SonicWall NSa Reviews

Our use cases for SonicWall NSa are the Global VPN and the SSL VPN, because nowadays, everyone prefers to work from home, and prefers to connect from mobile applications to our organization.

What's valuable in SonicWall NSa is the ATP (advanced threat protection). It can protect users from malicious links, e.g. those sent to the end user email and is clicked by the end user, who'll be led to a bad website. SonicWall NSa has a Sandboxing service that is very helpful for us, especially when end users accidentally click on malicious links.

Another valuable feature of this solution is that it is very useful for site-to-site VPN connectivity issues.

SonicWall NSa also has very good hardware, e.g. from 2013 to 2021, only one product had a hardware failure, and within 24 hours, they were able to replace that product.

I also love that SonicWall has very good technical support, who are very knowledgeable, provides good suggestions, and they're easy to reach.

An area for improvement in SonicWall NSa is that sometimes, we experience bugs when upgrading, so we have to contact their technical support to fix issues.

It would be much easier if this improvement was in place: if the one-time password which is built-in, was provided as an OTP for the administrator logging into the console, so that we'll have a quicker awareness of it, rather than needing to check emails for it. Having a Telegram or WhatsApp bot integrated with the device, for example, will be very helpful for us, so we can instantly take action, without us needing to log into and check our emails, meaning we'll be able to put things right faster.

This may not be possible in SonicWall NSa, but I'm also looking for any kind of controller or device for the Windows server or client, e.g. Windows 11 and Windows 10 from SonicWall NSa itself, so that a security domain or the gateway of the organization would be able to identify the latest update for a product, whether that product is installed or not. This feature would be very helpful, and it's what I'd like to see in the next release.

I've been using SonicWall NSa since 2013.

SonicWall NSa performs well, but sometimes, there are bugs, so I have to call their support when this happens, and I elaborate on the problem we're facing. Support then takes the diagnostic data, fixes it, then sends back to me the firmware or the setting so I can restore my SonicWall NSa.

SonicWall NSa is easy to scale.

The technical support team for this solution is very knowledgeable. They are able to fix issues. They understand what we are facing and they suggest very good options. They provide us very good support, and on a scale of one to five, I'm giving them a four to a five for technical support.

I previously used different solutions, e.g. Sophos and Fortinet, but what I noticed is that I either couldn't find how to contact their technical support, or if I was able to call their technical support, I either get a busy tone, or it takes a long time to speak to someone. As for SonicWall support, I only had to wait 10 minutes to speak to someone, and if they accidentally drop my call, they'll immediately call me, no matter which part of the world I'm in, so I switched to SonicWall NSa.

I deployed SonicWall NSa myself. Deployment was very easy.

Last January 14th, one of my firewalls went down, so we had to replace it, but it was unfortunate that we didn't enable the local backup. At the time, what we had was the factory set up option for the device, so it took me six hours to fix, e.g. applying for the policy site to the site VPN, creating the users, etc. All those processes took a minimum of five to six hours.

I didn't use a vendor or a third party for the deployment of this solution. I only had to call their support if there was something I couldn't understand, e.g. why the traffic wasn't working, etc. For some of the processes, I took notes from their support, while for the rest of the processes, we can do it by ourselves.

SonicWall NSa has two types of license, so the cost would depend on the license.

The advanced license is a bit expensive when compared to the comprehensive license, but when you compare the advanced license to the licensing cost of other brands or competitors, it is expensive.

One good point about the more expensive license for this product it that they provide a hardware guarantee, which means direct replacement, no matter how long you've been using it, whether you've used it for two, three, five, or seven years. You can easily have your device directly replaced if it's having issues with the firewall, software, or hardware, etc. You can get this done as an end user, or as a customer. You just have to fill in and send back the application form for device replacement, provide the serial number and the model number, and that's it. They will replace your device. It's also easy for them to transfer your license to another device. SonicWall NSa is worth the money.

I evaluated Sophos and Fortinet solutions.

The firewall products I'm using are SonicWall NSa 3600 and 2400.

