We compared SonicWall TZ and WatchGuard Firebox across several parameters based on our users' reviews. After reading the collected data, you can find our conclusion below:
Comparison Results: SonicWall TZ is highly praised for its user-friendly interface, robust features, and cost-effectiveness. However, there are areas that need improvement such as reporting, licensing, scalability, and support. On the other hand, WatchGuard Firebox is commended for its comprehensive features, ease of use, and reasonable pricing. However, it also has areas that need improvement including the interface, web blocker feature, reporting, customer support, security, configuration options, scalability, and integration.
"The integration with Active Directory is one of the good features. Most of the customers are now looking for the Single Sign-on feature. So, being able to integrate Active Directory with the firewall is useful. It is also easy."
"I have found Fortinet FortiGate to be scalable."
"The CLI and GUI do a good job of putting a lot at your fingertips."
"The solution has very good threat and content filtering switches."
"We are using the FortiGate 100D series. VPN, firewall, anti-malware, OTM, and intrusion prevention are useful features."
"Whenever I need something, Fortinet improves and updates the software for me."
"Layer-3 firewall and routing are the most valuable features."
"The product is easy to use and is stable. The SV1 functionality is a benefit."
"It protects against intrusion while allowing needed access."
"Ease of management and the VPN integration."
"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."
"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."
"It's been very easy to implement and deploy."
"I like the firewall product, the security server, and the content filter."
"The most valuable features are security and technical support."
"Once it's configured properly, the solution is unbreakable."
"The client is easy to use and stable"
"The solution has a useful traffic monitor."
"The set up of the VPN is pretty straightforward. Being able to build VPNs on the fly for certain users, if need be, is also valuable."
"The most valuable features of this solution are live logging, rule setup and maintenance, and VPN creation."
"It's pretty simple to understand when you want to do any diagnostics on your network. If you want to go in and see what packages are having trouble getting through, what's being held, stalled, etc., it's very easy to use in that way."
"It has everything we need in terms of functionality."
"It protects me against malicious websites, as well as malicious downloads, as a perimeter anti-virus. I've also seen it blocking a lot of pings and different probes."
"They've done a lot of work with their SD-WAN, which we do use, to have our old internet service with our new internet service. If anything goes down on a particular interface, I can have different rules applied. Most of my users don't even know when our primary internet goes down anymore... I don't have to be here to do anything to switch it to our backup internet or to switch it back."
"I would like to see improvements with the antivirus and IPS as they are not working properly all the time."
"The room for improvement is about the global delivery time period. Usually I need to wait for almost one month to deliver it overseas. So if you can shorten the deliver time it'd be great."
"I would suggest that Fortinet add sandboxing to their solution."
"I think the only issue that needs improvement is the interface."
"A couple of things I've seen that need improvement, especially in terms of a hard coding. The driver-level active moment really is out-of-the-box and we have to have contact the customer support and sometimes it is difficult to resolve."
"It should be more stable. There should be full integration within Fortinet products themselves as well as with other third-party products. Especially when you're not dealing with SIEM and the correlation of the security box, we want Fortinet to be able to share that information with as many other products as it can."
"Web security solutions can be improved."
"We would like to see better pricing."
"The solution must provide more ports."
"The stability could be a lot better."
"Its reporting can be improved. Currently, we cannot directly get the user names. It only shows the IP, which makes it a bit confusing because we need to use the IP to find the user. If we could directly get the name of the user, it would be better."
"Pricing could be lowered slightly."
"The solution's pricing could be made cheaper."
"Its pricing can be better. It is very expensive."
"In general, the company needs to think contingently and integrate more security options."
"I would like to see lower antivirus pricing."
"I would like to see more simplified management of the firewall... It's a complicated system to use."
"In terms of what could be improved, I would say their web blocker feature. It is still quite a confusing setup, especially when you want to filter out a particular category for granularity. For example, you do not want to filter Facebook but you do want to filter Facebook games only. It can be done, but the process to do it is very confusing."
"The solution is lacking a professional website, they should be updated more often."
"The UI is not as user-friendly as the model that I had used before, which was from Check Point. The design of the Firebox UI is restricted and needs an experienced network guy to understand the format and settings."
"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."
"We use WatchGuard to manage our failover for internet. If a primary internet goes down, it does a failover to the secondary the internet. However, what it doesn't do so well is that if the primary internet has a lot of latency but it's not completely down, it doesn't do a failover to the backup in a timely manner."
"There is room for improvement on the education side, regarding what does what, rather than just throwing it at a person and assuming they know everything about it. A lot of times, you have to call WatchGuard support to get the solution that will work, rather than their just having it published so that you can fix the problem on your own."
"A 12-hour power outage... got our batteries."
SonicWall TZ is ranked 12th in Firewalls with 78 reviews while WatchGuard Firebox is ranked 13th in Firewalls with 79 reviews. SonicWall TZ is rated 8.0, while WatchGuard Firebox is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of SonicWall TZ writes "Has efficient user access control feature and good technical support services ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of WatchGuard Firebox writes "Offers a streamlined deployment, intuitive interface and robust security features". SonicWall TZ is most compared with Sophos XG, Netgate pfSense, Meraki MX, SonicWall NSa and Cisco Secure Firewall, whereas WatchGuard Firebox is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Sophos XG, OPNsense, Meraki MX and Cisco Secure Firewall. See our SonicWall TZ vs. WatchGuard Firebox report.
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