SonicWall TZ Reviews

For protection, we follow the market standard. We configure the security policies, then the routing, starting routers, and then add policies, and configure the zones. Then we configure the application filtering, URL filtering, and all the security services which include Gateway Anti-Virus, IPS, then Botnet Filtering, and antispam.

The most common feature in the firewall, apart from that traditional firewall, would be the security services, like application control, URL filtering, Gateway Anti-Virus, and IPS protection. These are the essential features in the firewalls which I think, has to be enabled and properly used at every network infrastructure.

Though it is not as powerful and as good as the Palo Alto, Check Point, and Juniper firewalls, it is a small firewall and it is actually, highly acceptable for SMB customers where there is not much outflow of internet traffic and users are less in number. They can update or enhance the application signatures. They have that Capture ATP option, which is the sandboxing option there. Other than that, they can enhance the application signature, because, in SonicWall, the signatures of the application are not up-to-date. It is not a big database compared to Palo Alto, or Fortinet. It is slow and it takes time. 

If you have created zones it automatically creates the access policy for allowing traffic from one zone to another zone. Similarly, if you create a site-to-site tunnel or a remote tunnel, in that case, it will automatically stage the access policy. However, there are options to disable that auto-creation, but if you compare this with the other firewalls, other firewalls don't have that. This is basically one thing that SonicWall TZ can work on so that an unnecessary access policy doesn't get generated in the firewall. 

I have been working with SonicWall TZ for the past two and a half years.

It is stable. If there is less operation, it is stable. But if you have fifty to one hundred users, in that case, and if the operation increases, it is not stable. It will give a delay in some packet requests.

It is scalable. If the operation is less, it is scalable. But if the operation increases and the bandwidth consumption increases, it does not perform as per the expectations.

Technical support is very good. 

Positive

It is straightforward. It is out-of-the-box and anyone can configure it. The deployment takes less than one day. Basically, while they were deploying this TZ Series firewall, we didn't face any issues. But there are some old customers who had some issues with the IPs they had to set on from remote offices to the HO. In that case, we did that troubleshooting. Other than that, we didn't face any issues.

It comes to a range between five hundred to seven hundred dollars. The Fortinet firewalls range from five hundred to one thousand dollars. 

I would rate SonicWall TZ a seven out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for its firewall capabilities.

The best thing about the product is the very good threat prevention output.

The dashboard needs to be improved.

They can work on the GUI part of the solution. Currently, it is a little bit complicated as compared to other competitors.

Each uplink is quite a big and complicated sort of tool. Other products, like Checkpoint, are so-so, however, they are better. Fortinet is a good example of one that is very good and easy to use.

I've been working with the solution for four to five years.

The stability is excellent. We find it to be reliable. We haven't had any issues at all.

We consider growing the solution based on the company's needs. We work with different sizes of organizations. We try to project out what a company will need, not tomorrow, but three years down the line, and build for that on day one.

We do this due to the fact that it's not exactly scalable. We build it bigger so organizations can grow into the solution quite a bit. Users are restricted by the model of the firewall, so if you choose something that's too small, it won't be able to meet your needs and you'll have to start over and trade up to a bigger model.

If a TZ series can handle 500 users, and a company currently has 200 users, they'll be able to scale up, technically speaking, to about 300 more users before they hit their threshold.

Basically, the scalability is not infinite. It's quite limited to the capacity of the model itself.

We've never dealt with technical support. We've managed to handle any issues ourselves, in-house. I can't speak to the kind of service they provide.

I also have experience with Sophos XG.

I find that there aren't too many differences between firewalls, as everyone has the same platform and goals.

The initial setup is not complex. It's very straightforward. We found it to be quite easy.

It may take a while to deploy the solution, at least here in Haiti. It will take longer than a few hours. Depending on the client, it can take anywhere from a day or two to up to ten or 15 days.

It's all dependent on the customer side. What will define the length of time will be is the mobile policy they want to implement on the firewall. That depends on the customer.

You only need one person to deploy and maintain the solution.

We're resellers. We handle the implementation for our clients.

We use this solution ourselves, however, we also deploy it for our clients. We're resellers.

We're using the latest version of the solution.

I don't know if I have specific advice, as each customer is different and has different needs in terms of security. It depends on their policies and how they want to implement them. There are almost endless amounts of policies that can be added to the solution.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

We use it for ATP, the main firewall, and VPN connections to some of our sites.

The VPN is quite useful for us, as well as the ATP. Overall, I would say it's a good solution for small enterprises.

We are currently using a 54.1 version, which, when compared to other solutions like FortiGate or Check Point, needs to improve in many aspects. Even the new SonicWall 7.85 is not safe compared to FortiGate. There is a huge difference.

