We performed a comparison between Barracuda CloudGen Firewall 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."It is easy to use and performs very well."
"The VPN is the most valuable feature."
"I like how we can achieve total integration."
"SSL-VPN is very useful for us and has been very reliable."
"The web filtering facility and application control are the most valuable features from the point of view of our clients. The VPN feature is also quite popular amongst our clients. Two-factor authentication is one of the good features in Fortinet. These features are important for the current scenario of security. Security has become a necessity nowadays. With cyber-attacks becoming more common, protecting an organization's data is one of the major tasks. It is also very stable and scalable, and it is very straightforward to configure. Their technical support is also good."
"A strong point of FortiGate is the graphical interface is complete and easy to use."
"Reliability is the best feature. We faced some issues when we were setting it up, but the service, portal, and administration are good."
"It works very well. It has a lot of different functionalities. Its cost is also fine for our customers."
"They have a very responsive customer service and support team."
"Easy integration with some other systems like LDAP or Active Directory to manage other permissions and the division of external access and internal access."
"It provides a lot of functionality adhering to the current trends."
"If you have multiple offices, all inter-connected via the internet, you want a single management console through which you can manage all you firewalls. In that case Barracuda could be a good option."
"Its stability and SD-WAN features are the most valuable."
"I think Barracuda CloudGen Firewall is one of the most advanced firewall platforms. I also like that it's easy to get top-level support right away. You get that security, and if you make a mistake, it doesn't break."
"Most people are using enterprise applications remotely, and there is no license for SSL VPN, or in other words point-to-site. There is no limit on that. On other devices there is a specific limit and you have to pay per use for SSL VPN."
"One of the most important parts is, there is auto-upgrade of the hardware every fourth year."
"Most of the features are useful. It is easy to configure and easy to troubleshoot. I can see the utilization of different networks, and there are also App control features."
"The network security is great."
"I like the firewall product, the security server, and the content filter."
"It does what it says it is going to do."
"User-friendly firewall solution which scales well, is stable, and has high availability."
"Once it's configured properly, the solution is unbreakable."
"It's a stable solution."
"With the main firewall routing there, we can do connectivity point-to-point. On the low bandwidth we can connect in all the branches with my corporate office."
"Fortinet FortiGate needs to improve the logging and reporting. Additionally, the next-generation application's policies should be improved. When they were released they had bugs."
"The search tool needs improvement. It's very difficult to search for policies right now."
"I would like to see better pricing in the next release, as well as a simplification of the installation."
"The solution could be more secure and stable."
"I feel that the reporting needs to be improved."
"Some of the software stability could improve."
"One of the problems I was having was with user mapping, and it is an issue for which I have escalated tickets with Fortinet support."
"The visibility of the network can be better. The GUI can be improved for better visibility of the network flow. Other solutions have better GUI in terms of network visibility."
"Can be underpowered if you choose to use all available add-on features. Just be careful when sizing your unit. Make sure you take into account what features you will be turning on, and work with your sales rep to get the model that can handle that load."
"The price could be better."
"The biggest downside is that it is quite an expensive product."
"The features are a bit limited compared to other vendors."
"They have a very complicated interface. It's very hard to learn."
"We would like to see a solution that is focused on container deployment, which is very important right now."
"It would be better if they had a trace and trap feature. It's hard for me to say anything bad about Barracuda. This is because we had a firewall go down in the town of Kirkland Lake, and it was a blown-out port, and they had an instant replacement."
"While using Barracuda CloudGen Firewall, we encounter issues with VPN profiles for Windows."
"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."
"The monitoring is a little bit confusing."
"We have experienced some issues with SonicWall TZ and they are lacking some advanced features other vendors have."
"The log sections could be done more clearly."
"Support for SonicWall TZ needs improvement, particularly the time it takes before you're able to speak to a support person, e.g. you have to wait for at least 30 minutes on the phone."
"Sometimes there is a glitch between the network connection. Last time, something happened on our IP phone, the SonicWall team did some updates to fix the issue. However, glitches happen very rarely. I did not experience any other types of problems."
"FortiGate has a client DNS in the firewall, but SonicWall doesn't have that. To create or configure a site-to-site VPN tunnel, we have to give a DNS name. Currently, we have to get the DNS name from a third party and then include it in SonicWall, whereas FortiGate has its own client DNS, so it provides a DNS name, and it does not require a third party. There should be a graphical option to view the network utilization and bandwidth usage."
"User interface could be improved."
Barracuda CloudGen Firewall is ranked 20th in Firewalls with 35 reviews while SonicWall TZ is ranked 12th in Firewalls with 78 reviews. Barracuda CloudGen Firewall is rated 8.2, while SonicWall TZ is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Barracuda CloudGen Firewall writes "Feature-rich, robust, and easy to set up". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SonicWall TZ writes "Has efficient user access control feature and good technical support services ". Barracuda CloudGen Firewall is most compared with Netgate pfSense, OPNsense, Sophos XG, Cisco Secure Firewall and Cisco SD-WAN, whereas SonicWall TZ is most compared with Sophos XG, Netgate pfSense, Meraki MX, SonicWall NSa and Sophos UTM. See our Barracuda CloudGen Firewall vs. SonicWall TZ report.
