We performed a comparison between SonicWall NSA and Sophos XG based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Sophos XG’s single pane of glass makes it easy for users to manage the entire solution from anywhere. The solution is very light, stable, and provides excellent real-time control. Many users have experienced stability issues with SonicWall NSa. They feel it can be a bit buggy, resulting in occasional freeze-ups and downtime. The solution does not scale easily.
"The most valuable feature of this solution is Quota."
"FortiGate is flexible and easy to use."
"It is a safe product."
"The most valuable features are simplicity, management, and that it's constantly evolving."
"The most valuable features are that it is very simple to configure and to manage."
"Customers are more inclined towards FortiGate because of application control, web filtering, and anti-spam features. The support from the FortiGate team is good, and price-wise, it is affordable."
"The initial installation is very straightforward."
"The features that prevent internet connections, the filtering are the most valuable because we did not have any internet protection before."
"SonicWall's technical support is very good."
"The filtering is excellent."
"The features I found most valuable are email security and web filtering."
"SD-WAN is a good feature."
"Support is usually good when it comes to helping with issues."
"They offer good antivirus solutions."
"I like that SonicWall NSa is a stable product. It's also a scalable product."
"It has good reporting, the reporting is marvelous."
"I like the dashboard, the interface, the management console, and the remote login."
"The two most valuable feature of Sophos XG is, one the option to filter according to different applications and two, the integration with the Active Directory."
"We've deployed quite a number for our users and our customers, and the feedback is quite positive in terms of management and also administration."
"The stability of Sophos XG is very good. However, there have been some issues with other weaker models because they are limited in hardware in resources."
"I have found the solution easy to use and fully integrated."
"The product's initial setup phase was straightforward."
"The updates are helpful and add to the solution in a positive way."
"In my experience, the solution was easy to use, has lots of features, and is easy to configure."
"Their software support needs improvement. I would prefer to have better support for bug fixes. Sometimes, we open a ticket, and it is very difficult to get a solution. Specifically, we are not at all happy with their support for load balancing."
"Fortinet FortiGate can be integrated with different platforms. They have integrations in place, but I can't say they're 100%."
"The solution could be more secure and stable."
"One area for improvement is the performance on bandwidth demands for smaller devices, as well as better web filtering."
"They should improve the interface to make it more user-friendly."
"I could not configure sFlow from the FortiGate graphical user interface. I realized that the sFlow configuration is available only from the CLI, and discovered that sFlow is not supported on virtual interfaces, such as VDOM links, IPsec, or GRE."
"There are some complex administration tasks in their administration portal. That needs to be improved."
"Fortinet FortiGate needs to improve to be on par with its competitors, such as Palo Alto and Sophos. They are the market leaders. Fortinet FortiGate needs to improve its capabilities. However, we are happy with Fortinet FortiGate."
"In terms of improvement, features like App Control do not work properly"
"The reporting and monitoring are a bit complex and should be easier in SonicWall NSa because other firewalls I have experienced have been more simple, such as Palo Alto. We are able to receive a clear view of our network. As a general user with little experience, it would be difficult for them to handle."
"Vendor support needs improvement. The frequency of time and support should be increased."
"We still get phishing emails that manage to come through from time to time."
"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."
"Port forwarding could use streamlining."
"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."
"The solution can be a bit expensive."
"They made some changes to the firmware update sometime last year, which moved some of the policies from where they were before. Some of the policies, such as NAS policies, were separated, which made it a bit hard for people to trace the policies they had configured."
"The main problem with Sophos XG today is that it doesn't have a feature where you actually know the quality of an international link, which would allow us to we know if the link is operational or not. We need more information. It's losing packets on the network. It's high latency. So, we need more information to know if the link is really bad or really good, and today, we will only know if it's working and this just isn't enough."
"In the Sophos XG, the SD-WAN has all the rules done separately, such as net policy routing. In the previous version, they were all in a single rule and everything was done that way. The way it is now is difficult for us because we are not used to this newer version. The firewall rules should be easier to configure and create. Everything should be done with a single click."
"Even though things work on the back end, we have encountered bugs in the solution."
"There's an IP address delivery for our VPN client and a limited range of IP addresses. So this is a problem in the latest firmware release, but rather than using homework scenarios, we need a lot of VPN clients."
"In the product, the area revolving around SD-WAN has certain shortcomings where improvements are required."
"The interface of Sophos XG could be improved. I would prefer the Sophos XG to have an interface for the technician who is setting it up similar to the Sophos SG. I felt the Sophos SG user interface was superior. however, in terms of the functionality of the product, Sophos XG is in many ways more powerful than the Sophos SG. I have no complaints about the quality of the product or the end result. For someone who has used both, I preferred the old interface to the new one."
"We encounter difficulties while navigating through certain features and functionalities of the product."
SonicWall NSa is ranked 19th in Firewalls with 80 reviews while Sophos XG is ranked 7th in Firewalls with 192 reviews. SonicWall NSa is rated 7.8, while Sophos XG is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of SonicWall NSa writes "Great performance and security with reasonable pricing". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sophos XG writes "Easy to use and deploy with an improved pricing structure in place". SonicWall NSa is most compared with SonicWall TZ, Meraki MX, Cisco Secure Firewall, Netgate pfSense and WatchGuard Firebox, whereas Sophos XG is most compared with Netgate pfSense, OPNsense, Sophos XGS, SonicWall TZ and Untangle NG Firewall. See our SonicWall NSa vs. Sophos XG report.
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