We performed a comparison between pfSense and SonicWall TZ 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 user interface is very easy to manage and find rules. You can do object searches, which are very easy. Also, the logging is very simple to use. So, it is a lot easier to troubleshoot and find items inside the firewall."
"Cisco tech is always good and helpful. I would rate them as 10 out of 10."
"Firepower NGFW has improved my organization in several ways. Before, we were trying to stamp out security threats and issues, it was a one-off type of way to attack it. I spent a lot of manpower trying to track down the individual issues or flare-ups that we would see. With Cisco's Firepower Management, we're able to have that push up to basically one monitor and one UI and be able to track that and stop threats immediately. It also gives us a little more granularity on what those threats might be."
"I like that Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall is reliable. Support is also good."
"Another benefit has been user integration. We try to integrate our policies so that we can create policies based on active users. We can create policies based on who is accessing a resource instead of just IP addresses and ports."
"The remote VPN and IPsec VPN or site-to-site VPN features are valuable. The clustering feature is also valuable. We have two ISP links. Whenever there is a failover, users don't even get to know. The transition is very smooth, and the users don't notice any latency. So, remote VPN, site-to-site VPN, and failover are three very powerful features of Cisco ASA."
"The dashboard is the most important thing. It provides good visibility and makes management easy. Firepower also provides us with good application visibility and control."
"The high-availability and remote VPN features are most valuable."
"I mostly like all of it. Whatever we use is valuable."
"I am happy with the EPLS, the radius, and I am happy with the captive portal."
"I like the connectivity to the open VPN. It's very smooth."
"My technicians find the pfSense's web interface very useful. It is very easy to use. pfSense is very reliable and stable. We like the OpenVPN clients that can be deployed using pfSense very much."
"The solution has good customization abilities and plenty of features."
"The solution is very easy to use and has a very nice GUI."
"The VPN is my favorite feature."
"The initial setup is not complex."
"Its user interface and simplicity are the most favorite parts for our clients. They find it stable and easy to use. Its performance is also good."
"It's been very easy to implement and deploy."
"From our point of view, the most valuable feature was the ease of deployment."
"The most valuable feature is the user-friendly navigation."
"The installation is straightforward and took approximately 30 minutes."
"It is very user-friendly, and there is no problem in using its interface."
"It lets me monitor in live time if someone is 'hogging' bandwidth."
"SonicWall TZ is a stable product."
"We wanted to integrate Firepower with our solution, but it didn't have the capability to accommodate our bandwidth since they only had two 10 gig interfaces on the box. We run way more than that through our network because we are a service provider, providing Internet to our customers."
"Cisco still has a lot of work to do. You can convert an ASA over to a Firepower, but the competitors, like Palo Alto and Juniper, are coming in. And believe it or not, they are a little bit more intuitive. Cisco has a little bit more work to do. They're playing catch up."
"The only improvement that we could make is maybe [regarding] the roadmap, to have better visibility as to what we are targeting ahead in the next few quarters."
"Most of the features don't work well, and some features are missing as well."
"There is huge scope for improvement in URL filtering. The database that they have is not accurate. Their content awareness and categorization for URL filtering are not that great. We faced many challenges with their categorization and content awareness. They should improve these categorization issues."
"The application detection feature of this solution could be improved as well as its integration with other solutions."
"They need to do an overhaul of the management console."
"Cisco makes horrible UIs, so the interface is something that should be improved."
"In an upcoming release, the reporting could be more user-friendly. For example, the reporting in graphs and charts for the host can be cumbersome."
"The security could be improved."
"The solution could improve by having centralized management and API support online."
"It could use a little bit of improvement in the reporting."
"The interface is not very shiny and attractive."
"ClamAV AntiVirus can cause some crashes. That service should be improved."
"I tried pfSense, and it has a big issue with file system consistency, and this is what drove me to OPNsense. The file system stability is quite a big issue for us. We have a lot of outages related to power issues, and OPNsense is much more stable on this side."
"The access control aspect of the product could be improved."
"In terms of what needs to be improved, I would say better load balancing and data filtering."
"Getting support can be slow."
"If the operation increases and the bandwidth consumption increases, it does not perform as per the expectations."
"SonicWall TZ can improve the UI application and when you create any net policies or any new policy, it will not sync or work properly."
"Its reporting can be improved. Currently, we cannot directly get the user names. It only shows the IP, which makes it a bit confusing because we need to use the IP to find the user. If we could directly get the name of the user, it would be better."
"GUI interface could be improved."
"Sonic Analyzer could be improved. It's difficult to manage and not very intuitive."
"The log sections could be done more clearly."
pfSense is ranked 3rd in Firewalls with 47 reviews while SonicWall TZ is ranked 13th in Firewalls with 38 reviews. pfSense is rated 8.4, while SonicWall TZ is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of pfSense writes "Feature-rich, well documented, and there is good support available online". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SonicWall TZ writes "Multifeatured firewall solution with a user-friendly interface, high availability, scalability, and stability". pfSense is most compared with OPNsense, Fortinet FortiGate, Sophos XG, Untangle NG Firewall and Azure Firewall, whereas SonicWall TZ is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate, Sophos XG, SonicWall NSa, Meraki MX and WatchGuard Firebox. See our SonicWall TZ vs. pfSense report.
See our list of best Firewalls vendors.
We monitor all Firewalls reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
Just purchase an anti-spam license and activate it at the SonicWall license portal.
I would like to recommend you SONICWALL HOSTED EMAIL SECURITY ADVANCED. It is more helpful and if you are using Office365 or GSuite, go for SonicWall Cloud App Security.
It is more powerful.
Hi, for SonicWall you buy a license and on the same firewall you can activate the antispam only in the ingress mode.
But there is a catch, at the moment they don't support TLS for SMTP so I would recommend their other solution, that has email security for appliance and virtualized on VMware or Hyper-V.