We are using the latest version of this solution.

We are using a local backup, and we also enabled for my SonicWall NSa a cloud backup for all devices. We are using six firewalls, so we enabled the flow backup, with the goal of being able to restore immediately, in case of emergency.

This product doesn't require much maintenance. Our company operates 24/7, and we deal with ready-mix concrete. It depends on the production, but SonicWall NSa continuously runs 24/7. Maintenance is done monthly, particularly for upgrading the firmware, or for restarting SonicWall server patches. Maintenance of this product only takes one hour on a monthly basis.

We have 200 end users of SonicWall NSa.

I always recommend this product to my friends and colleagues. My supplier also recommends it. I suggest to them to go for SonicWall NSa, depending on the user, e.g. if you have 100 end users. We pay for the license, for example, 2,200 dirhams, so I can get the license, and also get the SonicWall SOHO device, which is the smaller one.

My rating for SonicWall NSa is seven out of ten.

The solution is used basically a parameter firewall and to secure the company network.

The content filtering is very good.

The solution is easy to use.

They offer good antivirus solutions. It's basically a complete package.

The solution is stable. 

There's always room for improvement. 

For example, the monitoring system is in need of improvement. Their monitoring system is too expensive. Most of the company doesn't apply the monitoring system as it's too expensive. Some more monitoring features should be built into the firewall device itself.

Management spends a lot of money on the device, and they want to know what is working, et cetera. To understand this, we need some reports, graphs, and figures. Without these items, management may not be convinced they are spending the money in the right way. Having reports that reflect the work done to keep the network secure would show the benefits and the ROI in a positive way that would help sell management on the product itself.

The ongoing service fees are high.

The solution could use more online educational tools to help users understand the underlying functionality of the product. Things like videos and tutorials could help a lot. 

I've been working with the solution for the last nine years or so at this point. It's been almost a decade.

The solution is very stable. We can do 80% to 90% of tasks with no issues whatsoever. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.

The solution can scale, however, in Pakistan, it's not easy not to spend so much. One device can last over five to six years. You can say scale, however, you need to have an understanding of what functionality you will need over the years. Over four to six years, the device can fulfill your requirements. After six to seven years, you can replace it with another model or another brand to meet your updated needs.

I didn't use support over the last nine years, except for handling the device replacement itself. I needed a device replacement due to some damage, and they fulfilled my request and requirements. In terms of tasks such as configuration issues, I've never actually asked for assistance for those queries and therefore could not rate how helpful or responsive they are when they cover those matters. 

In the past, I have also used Fortinet and FortiGate as well as Juniper. I have 19 years of experience with various solutions. I have used multiple devices including Cisco, Juniper, FortiGate, SonicWall, and others. Basically, FortiGate and SonicWall are more or less the same types of solution. However, the SonicWall is easier to install than FortiGate.

I have deployed the solution myself. I did not need the help of an integrator or consultant.

The pricing is reasonable, however, all firewalls have high prices for subscriptions for their services to cover after warranty needs for content filtering, for antiviruses, for web filtering, et cetera. All firewalls have extra prices. 

After spending so much money year over year, we were surprised that we had to still pay more than the device cost just to covers services. That's why you may find that most companies stop their services and just running the firewall as a box. Most small companies stop their services just due to the high subscription fees. That said, multinationals or larger organizations likely still pay the service fees.

In places like Pakistan, a developing country, it's hard to continuously pay, as we find the continuing service fees expensive. They should work to make an exception for certain regions such as ours.

I'm a customer and an end-user.

I can't remember the exact versions we are using. We may be on version 6, and the models I have used include the 2600, 2500, and 3600 series.

I'd warn new users that the box is huge. The box has multiple functionalities and most users are not trained. They can't benefit from all the functionality as they don't know that it exists. Due to the lack of knowledge, most users don't leverage additional functionalities which they should. While the solution offers good devices and reasonable pricing for the box, companies need to educate themselves on how they can best use the product to their advantage. SonicWall can help by posting more videos and sharing more information.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

My company uses SonicWall NSa as the primary firewall and the SonicWall TZ series as a backup firewall. I have no idea why the company needs to support two firewalls. Still, sometimes, SonicWall NSa has an issue, so the company removes the memory card from it, then replaces it with the memory card from the backup firewall.

