SonicWall NSa Reviews

We are a software development company, and we have approximately 100 to 125 users working at the same time. This firewall is part of our security solution and we are planning to upgrade it to a TZ or another NSA model.

The most valuable features are the antivirus and reporting.

SonicWall NSA is easy to deploy, easy to maintain, and easy to configure. There are lots of features, which is really good for us

The reporting feature could be better because most of the companies want to have the analytics included, which is something that you have to buy separately.

We bought our SonicWall NSA between nine and ten years ago.

This is a stable solution, as per our needs. We have not experienced any problems with it.

We have 125 concurrent users at this time.

We are planning to replace the current model with either a TZ or another NSA.

The NSA model is very easy to deploy and it does not take a long time to do.

I deployed it myself. I watched some videos online and then completed the deployment.

Licensing fees are paid on a yearly basis, and we are happy with the pricing. This is one of the reasons that we choose this product.

This is definitely a product that I can recommend to others.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

This product is the firewall that protects us from attacks from the internet.

This product has kept us safe and we haven't had any breaches.

The most valuable feature for us at the moment is the VPN, given that everybody has moved to home offices.

It is easy to integrate.

Initially, it may be difficult for some people to learn and become acquainted with it. I have been using it for a long time and find it straightforward to use.

I have been using SonicWall NSA for about 20 years.

SonicWall NSA is very stable. It is refined and well-tested, and it has been around for almost 30 years. It's a proven technology.

Each model scales to a certain point. If you outgrow it, then you buy another version.

Nobody specifically uses this product but every day, all of the company traffic goes through it.

The technical support is great.

At this site, SonicWall NSA is the only firewall that has been used.

I found the initial setup to be straightforward.

The price is reasonable for what it does.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this product is to get some training if it is your first time. It can be a little complex for new users.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

I am using SonicWall NSa as a firewall for many of its functionality, such as intrusion detection and traffic control.

The most valuable feature of SonicWall NSa is the control aspect of the solution.

The detection of malware can improve in SonicWall NSa.

I have been using SonicWall NSa for approximately seven years.

SonicWall NSa is stable.

The scalability of SonicWall NSa is good.

We have approximately 2000 employees and 6000 students using the solution. We have plans to increase the usage of the solution in the future.

The support is mostly online that we have received from SonicWall NSa.

I rate the support from SonicWall NSa a four out of five.

We did not use another firewall previously.

The initial setup of SonicWall NSa is straightforward. The full deployment took approximately two weeks.

We had an integrator do the implementation of SonicWall NSa for us.

I am the only one who maintains the solution.

SonicWall NSa is a straightforward firewall appliance, and most of the features are available.

I rate SonicWall NSa a nine out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for security. It's used as a firewall.

The solution is very stable.

It's an excellent product for an SMB.

The filtering is excellent.

The solution is quite stable.

We found the initial setup to be straightforward.

You can scale the solution to a certain extent.

The product likely isn't a good fit for a large organization.

They need to elaborate on their business from a technical point of view. 

I've been working with the solution for about four or more years at this point. It's been a while. 

The product scales quite well. There are no bugs. It's not glitchy. It doesn't crash or freeze. I find it to be reliable. 

You can scale the solution. We haven't used it beyond 1,000 to 1,500 users. Beyond that, I'm not sure what it can handle. I haven't really tried to scale it too much.

I've also used Palo Alto. I used it at my previous organization.

We found the initial setup to be very straightforward. It's not overly complex or difficult. A company should have any problem with the process.

We're a customer and an end-user. We don't have a business relationship with SonicWall.

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten. While we've been mostly happy with it, it's more for SMBs as opposed to larger organizations.

I'd recommend the product to small organizations for sure.

When it comes to securing VLANs, the primary use case for SonicWall NSa is VPNs. 

Compared to Cisco, SonicWall NSa is much easier to configure. Cisco tends to be cumbersome through the web interface. It's easy through the command line, but when you're troubleshooting something, you're usually not going through the command line. When you're digging through data trying to find if something happened, you're usually digging through the logs, through the web interface, because it should be much easier. In Cisco, the logs are odd and you have to be really particular on what you want. You have to look for specific details. 

This process is much easier SonicWall NSa. I want to know where the problem started and where it ended, that's it; and it's really clear in SonicWall NSa. Whereas in Cisco it's just not clear at all.

It would be amazing if all of the ports on the throughput devices were 10 gig or 100 gig. That would make it so much easier for me to designate 10 gigs throughout the whole network. Right now, with SonicWall NSa, I'm doing designations like "use 10 gigs through the whole network until you hit firewall." In that case, all of the traffic that has firewall enabled on it drops to one gig.

That causes issues with throughput, especially when you're talking about data stores and Ice Guzzy, or when you're splitting things out with VLANs. 

MAC address filtering on the VPN and on the firewall itself would be a good thing to add as well. If it's there, I don't know where it is.

Automation would also be good. 

The implementation for VLANs is a little bit cumbersome. It would be good to make that a little bit easier.

I've used SonicWall probably on and off for the last couple of years. It depends on which client I'm working with.

