPN, SSL VPN, and IPSec VPN."
"SonicWall has USCS and anti-virus at the gateway level. Everything is filtered, and if it detects an intruder, it drops the line."
"The basic firewall rules of the solution are great."
"The most valuable feature of SonicWall NSa is the control aspect of the solution."
"This product is user-friendly and easy to configure."
"It's very flexible and meets our customer's needs."
"The solution has many useful features, such as content management, user management, user filtering, and domain controller connectivity mapping."
"Our old firewall was running as HA (High Availability) on two different but identical rack mounted servers. Moving to SonicWall allowed the company to move to one unit, yet accommodate more connections because it had sixteen ports and handled fail-over better than the old firewall solution."
"From a reporting perspective, there's room for improvement. They're providing FortiAnalyzer through which one can get some enhancements, but the visibility and reporting still need slight improvement."
"Vulnerability scanning could be improved."
"It is quite new for us, and we need to go more in-depth into the monitoring tools. It provides different features that we need to do what we want. So far, it is okay for us. In terms of improvement, in the future, they can provide a faster implementation of features. Some of the features are first available in other solutions. Fortinet sometimes takes a little bit longer than other solutions, such as Check Point, to implement new features."
"As far as wanting more scalability or things in the network diagram, it's going to cost you."
"We had a minor problem where there was a major system upgrade on the hardware platfrom and the Mac client was not available as soon as it might have been. The PC client was available immediately, but we had to wait a month or so, before there was a mac client. I was slightly irritated that it was not ready on time, but it was eventually resolved."
"Palo Alto has a feature called WildFire Analysis that is unavailable in FortiGate. WildFire is better than a sandbox because it can address zero-day threats and vulnerabilities. It can immediately identify zero-day threats from the cloud."
"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."
"We'd like more management across other integrations."
"We have ran into issues with Palo Alto’s limitations for resolving large IP lists from DNS lookups, as well as the antivirus interfering with App-ID."
"Palo Alto should update their documentation to make it more readable and provide easier-to-follow instructions through videos."
"AWS doesn't integrate well with third-party firewalls."
"The command-line interface is something that some people struggle with and I think that they should have an option to go straight to the GUI."
"The solution's licensing could be improved, and training should be included before installation."
"In the next release, I would like to see better integration between the endpoints and the firewalls."
"In the next release, I would like to see better integration of multi-factor authentication vendors."
"The solution needs to improve its visibility. It's not straightforward to use. Understanding the policies, authorizations, and initializing features requires careful review. The product needs to offer proper training."
"I would like to see better integration."
"Vendor support needs improvement. The frequency of time and support should be increased."
"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."
"The cost could be lower. There could also be more flexibility for smaller companies."
"Needs a more detailed reporting feature."
"The cloud services may be in need of some improvement."
"Sometimes I found the GUI and some of the features a little bit hard to navigate, as opposed to Fortigate, which is much more user-friendly."
"One issue with the solution is that no authorization or authentication features exist."
Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is ranked 10th in Firewalls with 52 reviews while SonicWall NSa is ranked 20th in Firewalls with 77 reviews. Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is rated 8.6, while SonicWall NSa is rated 7.8. The top reviewer of Palo Alto Networks VM-Series writes "Many features are optimized for troubleshooting real-time scenarios, saving a lot of time". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SonicWall NSa writes "Great performance and security with reasonable pricing". Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is most compared with Azure Firewall, Fortinet FortiGate-VM, Cisco Secure Firewall, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls and Juniper SRX Series Firewall, whereas SonicWall NSa is most compared with SonicWall TZ, Meraki MX, Sophos XG, Cisco Secure Firewall and Netgate pfSense. See our Palo Alto Networks VM-Series vs. SonicWall NSa report.
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