I like that SonicWall NSa is a stable product. It's also a scalable product.

One area for improvement in SonicWall NSa is the GUI. It isn't easy to understand.

The support for SonicWall NSa is mediocre, which is another area for improvement.

The product speed also has room for improvement.

SonicWall NSa also uses old technology compared to other firewalls, so it needs to upgrade some of its functionalities, such as the VPN.

We've been using SonicWall NSa since 2018.

SonicWall NSa is stable, and it has no issues, stability-wise, so it's an eight on a scale of one to ten.

The scalability for SonicWall NSa is fine, so it's a seven out of ten.

The technical support for SonicWall NSa is a two on a scale of one to ten. It isn't good because SonicWall support will only call you if they have time.

Negative

I'm looking for a different solution so my company can switch to it from SonicWall NSa. I worked with CyberDome and then Fortinet.

Compared to SonicWall NSa, I noticed that the interface is easier than the SonicWall NSa interface. However, I'm describing non-enterprise solutions. 

Support is also excellent versus the support SonicWall NSa provides. If you email or call the support team of Fortinet or CyberDome, you'll get a call. In contrast, the SonicWall NSa technical support team rarely calls, even when I could not configure the product, and my team could only see the logs. However, SonicWall NSa has strong endpoint visibility, which lets my company identify where the issue lies on the network or the infected system.

Fortinet offers a free VPN feature, while SonicWall NSa charges you for that.

The initial setup for SonicWall NSa was complex. The product took a lot of work to configure. That was critical because you had to configure rules, ports, and other parts. I'm describing new setups because, in terms of SonicWall NSa deployment for my company, I wasn't there during the deployment as I recently joined the company.

I don't deal with pricing for SonicWall NSa, so I have no information on that.

Right now, my company uses SonicWall NSa.

I work for a large enterprise using the SonicWall TZ series and SonicWall NSa.

My company uses version 600 of SonicWall NSa.

The SonicWall TZ series is horrible because whenever you remove the hardware, for example, the power supply, it will take five to ten minutes before it powers on. The last time, it didn't respond, so I had to remove the firewall and reboot SonicWall TZ, which took half an hour. The firewall was entirely down, and that time was critical, so SonicWall has to fix the reboot time issue on SonicWall TZ. That was a very, very bad experience.

The company has eleven locations with a total of one thousand SonicWall NSa users.

One non-technical staff maintains SonicWall NSa. The product doesn't require much maintenance.

My rating for SonicWall NSa is four out of ten.

I'd advise others not to go with SonicWall NSa because the interface has many issues. Another issue I have with the product is the reboot time. In particular, the hard reboot is very slow in SonicWall NSa.

My company is a SonicWall customer.

I use SonicWall NSa for bandwidth monitoring and aggregation. I also use it to control browsing.

What I like best about SonicWall NSa is the security it offers compared to other solutions in the market. Its reduction rate is also better than others.

SonicWall NSa has multiple areas for improvement.

One is that it doesn't have a proxy. It also doesn't have the quota management feature required in specific scenarios where you need to limit user bandwidth for a particular day, so one user isn't using up too much bandwidth compared to other users.

Active/Active HA is also missing in the product.

What I want to be added to SonicWall NSa in the future is the bandwidth optimization feature.

I've been using SonicWall NSa for fifteen years.

SonicWall NSa is a stable product.

To scale SonicWall NSa, you need to keep changing the model of the box, but this is the case in any other solution, so you go for hardware appliances, such as Fortinet, Sophos, Palo Alto Networks, and Check Point because after reaching a specific capacity, you need to change the model.

SonicWall NSa has good technical support, so support-wise, I'm giving it a ten out of ten.

Positive

My company chose SonicWall NSa over other products because it was good. It was better than others.

