We performed a comparison between Azure 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."The flexibility and ease of configuration are the most valuable features."
"Unified Threat Management (UTM) features."
"The most valuable feature of Fortinet FortiGate is URL filtering."
"The next-gen features, the unified threat management capabilities are something that just about everybody is interested in at this point."
"Secure, user-friendly, stable, and scalable network security solution. Installation is straightforward."
"Some of the key features of the solution is that it has good reporting, you can receive many details from the connection, for example, clients and website information."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiGate are the ability to work in proxy mode, which other solutions, such as Palo Alto cannot. There are some features that are better that come at no extra license or subscriptions cost, such as basic SD-WAN. The DLT is useful, other solutions have the same feature too, such as Palo Alto."
"The most valuable feature of FortiGate is FortiView which provides proactive monitoring."
"I think that one of the best features is definitely the premium version, along with the IDPs in terms of the intrusion detection and prevention system."
"The most valuable feature is the integration into the overall cloud platform."
"It provided ease of maintenance. If a new firewall was needed, we only had to run the pipelines for this. So, the maintenance was very easy."
"It's auto-scalable, which is a great feature."
"One of the notable advantages of Azure Firewall is its user-friendly interface, which closely resembles or shares similarities with other Azure components."
"Performance and stability are the key features of this product."
"I can easily configure it."
"One of the best features is that it natively integrates with Azure Services and tools. When you have a third-party offering, that is not the case. But Azure Firewall provides a comprehensive and seamless security solution for your Azure resources."
"The features that I have found most valuable are the firewalling, which is very good and the GUI which is very intuitive. It is easy to use, and provides great security."
"It's very simple to use and the support is great."
"The most valuable feature of SonicWall NSa is the control aspect of the solution."
"The solution can scale."
"I really like the performance; there are no delays and no latency, which is a unique quality in firewalls nowadays."
"The product is simple to manage."
"Easy to setup and implement"
"We have utilized all the features. The most valuable are the URL filtering by category, DMZ zoning, load balancing and site-to-site VPN."
"I think the only issue that needs improvement is the interface."
"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."
"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."
"For the migration, everyone has a firewall in use and I am selling Fortinet. Typically, I am replacing another firewall. Previously, there was a tool available to convert configurations from one firewall, such as Palo Alto, to Fortinet, but this tool is no longer free. If it could be made free again, it would be very beneficial."
"The support is the main thing that needs to be improved."
"It is quite new for us, and we need to go more in-depth into the monitoring tools. It provides different features that we need to do what we want. So far, it is okay for us. In terms of improvement, in the future, they can provide a faster implementation of features. Some of the features are first available in other solutions. Fortinet sometimes takes a little bit longer than other solutions, such as Check Point, to implement new features."
"The security of Fortinet FortiGate could improve."
"I think they need to improve more in order to be a competitor with the leaders of the field."
"The solution lacks artificial intelligence and machine learning. It might be in the roadmap. However, currently, it's not available."
"Currently, it only supports IP addresses, so you have to be specific about the IPs that are in your environment."
"It needs a lot of improvement, especially on intruder detection. They are working hard on that."
"Right now, with Azure Firewall, we cannot have a normal inbound traffic flow. For inbound, Microsoft suggests using application gateways, so the options are very limited. I cannot use this firewall as an intermediate firewall because of the limitations, and I cannot point routing to another firewall. So if I want to use back-to-back firewall architecture in my environment, I cannot use Azure Firewall for that type of configuration either."
"It has fewer features than you can get from other firewalls, like anti-spam and anti-phishing. Those kinds of things are not included. It only includes IDS and IDB."
"The threat intelligence aspect of this particular firewall is not at par with other providers."
"There is room for further integration of AI into the system."
"It is a cloud service, but the lending speed for each region is not always the same. For example, in China, the speed is slow. They need to think about how to make sure that the service pace or speed is always the same in all regions. It would be a great improvement if they can provide the same pace worldwide."
"The product likely isn't a good fit for a large organization."
"The user interface could be better."
"It would be useful to have an application firewall that prevents the outside world from seeing your private IPs. You don't need to publicize your private IPs to the outside world, and you can create a barrier, like a proxy server."
"The content ID needs to be improved."
"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."
"The reporting feature could be better because most of the companies want to have the analytics included, which is something that you have to buy separately."
"It only has a single power interface, which has limitations in terms of high availability."
"We have security as a service, and they make recommendations about adding to the denylist and other things. That part could be more accessible and more user-friendly. I'd like to see SonicWall add a user-friendly interface where our internal team can drag and drop everything."
Azure Firewall is ranked 21st in Firewalls with 33 reviews while SonicWall NSa is ranked 19th in Firewalls with 80 reviews. Azure Firewall is rated 7.2, while SonicWall NSa is rated 7.8. The top reviewer of Azure Firewall writes "Easy to use and configure but could be more robust". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SonicWall NSa writes "Great performance and security with reasonable pricing". Azure Firewall is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate-VM, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Palo Alto Networks VM-Series and Check Point NGFW, whereas SonicWall NSa is most compared with SonicWall TZ, Meraki MX, Sophos XG, Cisco Secure Firewall and Netgate pfSense. See our Azure Firewall vs. SonicWall NSa report.
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