WatchGuard Firebox Reviews

WatchGuard Firebox is our daily firewall. It gets used on a regular basis.

It is deployed locally. We are using its latest version.

Their support is excellent, and the stability is very good.

Some of the configuration options are somewhat confusing.

It has been very stable.

Their support is excellent.

It is very stable and fairly easy to use.

I would rate it an eight out of 10.

We use WatchGuard Firebox for network security in our offices.

The main features of the solution are the control of the site-to-site network access and the overall features.

The solution can improve by adding a feature to tag a MAC address of a computer system in the policy and more IP configuration settings.

I have been using this solution for approximately ten years.

We did not need to use technical support.

The implementation of the solution was done by our IT management team.

I rate WatchGuard Firebox an eight out of ten. 

We are using it for firewalling and providing wireless network connectivity for access points. It is a standard product for our infrastructure. 

We can implement it very easily. There are some standards that we can explain to our colleagues. It is easy to maintain the same type of installation at various customer locations. It is easy to pass on the information to our team about how to implement it in the same way.

The ease of use is most valuable. You can quickly train someone who hasn't seen a firewall in life. You can get people up to speed, and in a few months, they are able to manage this product very easily. It is a very user-friendly, scalable, and stable product. Its price is also spot-on.

Its documentation could be improved. Sometimes, you need to search a bit longer to find what you are looking for.

I have been using this solution since 2014.

It is a very stable product. Usually, we have several years of uptime on WatchGuard Fireboxes. They can run for very long without any issues.

It is very scalable. We have several customers with several sites, and we can easily extend the network by using Fireboxes at several sites with site-to-site tunnels. If you use the WatchGuard system management software, you can even drag two Fireboxes together, and they automatically make their own tunnel. You don't even have to perform any additional tasks. It is very user-friendly in terms of scalability.

We get good support. It can take a bit longer only in the case of a specific problem that even they are not aware of, but that's the case with many of their competitors. In general, their support is very good.

It is fairly easy to deploy. You can also deploy it remotely. It provides a very easy and out-of-the-box experience.

It has a very good price. It is not the most expensive one, and it is also not the cheapest one. It is just spot-on in terms of price.

We evaluated Fortinet and Cisco. We chose WatchGuard because we wanted our engineers to be able to learn and work with the product in a very short amount of time.

When comparing Fortinet and WatchGuard, in the past, Fortinet was before WatchGuard in providing the features for directly resolving DNS names and hostnames and making additions to the rules. A few months later, WatchGuard also implemented these features. Nowadays, it goes both ways.

I would advise others to definitely take the WatchGuard Essential Security training course, which is a four-day or three-day course. It really gives a broad overview of the product. You get a good, basic, and overall feeling of the product. You can take it in groups. We normally go with four to five engineers of our company. Most of the time, after that course, you can implement the basic product and even scale it out to many more locations without requiring additional training.

I would rate WatchGuard Firebox a nine out of ten. I am pretty satisfied with this solution.

In regards to price and technology, it's a great solution.

I like that this product has very few issues.

The only downside is that it is missing an API, that you can use to easily collect information from it. Also, everything is proprietary with the WatchGuard software and that is a bit of an issue.

The API connection would be a very big improvement to get information from the system or to actually configure it with its own dashboard, for example.

Providing additional features would give it a more up-to-date management interface. They have only just entered the cloud since last year which puts them behind compared to other competitors, such as Fortinet, who has the advantage over that, but they have a disadvantage where they have several zero-day attacks on their devices.

I have been using WatchGuard for six or seven years.

Stability is the most valuable feature of this solution.

It's a very scalable solution, but we are not using it in a very large environment.

We use this solution because they have a very good support team. They are very knowledgeable about ways of implementing this solution in our industry.

Technical support is good.

The initial setup was straightforward.

It's fair pricing, but it could always be reduced.

I would suggest comparing the features of the competitors based on data consumption because that's where Firebox is winning.

Overall, we are quite happy with the Firebox solution and we have not seen any issues so far. This is why we are using it.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We have got WatchGuard Firewalls. So, we use their EDR, which is a part of the security package that they provide us.

We use this solution for additional protection and response. We use it in combination with the antivirus that we provide to our clients. We have the latest version of this solution.

The protection that it provides from ransomware is valuable. The awareness that it has is also valuable. 

It didn't have a central console earlier, but now it has a central console, which is pretty good.