SonicWall NSa is easy to implement. It took two hours to deploy the product completely.

We implemented SonicWall NSa as we're SonicWall resellers.

There's ROI from SonicWall NSa, and its reduction rate is the best.

There are different pricing models for SonicWall NSa.

My company uses a next-generation firewall from SonicWall, SonicWall NSa.

I'm using version 2650 of SonicWall NSa.

My company is a SonicWall NSa reseller.

In the company, everyone uses SonicWall NSa, particularly fifty people.

My advice to people looking into implementing SonicWall NSa is that it depends on the setup. What my company does is first understand the setup and why the customer wants to deploy the product. Based on the customer's answers, my company presents solutions that would work. For example, if you require a proxy or a quota management feature, SonicWall NSa will not be a complete solution. If you need Active/Active HA, SonicWall NSa won't be the right match. You need to understand what you require from the product. If you need browsing and management turnovers, then SonicWall NSa will be good enough. Overall, the product still has some areas for improvement.

My rating for SonicWall NSa is seven out of ten. For me to give it a higher rating, it should have more features. Right now, I'm unable to market it well because it doesn't score very well in Gartner. I can only position SonicWall NSa as having the best reduction rate. The product is relatively good and stable but still needs certain features.

The solution is a security system we install in our customer's office. It's a firewall. We have a control panel to manage and view some data and this control panel is in the cloud. However, the firewalls themselves are in the customer's office.

The security is great.

It has great performance.

The prices are similar to other vendors and the support is good.

The deployment process is simple. 

I can't speak to any missing features. They've recently released a new version and it's quite good. Right now, it's the best solution.

I'd like to see integration with Microsoft 365 for authentication.

We've been using the solution for a while. We've definitely used it over the past year.

The stability and performance are great. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. It's true that SonicWall had a lot of problems in the past, however, now it's very stable. It works perfectly.

It's very scalable. In some cases, it's necessary to change the firewall, however, it's easy to change as SonicWall has the ability to migrate the configuration from all firewalls to the new one.

Technical support is great. They are helpful and responsive. We are quite happy with their capabilities.

I'm also familiar with Fortinet. I find SonicWall more secure. It also offers better performance. 

Previously, we installed a firewall directly with Linux and we configured it all at once. It was very manual. 

Now, the implementation is easy. In the past it was difficult. Companies needed a specialist to deploy new firewalls. Now, they have a system that a normal technician can install.

It takes a few hours to install and deploy the product.

We have two people that handle deployment and maintenance. 

The pricing is on par with others on the market. It's not overly expensive.

The cheaper option is between €100 and €200. However, NSa has different models and the more expensive one is for around €10,000, more or less.

When we purchase our NSa, we buy the firewall and the security services. The security services are for a period of time from one year to three years. When we arrive at the end of the contract we need to renew the security services, however, the firewall will still work. We only need to renew the security services.

When we decide to change from Linux firewalls to an appliance we looked at different companies, like Cisco and Fortinet, and we compared these different companies and products. We decided on SonicWall due to the relationship between performance and security.

We are partners.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

We have two SonicWalls in the High Availability setup with failover configuration.

We use it for the firewalling, for IPS protection and for VPN clients.

With SonicWall we have more insight in the applications that users are using and what they are doing on the internet, so we can monitor better. It gives us better monitoring.

We now have more insight and information; what protocols and what websites users are trying to reach and what is blocked and what is not blocked, so we can better follow the tracks of the users.

The features that I have found most valuable are the firewalling, which is very good and the GUI which is very intuitive. It is easy to use and provides great security.

Overall, I'm quite happy about the product. The configuration and the interface are very good. Maybe the pricing and licensing could be improved.

It is not scalable. If your enterprise is growing hard then you have to buy another, bigger product. Maybe if you use it virtually it is more scalable.

We have been using SonicWall NSa for maybe eight to 10 years.

I work for several companies, and we use the NSa with one of them.

It is very stable.

