We performed a comparison between OPNsense 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."Its stability is the most valuable."
"Fortinet FortiGate protects against internet-based threats, both internal and external. It is scalable, stable, easy to use, and easy to install."
"The pricing is excellent. It's much less expensive than Cisco."
"Overall, the pricing of the solution is very good. The product offers good value."
"The feature I like most is the SD-WAN. It allows you to manage more than one ISP at the same time. And there is a high-availability mode, so if one of your ISPs is down, you still have a backup."
"The most valuable features are the policies, filtering, and configuration."
"The email protection and VPN features are the most valuable."
"The GUI is good."
"OPNsense is easy to scale when running on the hardware."
"The DNS-level filtering is impressive for thwarting time scanners."
"The solution is user-friendly and easy to configure."
"The feature I find most valuable, is that the program helped me to realize all the requested functionality that was needed."
"It's open source."
"I find the solution to be user-friendly. It has a lot of reports and easy settings."
"The most valuable feature is the Dual WAN in OPNSense, which offers advanced capabilities."
"The initial implementation process is simple."
"It's very flexible and meets our customer's needs."
"We have not found any vulnerabilities since implementing the solution."
"It's very simple to use and the support is great."
"SonicWall provides endpoint security with advanced protection. Moreover, SonicWall includes access points and additional features."
"The features I found most valuable are email security and web filtering."
"It allows us to block applications, i.e., websites by application type category. It is far more capable than content filtering alone."
"The basic firewall rules of the solution are great."
"Setup is easy. Anyone with basic firewall experience can do it."
"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."
"It can be a little bit more user-friendly in terms of policy definition and implementation. It seems a little bit complicated, and it could be simplified."
"In some cases, its initial setup could be hard for customers."
"I would like to see better pricing in the next release, as well as a simplification of the installation."
"I'm not sure if it's something that they already have or are developing something, however, we need some dedicated features for container security."
"There are some complex administration tasks in their administration portal. That needs to be improved."
"Some features of Fortinet FortiGate are actually fee enabled that are inconvenient for deploying in production. Other issues relate to isolation with Cisco products and your server."
"The pricing could be reduced or include the first year warranty."
"While they do have paid options that actually gives better features, for most of the clients, if they tend to take a paid option will instead opt for Fortinet."
"OPNsense could improve by making the configuration more web-based rather than shell or command-line-based."
"The reporting part could be better."
"The ability to set the VPN IP address would be a welcome addition."
"An area for improvement in OPNsense is the hardware, which needs to be updated more frequently. DNS blocking is another good feature I want to be added to the solution. pfSense has a peer-blocking feature that I also want to see in OPNsense."
"The interface needs to be simplified. It is not user-friendly."
"When using the solution at the beginning was difficult. There was a steep learning curve."
"I think the most important thing is that it should be easily accessible, but currently, that doesn't seem to be the case. We need a hardware platform that's based on common standards and open computing principles, which would be like a commodity and benefit us greatly."
"Having to deal with too many lower-level people in technical support means that it takes longer to resolve issues, so escalating support tickets should be faster."
"The ongoing service fees are high."
"It is very modular and with native resources which are much lower than its competitors."
"The security standards for space and point of view should be improved so that the solution deploys in critical areas."
"We still get phishing emails that manage to come through from time to time."
"The web interface administration of SonicWall NSa could be improved. Compared to Sophos and FortiGate, making rules is easier with those systems."
"Do not even consider NetExtender - probably one of the most horrific, nightmare grade Java-based VPN clients. We have but all given up trying to make it work reliably."
"You can do zero-trust networking with them, but it's not easy."
OPNsense is ranked 3rd in Firewalls with 36 reviews while SonicWall NSa is ranked 19th in Firewalls with 80 reviews. OPNsense is rated 8.4, while SonicWall NSa is rated 7.8. The top reviewer of OPNsense writes "Robust network security and management offering a user-friendly interface, open-source flexibility, and cost-effectiveness, with challenges regarding initial setup and the absence of official support". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SonicWall NSa writes "Great performance and security with reasonable pricing". OPNsense is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Sophos XG, Untangle NG Firewall, Sophos UTM and IPFire, whereas SonicWall NSa is most compared with SonicWall TZ, Meraki MX, Sophos XG, Cisco Secure Firewall and Check Point NGFW. See our OPNsense vs. SonicWall NSa report.
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