It can have a couple of false positives, but after you add them to your allow list, it works fine.

It could have better Mac support. I am pretty sure it doesn't have much support for Mac. It can be installed on a Mac, but it is not that good.

I have been using this solution for probably about a year.

It is stable.

Its scalability is really good. You can scale up or scale down depending on the number of users. 

We have over 200 clients of this solution. We have plans to increase its usage. We'll be deploying it for other clients to whom we provide our services.

They provide very good support. I am definitely satisfied with their support.

It is straightforward. It doesn't take long.

We evaluated a couple of other options such as SentinelOne and Palo Alto EDR Edition. We went with this solution because it is inbuilt with the network security routers that they provide. It is like an all-in-one sort of bundle system, and that's why we chose it.

I would rate WatchGuard Threat Detection and Response a nine out of ten. It is pretty good, and I am satisfied with it.

The solution is lacking a professional website, they should be updated more often.

I have used the solution for five years. 

We found no bugs with the operation of the solution. 

There are no problems with the technical support. If a problem occurs it gets resolved immediately with our technical support partners.

The initial setup is simple and understandable.

I find the solution to be very affordable.

My advice for people that wants to implement the solution is that it is very good, you get value for money, and you will be well protected. Additionally, you should make sure the implementation is done correctly and the configuration is well defined.

I rate WatchGuard Firebox a nine out of ten. 

We use it to meet our compliance.

It is something that we need for compliance, and it has been useful. Their support staff is also amazing.

They need to stop the VLAN limitation. They have a VLAN limitation on the size of their boxes. It is the worst thing ever. They basically sell their boxes by the size and the number of VLANs it can handle, which is a real issue. You spend a couple of thousand dollars for a firewall, and you can only do 30 VLANs, which is extremely silly, as a matter of fact.

It would be really great to have something for easier mass rule changes. It also needs a drag-and-drop function so that you don't have to constantly duplicate firewall rules. It would be nice to have such a feature because you got one WatchGuard, and you want to mirror its config and change a couple of things in another one and move some things around. It is not as easy as you would necessarily think.

It is kind of expensive, and its pricing can be a little better for sure.

I have been using this solution for a couple of months.

Its stability is good.

It is not very scalable. If you need more than 30 VLANs, you got to upgrade to the next biggest box. You have to change the hardware box and swap the boxes.

Their tech support is great.

We used a different solution. We switched because the other company was unethical. They did some unethical things that we weren't too happy with.

It is easy. The GUIs of WatchGuard System Manager and WatchGuard are different. You have to know where to go and look in both places to set them up.

We have four admins in my company for its deployment.

It is kind of expensive. I buy it on the appliance. I always buy three-year total security.

I would recommend this solution. I would rate WatchGuard Data Loss Prevention an eight out of ten.

We primarily use the solution to protect our hardware.

The pricing of the solution is okay. It's not the most expensive option.

This product may do well outside of the Chinese market.

This isn't very popular in China. It doesn't offer the best protection and it's incompatible with a lot of China's websites. It makes a lot of mistakes when it is detecting items as it's not recognizing items correctly.

It has the functional WebBlocker and the server is not local. Sometimes the performance is bad we'll get pop-ups saying "the server is not available". I'm not sure if users outside of China have such an issue, or if it's just due to the fact that we have a unique web experience in the country. The solution just doesn't fit well here.  

The performance could be a bit better.

I've been working with the solution for almost ten years. We have three generations of WatchGuard under our belt.

We've had issues with unstable network connections. It's hard to say if this was caused by a bug or an internal issue. It seems to depend on the network environment if it is stable or not. There just seems to be some limitations.

The scalability seems to have some limitations. We've had issues with performance, and that might affect scalability. I'm not sure.

IN China, the company doesn't really have any presence and so there isn't really technical support we can connect with. There is only an agent that is present, and they haven't been too helpful in the past.

I don't recall how the initial setup was. I can't recall if it was difficult or straightforward.

The pricing is likely similar to Cisco's Firewall. It's not the cheapest option. It has a moderate price tag.

I'm not sure if I would recommend the product. My experiences are based on what we've seen in terms of response to our network environment. Maybe other companies have a good international network and maybe they would have not this issue. It's hard to say. In any case, we've had issues.

Overall, I would rate the solution at a seven out of ten. Maybe they shouldn't be in the Chinese market.