We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Firewall and SonicWall NSa 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's inexpensive compared to some of the other technology out there."
"The most valuable features are the possibility of having one fabric for switching on security."
"I appreciate FortiGate's flexibility, which allows for centralized management through FortiManager."
"Security, SD-WAN, and Streetscape are valuable features."
"The stability and scalability of this solution are satisfactory. Its SD-WAN, VPN, and URL filtering features are very useful."
"You can purchase switches and you don't need to do anything with them. You just put in the firewall and the switches get all the policies and rules that you already have in the firewall. With Fortinet, you just connect the FortiSwitch to the Fortinet and that's it."
"The base firewall features are quite valuable to us."
"The ability to set up remote systems is the most valuable feature."
"Cisco Secure Firewall made it easier so that more than one person can handle things. We are able to have a bigger team that can handle simple tasks and have a smaller team focus on the deep-dive needs."
"I have not contacted technical support. There is a lot of information on the internet for troubleshooting. All you need to do is use a search engine and you will find the information you are looking for easily."
"The grouping of the solutions helps save time. If you have a problem and you have a high-level overview of the system, you can easily dig deeper into the problem. For example, I can check to see why ASA isn't working but the reason for the outage is actually because of Duo. I can spend a lot of time working in the wrong direction because I didn't have an overview."
"It provides security for our company and users."
"This solution has good security, and it's a good product. You can trust Cisco, and there's support as well, which is really good."
"IPS and Snort are very important because they also differentiate Cisco from other vendors and competitors."
"The most valuable feature of the Firepower solution is FireSIGHT, which can be easily managed and is user-friendly."
"If you compare the ASA and the FirePOWER, the best feature with FirePOWER is easy to use GUI. It has most of the same functionality in the Next-Generation FirePOWER, such as IPS, IPS policies, security intelligence, and integration and identification of all the devices or hardware you have in your network. Additionally, this solution is user-friendly."
"We can do the hosting and security all under one box. The UTM is a good feature."
"Compared to Cisco, SonicWall NSa is much easier to configure."
"SD-WAN is a good feature."
"The most valuable features of this solution are the GUI pre-filtering and the ATP (advanced threat protection)."
"Overall SonicWall NSa is a good solution for our use case."
"It has good reporting, the reporting is marvelous."
"SonicWall NS has a lot of valuable features. One of the best SonicWall NSa features is the ability to collect mini routers and get only one user connection."
"Support has improved dramatically since their separation from Dell."
"The support from Fortinet FortiGate could improve. They are not easily accessible when we need them. They could improve their response time."
"It does not have key authentication for admin access."
"I would like to have logs, monitoring, and reporting for a month without extra fees."
"Fortinet FortiGate can be integrated with different platforms. They have integrations in place, but I can't say they're 100%."
"Fortinet FortiGate can improve the integration with Active Directory. Additionally, I would like to have a Cloud Controller, such as they do in the Cisco Meraki solution."
"The integration with third-party tools may be something that they should work on."
"Fortinet currently has many products bundled with FortiGate including the basic firewall and load balancer, and I think that that they need to have separate product portfolios for each of these specialized services."
"There are SD-WAN network monitoring, SD-WAN features, Industrial Databases, Internet of Things, Detection, etc., however, we do have not licenses for those features. We thought that if you bought a product, you should have all of the features it offers. Why should you need to make so many extra purchases to enable features? They should have one price for the entire offering."
"It should have packets, deep level inspections and controls, like the features which other IPS solutions used to have."
"I would like to see the inclusion of more advanced antivirus features in the next release of this solution."
"Also, they have a Firepower source file that I can work on the ASA device and on Firepower devices. A problem here lies in the way that you manage these devices. Some devices do not support the FMC, and some devices have to be managed through ASDM, and others have to be managed through FMC."
"It would be good if Cisco made sure that the solution supports all routing protocols. Sometimes it doesn't."
"Some of the features, like the stability, need to be improved."
"It's lacking one feature: VPN. Also, the 2100 Series lacks a DDoS feature. If they could add that to those platforms, that would be good."
"One issue with Firepower Management Center is deployment time. It takes seven to 10 minutes and that's a long time for deployment. In that amount of time, management or someone else can ask me to change something or to provide permissions, but during that time, doing so is not possible. It's a drawback with Cisco. Other vendors, like Palo Alto or Fortinet do not have this deployment time issue."
"It would be great if some of the load times were faster."
"The dynamics needs to be improved. The solution is not very compatible compared to the market products."
"Port forwarding could use streamlining."
"The product could expand its throughput capacity."
"The user interface could be better."
"Sometimes I found the GUI and some of the features a little bit hard to navigate, as opposed to Fortigate, which is much more user-friendly."
"The product must enable integration with endpoint protection tools."
"One issue with the solution is that no authorization or authentication features exist."
"SonicWall NSa's reporting could be improved."
Cisco Secure Firewall is ranked 4th in Firewalls with 404 reviews while SonicWall NSa is ranked 19th in Firewalls with 80 reviews. Cisco Secure Firewall is rated 8.2, while SonicWall NSa is rated 7.8. The top reviewer of Cisco Secure Firewall writes "Highlights and helps us catch Zero-day vulnerabilities traveling across our network". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SonicWall NSa writes "Great performance and security with reasonable pricing". Cisco Secure Firewall is most compared with Palo Alto Networks WildFire, Netgate pfSense, Meraki MX, Sophos XG and Huawei NGFW, whereas SonicWall NSa is most compared with SonicWall TZ, Meraki MX, Sophos XG, Netgate pfSense and WatchGuard Firebox. See our Cisco Secure Firewall vs. SonicWall NSa report.
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