It has been around four and a half years now. The firmware that we are using is version 6.5.

It's extremely stable, actually one of the best. I would rate it a seven out of ten. 

I would rate it a six out of ten for scalability but for medium to small enterprises. All are remote users. I would rate the solution a six out of ten because there is still room for improvement, and it's not advisable even if the organization has grown.

A lot of users use it. All our email sheets are using it, and users connect via VPN.

The setup was fairly easy once you understood how the device worked. However, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone else anymore.

The licensing options are quite good in terms of what you get. For a small to medium enterprise, it's a good option.

If you are looking at it from a financial level, it's a good option. But I think there are other options out there. If I had found this product already in my organization when I joined, I would not have gone with this product. I would have gone with an entry-level FortiGate or Check Point. It would have been much better or easier, but SonicWall TZ is not bad, either. However, my device has almost reached the end of its life after almost one and a half years, and it's easy to switch to a different product at the end of our licensing period, which is towards the end of this year. So that would have been good for me.

Overall, I would rate the solution a seven out of ten. 

SonicWall is perfectly okay for businesses that need to support around 100-150 users.

SonicWall is very expensive in terms of using it for 500 users. It's very expensive compared to Cisco Meraki. Cisco Meraki is half the price with the same features. Even FortiGate is less expensive than SonicWall.

I'd like to see anti-spam included in the standard license. I have to pay more for anti-spam when really it should be the standard feature.

I have been using SonicWall for about two years. 

No issues with stability. There's an automatic update that defines everything and then implements it to where I can see it on the dashboard. I can see all the spam or malware that was detected, as well as the vulnerability. It then stops those issues. 

General maintenance is okay, but if some users require changes, or I have to deploy some policy on the users, then the steps are actually pretty lengthy.

The only issue I have with scalability is the price.

I get in touch with technical support whenever we require the support, the support is okay. We have a toll free number to connect with them. I just connect support and then discuss the issues. They take control of my firewall and then make changes as per my requirement. That's fine. The support is more or less is good. That's not an issue.

I license SonicWall TZ for three years subscription and support. I would say the price is about 20% more when compared to the competition. The standard service for what my company needs is already covered in that license. But if I need more licenses like for VPN or some other filtering, then I need to pay more.

I worked with Meraki and Fortigate. I can differentiate the products in terms of ease of use. If I go for ease of use and deployability, then I would prefer Cisco Meraki in any case.

It's not user friendly as compared to Meraki.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten. 

If an organization has about 200 users with slow growth, then SonicWall would be great. But if the growth is exponential and rapid, they may want to consider other solutions or SonicWall NSA.

In some cases SonicWall is used to outfit a company, replacing existing infrastructure and getting site-to-site VPN set up for easier management. It provides ease of use for VPN setups. We are customers of SonicWall and I'm a senior system analyst. 

The solution offers the right amount of control without being incredibly convoluted and frustrating, or without being too dumbed down where you don't have options to do certain things. It's very to the point with the controls and simplifies things for us. It's great value for money. 

The solution has a lot of robust options and it's easy to use. NSM is a good feature, a single pane of glass security center where you can monitor SonicWall for different clients and troubleshoot without it requiring individual access. The product has good integration with their SMA solution, which we deployed for one of our financial firms, and we've also provided a remote access solution for people with PCs at home who want secure access. It offers good content filtering.

I would probably say their GSM or their Sonic Analyzer could be improved. I have always found it difficult to manage and not very intuitive. I'd like to have better visibility of what each endpoint is doing. That's something Meraki has that is very easy to use.

I've been using this solution for over seven years. 

The solution is stable. We're an MSP, so if our clients have any dated hardware, we'll make a plan to switch to SonicWall, otherwise there can be issues with the internet or configuration where we can't get in and troubleshoot. We need to know we can get into the firewalls and make sure that they're online, as opposed to having to schedule someone to come in and deal with the basic physical connections or troubleshoot.

The scalability is very good because if you know how to work the base model, the old solution or the TZ 105, all the way up to the NSAs, they just scale up in terms of features and functionality and you don't change a whole lot. They have good terminology that sticks throughout, so if you work with one, you can work with them all. It means upgrading and scaling is very easy. We manage about 1300 users or so across about 100 different clients. For the most part, maybe 80% of them are on SonicWall, and we try to push that just because it makes our lives a lot easier.

We don't use the technical support very often, but the last call I had with them, everything was resolved within the hour. I spent more time on hold than I did with the person. It was 15 minutes on hold, for 10 minutes to resolve the issue. Otherwise, it's great. 

