We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Firewall and Sonicwall TZ based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Of the two solutions, Sonicwall TZ seems to be the more desirable product because of its easy deployment, great set of features, and affordable price.
"Fortinet FortiGate is a stable solution."
"Fortigate's most valuable feature is that it doesn't need a push policy when writing rules."
"Fortinet FortiGate's ease of management is the most valuable feature."
"The pricing is great and very reasonable."
"The most valuable features are SD-WAN, application control, IPS control, and FortiSandbox."
"It's an easy solution to set up."
"The SD-WAN feature is the most valuable. This feature evolved from link load balancing. It has helped us in terms of our uptime and privatizing applications whenever we experience an outage. The SD-WAN feature has been a plus for us. Two-factor authentication has allowed us to add more users in terms of remote working. We have two-factor authentication for remote workers to authenticate them before they get on the network."
"Fortinet FortiGate is easy to use."
"I have integrated it for incidence response. If there is a security event, the Cisco firewall will automatically block the traffic, which is valuable."
"The most valuable feature for the customers is that they can control what communication is allowed and what is not allowed. That is, they can allow or deny client traffic."
"The setup was straightforward. I was happy with the configuration and deployment of the solution, as it was quick."
"An efficient, easy to deploy and dependable firewall solution."
"The best solutions for our company are those we have yet to implement so it will be even better in the future for us than it already is."
"I like that Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall is reliable. Support is also good."
"It's very stable and mature."
"At this point, we find that this product has high productivity and high availability and there is no need for improvement."
"From our point of view, the most valuable feature was the ease of deployment."
"The most valuable features have been content filtering, and the interface is easy to navigate and to use."
"The solution boasts good performance and is easy to use."
"It is a scalable solution."
"SonicWall TZ think it's a good, solid, and stable product."
"We are very much happy with the support."
"We are able to block whatever we want to block by using this product. It provides all required security features, such as content filtering, VPN, in one box. Before switching to SonicWall, we had specified all required features."
"Once it's configured properly, the solution is unbreakable."
"The improvement is related to logs. Instead of the CLI, we should be able to have more insights into the logs of the firewall in the GUI."
"I don't really have anything negative to say as far as Fortinet firewalls are concerned. If anything, they can support a user a little bit better. They can stop being so time-sensitive about how much time the support call has taken, and they can help you do it yourself."
"They have to just improve its performance when we enable all UTM features. When you enable all the features, the performance of FortiGate, as well as of Sophos and SonicWall, goes down."
"The feedback that I have received is that the performance could be better, and the user experience is not as good compared to a previous solution we used. It could be more user-friendly. Of course, it still works fine for our operations."
"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 pricing could be reduced or include the first year warranty."
"FortiGate is really good. We have been using it for quite some time. Initially, when we started off, we had around 70 plus devices of FortiGate, but then Check Point and Palo Alto took over the place. From the product perspective, there are no issues, but from the account perspective, we have had issues. Fortinet's presence in our company is very less. I don't see any Fortinet account managers talking to us, and that presence has diluted in the last two and a half or three years. We have close to 1,500 firewalls. Out of these, 60% of firewalls are from Palo Alto, and a few firewalls are from Check Point. FortiGate firewalls are very less now. It is not because of the product; it is because of the relationship. I don't think they had a good relationship with us, and there was some kind of disconnect for a very long time. The relationship between their accounts team and my leadership team seems to be the reason for phasing out FortiGate."
"Palo Alto has a feature called WildFire Analysis that is unavailable in FortiGate. WildFire is better than a sandbox because it can address zero-day threats and vulnerabilities. It can immediately identify zero-day threats from the cloud."
"There is room for improvement in the stability or software quality of the product. There were a few things in the past where we had a little bit of a problem with the product, so there is room for improvement."
"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."
"The process of procuring modern-day technology within the DOD needs to improve."
"When we're looking at full-stack visibility, it can be difficult to get the right information out of Firepower."
"When comparing the graphical interface of this solution to other vendors it is more difficult to configure. There is a higher learning curve for administrators in this solution."
"The product line does not address the SMB market as it is supposed to do. Cisco already has an on-premises sandbox solution."
"It would be better if we could manage all of our firewalls as a set rather than individually. I would like to see a single pane of glass type of option. We also use another vendor's firewalls and they have a centralized management infrastructure that we have implemented. This infrastructure is a bit easier to manage."
"Other firewalls, upgrading is a very easy task; from the graphical user interface, you just need to import the firmware versions into it and install it. In this firewall, you need to have a third-party solution in both. It's a process. It's a procedure, a hard procedure, actually, so there is no straightforward procedure for upgrading."
"You need to be a certificate holder to set it up and configure it. It's really important because it looks easy, but it is complex. You need to have the knowledge and experience. But this is normal for technical products. It's not a product for regular user. It's for technical people. You need to have skills."
"The log analyzer in SonicWall TZ is something that they need to improve upon."
"I would like the solution to build in more redundancy. I"
"The user support could be improved because you have to go outside to get that kind of support."
"In general, the company needs to think contingently and integrate more security options."
"It could be made more user friendly."
"In terms of what needs to be improved, I would say better load balancing and data filtering."
"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."
Cisco Secure Firewall is ranked 4th in Firewalls with 404 reviews while SonicWall TZ is ranked 12th in Firewalls with 78 reviews. Cisco Secure Firewall is rated 8.2, while SonicWall TZ is rated 8.0. 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 TZ writes "Has efficient user access control feature and good technical support services ". Cisco Secure Firewall is most compared with Palo Alto Networks WildFire, Netgate pfSense, Meraki MX, Sophos XG and Azure Firewall, whereas SonicWall TZ is most compared with Sophos XG, Netgate pfSense, Meraki MX, SonicWall NSa and OPNsense. See our Cisco Secure Firewall vs. SonicWall TZ report.
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We monitor all Firewalls reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
