We performed a comparison between pfSense and SonicWall TZ based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Features: pfSense offers valuable features such as IP address blocking, user-friendly dashboards, scanning and filtering capabilities, stability, customization abilities, and cost-effectiveness. SonicWall TZ provides unified threat management, VPN capabilities, web security, a user-friendly interface, simplicity, stability, performance, content filtering, and additional features.
pfSense users have suggested the need for instructional videos for beginners, a clearer web interface, improved stability, a mobile application, enhanced reporting, and better integration with other solutions. Users of SonicWall TZ have pointed out improvements that are needed in rated throughput, secondary DNS hosting, cloud management, user interface, integration and flexibility, marketing and branding, reporting and licensing, additional ports, affordability and competition, UI application and policy synchronization, technical support and VPN connections, and pricing.
Service and Support: Some users of pfSense have appreciated the technical support, while others have sought help from the online community. SonicWall TZ has garnered both positive and negative feedback. While some customers have found the support to be satisfactory, others have encountered delays and language barriers.
Ease of Deployment: Users generally find the initial setup of pfSense to be straightforward and easy, with a simple installation process. However, they express the need for clearer guidance or a configuration wizard. The initial setup for SonicWall TZ is considered intuitive and not overly complex, with a smooth out-of-the-box process.
Pricing: The cost of setting up pfSense is affordable and requires no extra charges for firmware updates. Opinions on SonicWall TZ's pricing are divided, with some deeming it cost-effective for medium-sized businesses, while others perceive it as pricey and lacking competitiveness.
ROI: pfSense provides a budget-friendly option with a low yearly cost and substantial hardware savings, leading to a considerable ROI. SonicWall TZ is suggested for improved efficacy and is seen as an essential element for safeguarding the network.
Comparison Results: pfSense is the preferred option when comparing it to SonicWall TZ. Users appreciate pfSense's easy-to-use dashboards, its open-source nature, and its capability to block IP addresses. They find it affordable, customizable, and effective in preventing attacks.
"It's great for capturing the traffic and troubleshooting it."
"Fortinet FortiGate is user-friendly and affordable."
"The application control features, such as Facebook blocking and Spotify blocking, are the most valuable."
"We use a lot of function on the IPS and it works well for us."
"We use a southern institution that's audited for IT security and the reporting that automatically comes off the unit makes it much easier to meet compliance standards and makes it easier as far as the amount of time that has to be spent to compile that information. If you get your reporting set up correctly when you initially set it up, you just select the one you want and hit print. The auditing trail on it is the best feature."
"It's inexpensive compared to some of the other technology out there."
"Fortigate represents a really scalable way of delivering perimeter network security, some level of layer 7 security, WAF, and also a way to create a meshed ADVPN solution."
"The most valuable feature of Fortinet FortiGate is URL filtering."
"Stability has been excellent. We have experienced no issues; it never fails."
"The plugins or add-ons are most valuable. Sometimes, they are free of charge, and sometimes, you have to pay for them, but you can purchase or download very valuable plugins or add-ons to perform internal testing of your network and simulate a denial-of-service attack or whichever attack you want to simulate. You can also remote and monitor your network and see where the gap is. Did you forget a printer port? Most attacks at the moment are happening through printers, and they can tell you immediately that you forgot to close the port of the printer. There are more than one million printers that are in danger, and everybody knows that hackers are using them to enter the network. So, you can download plugins to protect your network."
"Super easy to manage. Anyone who has been working with firewalls can handle it."
"The product’s documentation is good."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"The gain in performance and security from configuring the VPN connections was significant."
"Open source and support are valuable. I have community support."
"The solution is very easy to use and has a very nice GUI."
"I have found this solution to be easier to use when compared to other products, such as those offered by Cisco."
"From our point of view, the most valuable feature was the ease of deployment."
"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 most valuable features are unified threat management which provides security intelligence and the VPN for both site-to-site and remote access."
"It lets me monitor in live time if someone is 'hogging' bandwidth."
"Good site categorization and application controls."
"The solution is stable."
"The installation is straightforward and took approximately 30 minutes."
"I feel that the reporting needs to be improved."
"Some of the features in the graphical user interface do not work, which requires that we used the command-line-interface."
"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."
"Its filtering is sometimes too precise or strict. We sometimes have to bypass and authorize some of the sites, but they get blocked. We know that they are trusted sites, but they are blocked, and we don't know why."
"The support team for Fortinet FortiGate needs to be more customer friendly."
"They should improve the interface to make it more user-friendly."
"Cisco Meraki products are rising very quickly in the cloud and the connected era. Meraki products offer much better ROI, upgradability, and manageability."
"Bandwidth usage in reporting could be improved for Fortinet FortiGate."
"The Netgate forums and community don’t provide extensive discussions and topics related to every pfSense service."
"It needs better parsing of logs. At the moment, you have to use an external server for this if you want a deeper analysis."
"The hotspot and the portal feature in this solution are not stable for WiFi access. We use it at least once or twice every day and it crashes. Some modules can be better by improving detection and having new updates. Additionally, we have some issues with clustering and load balancing that could improve."
"They could improve their commercial stance and be more agile when it comes to the commercial pricing of enterprise deals."
"We are at the moment looking to use it as a proxy service so that we can limit what websites people go and view and that sort of thing. That's an area I've struggled with a little bit at the moment and it could be a bit easier to set up."
"Other solutions provide more scope for growth. For instance, we can have only 10 to 20 employees on VPN, but other solutions can support more users. We also have more capabilities to increase the performance of the solution."
"The solution could always work at being more secure. It's a good idea to continue to work on security features and capabilities in order to ensure they can keep clients safe."
"I tried pfSense, and it has a big issue with file system consistency, and this is what drove me to OPNsense. The file system stability is quite a big issue for us. We have a lot of outages related to power issues, and OPNsense is much more stable on this side."
"We encounter issues while generating new reports."
"The cost of the solution has room for improvement."
"I would like to see more integration with other platforms."
"I think content filtering is the area this product should improve. It's a little tricky to get put in correctly."
"The log sections could be done more clearly."
"The log analyzer in SonicWall TZ is something that they need to improve upon."
"Although the pricing is good, it could always be lower. If we get to pay less, we're happier."
"If the operation increases and the bandwidth consumption increases, it does not perform as per the expectations."
Netgate pfSense is ranked 1st in Firewalls with 128 reviews while SonicWall TZ is ranked 12th in Firewalls with 78 reviews. Netgate pfSense is rated 8.6, while SonicWall TZ is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Netgate pfSense writes "User-friendly, easy to manage the firewall, rule-wise and interface-wise". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SonicWall TZ writes "Has efficient user access control feature and good technical support services ". Netgate pfSense is most compared with OPNsense, Sophos XG, KerioControl, Sophos UTM and Untangle NG Firewall, whereas SonicWall TZ is most compared with Sophos XG, Meraki MX, SonicWall NSa, WatchGuard Firebox and Cisco Secure Firewall. See our Netgate pfSense vs. SonicWall TZ report.
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Just purchase an anti-spam license and activate it at the SonicWall license portal.
I would like to recommend you SONICWALL HOSTED EMAIL SECURITY ADVANCED. It is more helpful and if you are using Office365 or GSuite, go for SonicWall Cloud App Security.
It is more powerful.
Hi, for SonicWall you buy a license and on the same firewall you can activate the antispam only in the ingress mode.
But there is a catch, at the moment they don't support TLS for SMTP so I would recommend their other solution, that has email security for appliance and virtualized on VMware or Hyper-V.