We performed a comparison between Check Point NGFW and SonicWall TZ based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Features: Check Point NGFW is highly regarded for its extensive security features, centralized management, and virtualization capabilities. SonicWall TZ distinguishes itself with its unified threat management, VPN capabilities, web security, and intuitive interface.
Check Point NGFW needs improvements in integration with other infrastructures, hardware upgrades, cost and pricing perspective, stability and security, setup process, load balancing capabilities, technical support, and reporting capabilities. SonicWall TZ requires improvements in rated throughput, secondary DNS hosting, cloud management, user interface, integration and flexibility, marketing and branding, reporting and licensing, additional ports, GSM and Sonic Analyzer features, advanced features and pricing, load balancing and data filtering, DLP integration, reporting analytics and user support, affordability and competition, and support and automation.
Service and Support: The feedback on Check Point NGFW's customer service varies, with some customers appreciating its helpful and responsive nature, while others believe there is room for improvement. SonicWall TZ's support is deemed satisfactory, although there have been instances of language difficulties and delays in assistance.
Ease of Deployment: The setup process for Check Point NGFW can be complex and may require specialized knowledge and experience for certain configurations and migrations. The initial setup for SonicWall TZ is described as simple, direct, and user-friendly, with a seamless out-of-the-box experience.
Pricing: Based on the feedback, Check Point NGFW is known for its high setup cost, however, it provides flexible licensing options. SonicWall TZ has mixed reviews regarding its pricing and setup cost. That said, it is considered fairly priced for medium-sized companies. There are extra fees associated with its cloud management capabilities.
Comparison Results: Check Point NGFW is the preferred product over SonicWall TZ. Users appreciate Check Point NGFW's comprehensive security features, centralized management, virtualization capabilities, stability, ease of use, and scalability. They also value its ability to protect against next-generation attacks and its strong security features. Users consider the customer service and support for Check Point NGFW to be superior.
"UTM/NGFW features and FortiCloud for logs and backups are awesome."
"The solution is highly scalable because they have devices that can handle a large amount of traffic."
"Whenever we raise a complaint with FortiGate, their response and resolution times are minimal."
"The solution has very good threat and content filtering switches."
"Our project needs to link two sides through the internet. One of these was in Cairo and the other in another city. We used FortiGate as the integrating solution between the two locations, i.e. the Fortinet 30E & 100E."
"Reliability is the best feature. We faced some issues when we were setting it up, but the service, portal, and administration are good."
"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."
"FortiGate improved our security. It's one of the best hardware firewalls."
"The information stored in the logs is very descriptive and includes a lot of details."
"We have found the central management (Smart Console) to be very helpful in managing all the firewalls and keeping the software/hotfix versions up to date."
"The separate management feature of Check Point NGFW is very convenient."
"I was impressed by how easy it was to activate blades and implement them on a security gateway, with the process taking less than five minutes."
"The documentation is simple to understand and is easily available."
"The activation of additional features is very easy and well documented."
"Even though Check Point NGFW provides a set of security features that enforce protection on the network, the most valuable aspect is also the most used feature: the plain and simple firewall component. This is the core of the product and works to a great extent without the need for all other available bells and whistles."
"I haven't had any data leaks or vulnerability situations."
"The most valuable feature is the user-friendly navigation."
"The solution is priced fairly and competitively."
"The VPN is quite useful for us, as well as the ATP."
"They give good protection to my network and support it."
"It does what it says it is going to do."
"The solution is stable."
"Good site categorization and application controls."
"It protects against intrusion while allowing needed access."
"The biggest "gotcha" is that if the client purchases what they call the UTM shared bundle, which has unified threat management on both, it's not as easy to manage if you have more than one firewall."
"Fortinet FortiGate can be integrated with different platforms. They have integrations in place, but I can't say they're 100%."
"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."
"I need user-behavior analytics, to find threat scenarios from inside the organization, insider attacks. That would be very helpful for us. In addition, I would like next-generation features for small and medium businesses. These businesses require UTM, all in one product. Fortinet must include it."
"Technical support for this solution can be improved."
"We had a minor problem where there was a major system upgrade on the hardware platfrom and the Mac client was not available as soon as it might have been. The PC client was available immediately, but we had to wait a month or so, before there was a mac client. I was slightly irritated that it was not ready on time, but it was eventually resolved."
"It should have a better pricing plan. It is too expensive. It should also have a more granular view of the attack. I don't have FortiAnalyzer, and it is difficult for me to have a complete view when there is an attack on my server."
"There are some cloud-based features that could be much more flexible than they currently are."
"Several security modules are based on HTTPS inspection, losing a relevant security capability if you don't implement it in your network."
"The pricing could be better."
"It depends whether the problem is known to Check Point. If they are aware there is a problem, quite often it will then depend on which tech you finally land on if it's easier or harder to get to the root cause. The last issue was in India so that was pretty bad. It's easier if you get directly through to Tel Aviv or Ottawa, but you can't choose. Once they know what the issue is, it's pretty good. It pretty much depends on the engineer that you get. There are pretty good engineers and there are many engineers who are at just the starter level at Check Point who are not really into the stuff. Sometimes it's hard, sometimes it's easy, depending on the problem and the tech engineer you get."
"With the version we're on, it's a bit time-consuming if you have multiple IP addresses to add. But in the later versions, which we're moving to, it makes it a lot easier to add IP addresses with dynamic objects, as they call it."
"In terms of what could be improved, I would say the application control and the visibility. I'd like granularity where you can have all the levels of policies that are defined, including the intel threat. It depends on what kind of intel threat the company has."
"In the past year, we faced severe downtime that lasted many days due to a misconfiguration."
"Error logs can be more specific."
"The perimeter antivirus can be improved. It's not as good as other leaders."
"The monitoring is a little bit confusing."
"Sometimes there is a glitch between the network connection. Last time, something happened on our IP phone, the SonicWall team did some updates to fix the issue. However, glitches happen very rarely. I did not experience any other types of problems."
"The solution should provide some additional ports."
"The lack of support is having me look into other solutions to replace SonicWALL."
"Although the pricing is good, it could always be lower. If we get to pay less, we're happier."
"GUI interface could be improved."
"I would like the solution to build in more redundancy. I"
"There can be an improvement in analysis and reporting. We need enhancement on the reporting side."
Check Point NGFW is ranked 5th in Firewalls with 275 reviews while SonicWall TZ is ranked 12th in Firewalls with 78 reviews. Check Point NGFW is rated 8.8, while SonicWall TZ is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Check Point NGFW writes "Good antivirus protection and URL filtering with very good user identification capabilities". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SonicWall TZ writes "Has efficient user access control feature and good technical support services ". Check Point NGFW is most compared with Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Sophos XG, Cisco Secure Firewall, Netgate pfSense and Azure Firewall, whereas SonicWall TZ is most compared with Sophos XG, Netgate pfSense, Meraki MX, SonicWall NSa and WatchGuard Firebox. See our Check Point NGFW vs. SonicWall TZ report.
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