SonicWall NSa is stable. 

Just adding multiple sites is easy. Clustering them is pretty straightforward. But if I needed to expand them in series, that's a little bit more complicated.

I've never used SonicWall tech support. 

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. 

Hire a network guy or have a service that's going to monitor and manage SonicWall NSa for you.

Mainly our customers use this solution as a general firewall. 

Currently, our most popular firewall is Fortinet FortiGate 40F. We do have all the way up to 100's, but most of our customers are small, medium-sized businesses.

We have a FortiAnalyzer that resides on Azure and we're getting a FortiManager because of the new capability to roll them out based on the serial number

With FortiManager and FortiAnalyzer, you have many more capabilities than you do with SonicWall.

I wouldn't say that. If it has no impact on them, it's doing its job correctly.

There are no specific features that you can say are better than anything else. It's very flexible and it meets our customer's needs.

The Fortinet Firewall is not the easiest firewall to maintain, nor is to set up and configure. Checkpoint and Sonos are much easier.

SonicWall, from my point of view is the same category as Fortinet. Checkpoint and Sonos are easier to use, but they don't have as many features as SonicWall.

You can do zero-trust networking with SonicWall, but it's not easy. Also, their desktop anti-virus sucks.

I have been using SonicWall since it was Netscreen — which was years ago.

When you buy it based on the load that you expect to use, there are no scalability issues, unless you swap them out.

SonicWall has exceptional tech support. I would rate checkpoint support best, SonicWall next, and Fortinet would be third. I would give SonicWall's tech support a rating of 7.5 to eight.

The structure of dealing with them is good. Once you get through to a support person, the support is very good. But getting through, getting to the point where you have someone on the line can be difficult. 

Overall, they're good at their job and they speak English.

The level of tech support varies: sometimes you get lucky and they're exceptional, and sometimes it's somebody that isn't that good.

If you don't set it up correctly, you are putting your customer's network at risk. They still haven't fixed a lot of the little issues that Dell introduced into the product line, but they're trying.

There are settings that if you don't set them correctly, you could potentially jeopardize your customer's network. 

SonicWall is probably easier to set up than Fortinet.

The pricing of SonicWall is still in line with Fortinet and Checkpoint. Personally, if I were presented with a decision between SonicWall, Checkpoint, or Fortinet, it would be a no-brainer.

If you're interested in SonicWall, consider checkpoint or Fortinet first.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of seven.

They don't have independent testing. They haven't been independently rated — or another way to put it: Gardner rates them poorly. Because of this, we can't sell SonicWall to customers as easily as we can sell Fortinet or Checkpoint.

SonicWall NSa's most valuable features are the ease of configuration and the GUI. It's a web-based application, so we can easily configure all we want in the browser.

An area for improvement would be SonicWall NSa's integration with antiviruses. In the next release, SonicWall should include a wireless solution so we can implement the firewall in our networks and for wireless users and access points.

I've been using SonicWall NSa for about two years.

SonicWall NSa is a stable system that's really easy to handle and communicate with.

SonicWall's technical support is very responsive and helpful whenever we need support from them.

Positive

Previously, I worked with PMG Firewall, but SonicWall has a higher level of compatibility, and the integration between the software and hardware gives us more speed in traffic and processing the data over the firewall.

The initial setup was easy - we could implement rules for mapping, network traffic, and network address translation easily on our firewall. I would rate the ease of the setup as four out of five.

SonicWall NSa is a great choice for any growing company - it's really helpful, and it's suitable for networks with limited or unlimited users. I would rate SonicWall NSa as eight out of ten.

Our primary use case for SonicWall NSa is as a public firewall, as an interface between our private network and the public network.

The product is working okay. The product is working feature-wise.

I would rate SonicWall NSa as an average product, not a very highly recommended one. It is an average product.

The stability is not there. The features are there, but they are not stable. They need to improve on this product because I feel that they have launched this product without much R&D.

We are using SonicWall NSa for quite a long time, around 10 to 12 years, but that includes the the older model, which was the 5500. Now we have been using the 5600 model for the last two, three years.

Performance wise, they are good - not very good, but they're okay, just good.

They are not stable. It is a very unstable product.

For maintenance, we require one engineer from the support partner, one from the tech side, and one from our side, so three engineers and one manager.

At any point in time we have more than 600 users.

We do not have plans to increase the number of users.

Tech support is okay, but the product needs much improvement.

We were not using a different solution before. We have always been using SonicWall, just the older model, which was 5500. We upgraded to 5600.

The installation part of the initial setup was a painful experience. I felt at the time that it was not a finished product. They have to do more R&D on this product to improve it.

It took a very long time to set it up, to be honest. It took very long because they had some bugs and fixes. After so many fixes, it took them very long to install this product.

Obviously, no OEM deals directly with them. We have their channel partners who did the installation.

To be very honest, we are not satisfied with the 5600 product.

On a personal level, I would not recommend SonicWall NSa.

On a scale of one to ten, you can rate SonicWall NSa a six.

The license and the hardware both need to be renewed. The annual maintenance contract is there. So they have to renew the licenses.