The initial setup was very straightforward. Deployment time depends on the client but if we're starting from scratch, you can have it updated and deployed within an afternoon without issue. We have our own techs with experience who can get things set up to the best of our ability. Implementation takes one person who knows what they're doing, but we have a team that can help out and troubleshoot if we run into issues. 

I'm not sure of licensing costs, but the price point isn't bad. In addition, you need to buy the hardware. There is also a standard support license, and they offer an advanced security gateway with other intrusion detection, prevention, content filtering, etc. There are some additional options we usually go with, but things like content filtering are hit and miss, and depend on what the client wants.

I've tried Meraki, but their price points are ridiculous and feature functionality is somewhat lacking. After Dell sold SonicWall, things improved a lot, and they've come a long way. There were some things about Meraki that I liked such as endpoint visibility. You can see the list of connected devices and apply a policy. You can get very low network so that bandwidth is not eaten up if someone is watching Netflix all day but they can still receive emails. Those kinds of things are what's missing in SonicWall. I've never been able to do something like that easily on the firewall side. Unfortunately, the cost of Meraki is really prohibitive. We tried a few other solutions and they just didn't pan out. If you want a good firewall, you have to pay thousands of dollars for what SonicWall does in a way that's easier to manage.

I would recommend trying the product, it's not too difficult, whether it's the setup or the cost. If you're looking for a really low-cost solution, you'll probably end up using something like pfSense which doesn't really compare to SonicWall. There are probably better solutions out there, but there are things that SonicWall does better, it just depends on your budget.

I rate the solution eight out of 10. 

The web security and IPsec VPN are both valuable aspects of the solution.

The NAT policies and port forwarding are great. 

We were initially actually using very basic features for my organization's requirements. It is a very simple model. There isn't much complexity to it.

It's been very easy to implement and deploy.

The solution is stable. 

Technical support is perfect.

We've found the pricing to be pretty good overall.

It would be nice if it was more user-friendly. The user interface is a bit difficult to navigate.

The technology in this particular version is very old. 

They have to improve their assistant client application.

In this particular SonicWall has a challenge with the SSL client. It provided NetExtender, a client application that is very challenging and is difficult to manage.

I've been working with the solution for about six years or so. 

I would say that it is 100% stable. Sometimes there's an issue, and we have to log a ticket, however, they will have it resolved. Rarely are there bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.

Sometimes support is delayed, and sometimes we get items resolved within hours. Overall, it is okay. Overall it is okay. They are very helpful and responsive most of the time and we are quite satisfied with their level of attention.

We previously used a solution called AnexGATE. However, we had issues with port following and needed to switch.

The initial setup is very straightforward. It's not overly complex. A company shouldn't have too much trouble implementing it. This is especially true if you have a bit of a technical person implementing it.

For the most part, the solution is very economical.

Although we have been using it for the last six or seven years, it is now expired and we want to upgrade it with either Fortinet or Sophos, and so, we are looking into those.

We are a customer and an end-user.

We are using the TZ300 model at this time. We haven't used the latest version of the solution just yet.

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

We use the tool for filtering and log management.

The product’s filtering and URL-blocking features are valuable. SD-WAN and VPN are also valuable features.

The solution must provide more ports.

I have been using the solution for six months.

I rate the tool’s stability a ten out of ten.

I rate the tool’s scalability a ten out of ten. We have around 100 users. We use the tool daily.

We used Sophos before. We switched to SonicWall TZ because it provides high availability.

I rate the ease of setup a ten out of ten. Setting up the users and accounts according to the groups and categories takes a few hours. The whole setup requires a few days.

We deploy the solution in-house. We need three people to deploy the tool. We need one knowledgeable person who has mastered firewalls to maintain the product.

The product is worth the money.

The product is not expensive, but it is not cheap. I rate the pricing a six out of ten.

We set up new environments and implemented firewall solutions in our organization. Overall, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

We use it for protection. We're about two versions behind the latest version.

It does exactly what it says on the tin. It is good for protecting the business from being compromised. Its port protection is very good.

It could probably be more user-friendly, and it could be more scalable with releases and subscriptions.

I have been using this solution for a few years.

Its scalability is not bad. It could be more scalable with releases and subscriptions. 

We have about 200 users.

I never needed their support.

I can't remember the old solution we had, but it was no good. So, we went to SonicWall.

It was a long time ago. From what I recall, it was pretty straightforward.

For deployment and maintenance, we have a technical team of around five internal people.

We have to pay yearly. Its licensing can be improved, and they should provide more features, such as AV, email filtering, and so on with the basic subscription.

There are a lot of products out there, and I don't have that much experience with any other product. If I have to buy a new product, I would probably review and do a comparison with SonicWall. 

Overall, I don't have any issues with the product. I like this product. It is very good. I would rate it an eight out of 10.