We performed a comparison between Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls 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."In terms of security, we have not experienced any security flaws or loopholes, and it has proven to be quite stable."
"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."
"Good performance, stability, and virtual domain ability."
"The interface is very user-friendly and I like it very much."
"The stability and scalability of this solution are satisfactory. Its SD-WAN, VPN, and URL filtering features are very useful."
"It's an easy solution to set up."
"The product offers very good security."
"With FortiClient, you can easily connect when you are home, check out what you want to do, and connect to your network when you are not at work. You can switch on servers and you can check what is wrong."
"The graphical interface is easy to troubleshoot because it has a drill-down sequence. It is easy to monitor traffic."
"The first time I came across these firewalls, what surprised me the most was their web user interface. It is complete and gives you a lot of information. You can do 80% of the things related to your network and firewall through the web UI. In some of the other devices, the UI is not as complete. App-ID is also very valuable in customer networks. When you're seeing a lot of traffic in your network, you can see in your web UI which users have the applications that are consuming the most bandwidth. You have a broad context, which is very good."
"We utilize advanced threat prevention features like web filtering and SSL decryption, which haven't caused any issues."
"I like the architecture because it separates the management plan process and the data plan process."
"The solution is scalable"
"A feature introduced by Palo Alto with the version 10-OS is embedded machine learning in the core of the firewall to provide inline, real-time attack prevention. Machine learning analyzes the network traffic and detects if there is any usual traffic coming from outside to inside. Because of Palo Alto, organizations detect around 91% of malicious attacks using machine learning. The machine learning helps customers by implementing firewalls in critical and air gap areas so there is no need to integrate with the cloud sandbox."
"The solution is user-friendly. It's secure and easy to understand your network visibility, control the network, and prevent attacks."
"GlobalProtect and App-ID features are very good."
"We use SonicWall NSa for authenticating MAC (media access control) ID from the PC."
"The prices are similar to other vendors and the support is good."
"It is able to fulfill my requirements. It protects our network environment. It has control over IPS, signatures, and it can also manage bandwidth and mapping. It is also stable and has good support."
"We have not found any vulnerabilities since implementing the solution."
"The most valuable feature of SonicWall NSa is the control aspect of the solution."
"SonicWall's sales support is much better than other vendors'."
"SonicWall NSA is easy to deploy, easy to maintain, and easy to configure."
"SD-WAN is a good feature."
"This product could be improved with Active directory integration and better handling in IPsec and GRE Tunnels."
"The stability of Fortinet FortiGate could improve."
"They need to improve their technical support."
"The integration with third-party tools may be something that they should work on."
"MTBF: Hardware failure is more common when compared to SonicWall or Cisco ASA."
"I would like to see better pricing in the next release, as well as a simplification of the installation."
"I have to say that the initial setup was complex. The deployment took a few days to get set up. Initially, we were using an IPVanish. We switched to this tool since we thought it would be easier. But it turns out it wasn't easier to set up and run."
"Pricing for it is a bit high. It could be cheaper."
"There has been a recent change in the graphical interface. For the monitoring part, they could have a better UI."
"The analytics could be improved."
"Based on the features that I have seen so far, I do not see any room for improvement, but they can improve their CLI documentation. I haven't really seen much when it comes to CLI documentation."
"Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls work slowly for vulnerability management. Its performance could be faster."
"Its software updates can be improved. It sometimes becomes very slow with the software updates for different features. It should have an External Dynamic List of data. The malicious IP is not frequently getting updated in Palo Alto, and this should be done."
"The solution could be more cost-effective."
"The price of the solution is very high."
"The scalability compared to other products is not good. You need to change the box whenever you want your number of connection sessions to increase."
"There are a few areas that need improvement including the VPN, user management, and reporting."
"The dynamics needs to be improved. The solution is not very compatible compared to the market products."
"The thing main thing is that there's no user admin and in other firewalls, we can enable the scalable features, but SonicWall doesn't have that feature."
"The detection of malware can improve in SonicWall NSa."
"The user interface could be better."
"Competitors provide SSL encryption licenses for free, whereas SonicWall only provides two licenses by default, but you have to pay for the rest of the licenses."
"SonicWall NSa doesn't have a proxy. It also needs a quota management feature in specific scenarios where you must limit user bandwidth for a particular day."
"SonicWall NSa has occasional bugs, particularly during upgrades, and that's an area for improvement."
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Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is ranked 6th in Firewalls with 162 reviews while SonicWall NSa is ranked 19th in Firewalls with 78 reviews. Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is rated 8.6, while SonicWall NSa is rated 7.8. The top reviewer of Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls writes "We get reports back from WildFire on a minute-by-minute basis". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SonicWall NSa writes "Great performance and security with reasonable pricing". Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is most compared with Check Point NGFW, Azure Firewall, Meraki MX, Sophos XG and Netgate pfSense, whereas SonicWall NSa is most compared with SonicWall TZ, Meraki MX, Sophos XG, Cisco Secure Firewall and Juniper SRX Series Firewall. See our Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls vs. SonicWall NSa report.
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