Scalability is an issue. If you need to scale for more performance you will need another product in a higher range. You cannot scale the product itself. That's not possible.

It is not scalable at all.

We have about 350 users. I do the maintenance on my own.

We use it daily.

We do not have plans to increase at the moment.

Their technical support is very good.

The initial setup is not complex, it is very easy.

In terms of my implementation strategy - at first I write down the case we need. I investigate all the uses we have to implement with the SonicWall, and then I install and configurate it. I think the primary configuration was maybe three or four hours.

It was all done by myself.

You can buy the license for one or three years, and we mostly choose the three year. That's a little bit cheaper.

We looked at the Cisco and we looked at the Palo Alto, but the SonicWall was the most valuable for the pricing, the best product for us. The main difference is the pricing.

SonicWall NSa is a very good product with a very nice price, and it is low-level to use.

It is easy to manage and easy to implement.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give SonicWall NSa a nine because of the stability and the easy-to-use GUI. It's a very nice product.

SonicWall has USCS and anti-virus at the gateway level. Everything is filtered, and if it detects an intruder, it drops the line.

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. We get the IOCs from the security companies, so these things can be filtered and blocked at the gateway level. They could add a feature where our team uploads the IOCs in an Excel spreadsheet instead of entering them in one at a time. 

We've been using SonicWall for almost seven years.

Yeah, it is much stable and we have been using NSa the previous version before also, the old device. It's all so far okay. It's stable only.

We could expand by another 20 percent, and the product would still cover us. It shouldn't be a problem. We haven't faced many challenges. It's a gateway-level firewall product, and we have 140 users.

SonicWall support is good.

We used Cisco a long time ago, but we moved to SonicWall almost eight years ago.

Setting up SonicWall isn't that complicated, but you need to know the scope — what's allowed and what isn't. But it's not as complex as Cisco. The deployment takes a couple of days, but we could probably do it faster. We upgraded from the older version of SonicWall NSa to the latest appliance in less time. 

It doesn't require a large team for maintenance. If we can manage it, anyone can. We only have three people on our team, and we can manage it without issue. 

We used the local redistributor here in Bahrain. They were knowledgeable and had SonicWall experience, so they didn't face much of a challenge. It was straightforward. The only difference is that we went with high availability — two devices. 

We have a yearly license. SonicWall's price is better than other vendors. We get a discount of about 15 percent off the initial cost.

I rate SonicWall eight out of 10. I recommend it. If you implement SonicWall, it'll be a smooth journey.

I'm using SonicWall NSa as an external firewall.

For me, the most valuable feature of SonicWall NSa is the UTM.

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.

Another area for improvement is the UI of SonicWall NSa, mainly because the rule set is challenging to review, and you always have to export the rule set for review. 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.

In the next release of SonicWall NSa, I want the solution to be more user-friendly.

I've been working with SonicWall NSa for more than ten years.

SonicWall NSa is a stable solution.

I am still determining how scalable SonicWall NSa is.

SonicWall NSa support is fine overall. My company always gets help from the local vendor.

My company used Check Point ten years ago, but its pricing was higher than SonicWall NSa. The cost to maintain Check Point was also higher, so now the company uses SonicWall NSa.

SonicWall NSa is relatively easy to set up because my company always partners with local support.

It took one month to implement the solution because the company had to migrate from the old to the new, including checking the rule sets. I'm referring to upgrades because the deployment from scratch happened ten years ago, so I don't remember the details.

An in-house team implemented SonicWall NSa together with a local support team.

My company has yet to evaluate any ROI from SonicWall NSa.

SonicWall NSa has reasonable pricing. My company pays for it yearly, but I forgot how much the company pays. From what I remember, you only pay for the license fees.

I believe I'm using the latest SonicWall NSa version, 2700, though I'm not sure.

My whole company in Hong Kong uses SonicWall NSa, so that's about one hundred people. Mainly two people maintain the solution.

A few people took care of the deployment of SonicWall NSa.

I rate SonicWall NSa as nine on a scale of one to ten.

I'm a SonicWall NSa user.