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I strongly recommend you SonicWall 5600. Its having lots of feature for network security and Comparison of price and Support it would be great choice.
Fortigate firewalls are quite rugged and offer great flexibility in configuring the policies and managing them. For individuals as well as group level user privileges. The antivirus offered is also very effective and not at all resource hungry. The only drawback is, the admin should be very well trained and aware of configuring the firewall. It’s quite complicated that way. Or the support provider (reseller) should have expert level admins to configure and set these firewalls in the infrastructure.
I would alternatively suggest looking into Sophos firewalls. They are equally rugged and effective. And also have a much user-friendly configuration and management console.
Barracuda: No Presence in the market at all, quite different way to install manage the product. Impossible to find the technical resource. If it is managed by Multinet then it’s a different story.
UTM control was not good back in the days, not sure about recent improvements.
Support Generally good feedback of Barracuda support.
Sonicwall: Very little presence in the local market, will have compatibility issues when establishing VPN with other vendors or any other integration.
UTM should be good, not experienced it first-hand.
Support, Have horrible feedback about support. they don’t respond for months.
Fortinet: Firewall full of features, good market presence with official REPs in the country. It is basically the same Juniper SSG ScreenOS platform with good UTM.
UTM is good
Support, Support in the region from India is poor, fright. A good local partner can make your day. If case is escalated to US/Canada teams, the experience is much better. You need in-country REPs support to escalate the cases.
China effect, the downside of Fortinet is, its QA of new FortiOS release is not good at all. Things running fine on one release fail badly when upgraded to new release. you need to be ready for an alternate solution when faced with such situation.
But it is better than Barracuda and SonicWall anyways.
RMA time is not next day.
Palo Alto: I would recommend Palo Alto, it can do everything typically required from a NGFW/UTM. Price can be expensive. Typically models with high throughput are quoted from most vendors. In reality, the actual required throughput is not that much. PA820 and PA220 can cater 90% of requirement we have in our environments. This way solution will be comparatively competitive cost wise. Compatibility with third-party devices is good.
Per-user bandwidth limit is missing.
UTM is best.
Support is good. The first level is through support partners, but the experience is good.
No rapid RMA, as no in-country depot exists. But On site spare is best, as the customer owns the spare unit on his premises.
Fortinet is a good option, the interesting thing with them is all the other bits you can add. Many of these such as email protection, Sandbox, edge device protection (anti-virus, VPN Connector for PCs), tokens (electronic or hardware), switches, Wireless Access Points all talk to each other so the Fortinet security umbrella covers them as well. Fortinet has a SIEM as well.
Whatever you buy, get training on it. Also, evaluate the reseller's ability to do an install. Some folks just sell the product, other also know how to install - buy from the latter, and get some Pro Services for the installation.
I have always thought Barracuda's marketing was better than the products (it is very good marketing) and SonicWALL R&D suffered under Dell, and I don't know that it is any better now they are owned by an Investment house.
Out of these three firewalls I would, and have chosen Fortinet. Checkout NSS Labs for real world comparisons. I have been using Fortigates for 2 years now in HA configurations and have only once had to use the cli. Also updates and firmware upgrades never bring the network or internet down. These firewalls get new features added at no extra cost and the throughput is amazing. Buying the UTM bundles gets you all of the features you need and more. I heard about support issues but evertime i call i get routed to someone who knows how the features work and actually helps. We added a fortianalyzer and now we can see logs from all of the firewalls in one console and hold them for a year. Fortinet doesn't just manage their antivirus products they are the developers. These firewalls decrypt data on the fly and scan for viruses before it gets to your email, desktops or servers. Within the first week it caught ransomware within a yahoo email before it could infect our systems. We replaced our websense URL filtering with the URL filtering within the fortigates and never looked back.
I could go on and on but the real tilt in Fortinets favor was it was near half the cost of similar features and functions PA had quoted. Write down what you want and then ask if the vendors have these included in their firewalls or if they have separate appliances that can do them. Every appliance has a latency cost associated with it. You might find that all three can do what you want then it will come down to the management of the firewalls and cost.
Good luck.
I've utilized both SonicWALL and Fortinet in many implementations over the years. Fortinet does a better job in large, multi-tenant deployments and has excellent stateful packet inspection throughput. If you're planning to do SSL decryption and inspection, SonicWALL is the way to go (and currently, the product we lead with). I've found SonicWALL to be easier to manage and have also found that if you're a GUI-oriented user, all of the features are there in the UI. On the Fortigate you'll often have to dig into the CLI to enable some features.
The Barracuda products are very good and quite pricey, especially since you mentioned you were looking at the Sonicwall TZ series. The Sonicwall TZ series is meant for a smaller environment. The Fortinet firewalls are great but require a little more training. My experience with Sophos is that they have been a little buggy and support is not great. Since Sonicwall was sold by Dell the support has been better. I work with several small companies and I would say go with whatever product you have the most experience with. The learning curve can be a little much when you don't know what you're looking at. Both Sonicwall and Fortinet have pretty good support and a pretty extensive KB. Good Luck!
fortinet or baracuda and CISCO ASA 5500 series also good