We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure 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 security fabric is excellent."
"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 initial setup is straightforward."
"Good anti-malware and web filtering features."
"Fortinet FortiGate is user-friendly and affordable."
"The main benefit is the grouping of our security monitoring."
"It's very easy to set up, it's very easy to make policies and, for an organization, that means you don't need IT expert in firewalls. You just need to have somebody who knows a little bit of IT, and that's it. With other products, you need someone with a "Masters" degree in firewalls."
"The most valuable features are the possibility of having one fabric for switching on security."
"An efficient, easy to deploy and dependable firewall solution."
"When I was managing these firewalls, I found them easy to understand, easy to deploy, and easy to maintain as compared to some of the other firewalls I have been involved with earlier. The opinion of my coworkers is that it's easy and quick to establish new zones, expand, and maintain."
"It's quite a capable box for UTM."
"The remote VPN and IPsec VPN or site-to-site VPN features are valuable. The clustering feature is also valuable. We have two ISP links. Whenever there is a failover, users don't even get to know. The transition is very smooth, and the users don't notice any latency. So, remote VPN, site-to-site VPN, and failover are three very powerful features of Cisco ASA."
"We are mostly using it for remote access, so the remote access feature is the most valuable, but all other features are also needed and required. It is also a very straightforward and reliable solution."
"Cisco ASA provides us with very good application visibility and control."
"One thing I like about the product is the logging features, the way it logs, the way it forwards the logs in Syslog."
"All the features except IPS are valuable. IPS is not a part of my job."
"The most valuable feature is the sandbox."
"SonicWall has USCS and anti-virus at the gateway level. Everything is filtered, and if it detects an intruder, it drops the line."
"They offer good antivirus solutions."
"SonicWall NSA is easy to deploy, easy to maintain, and easy to configure."
"SonicWall NS has a lot of valuable features. One of the best SonicWall NSa features is the ability to collect mini routers and get only one user connection."
"Content filtering reduces the load on the available bandwidth and restricts employees from using distracting websites on the job, which leads to more productive hours."
"Our old firewall was running as HA (High Availability) on two different but identical rack mounted servers. Moving to SonicWall allowed the company to move to one unit, yet accommodate more connections because it had sixteen ports and handled fail-over better than the old firewall solution."
"The most valuable aspect of the solution is its ability to work like any other firewall."
"Vulnerability scanning could be improved."
"We had some issues in the beginning while setting it up, but after doing the firmware update, it is working fine."
"In the next release, maybe the documentation on how to use this solution could be improved."
"The setup is pretty complex and not easy to implement."
"The monitor and the visibility, in this proxy, is very weak."
"The UI could be improved."
"Fortinet FortiGate could improve by having more capabilities for troubleshooting VPN connections. For example, I do get some feedback about the current status, but I could use some history and logging of important events. The information is logged in our Syslog server, but I could use that information from the device. If they could provide a GUI to have some more insight on what's going with my VPN would be useful."
"There are some tiny bugs that sometimes affect the operations. In the past revision of it, there was a bug. Because of the bug, we had to downgrade the version. It happened only with the last revision."
"I would like to see them update the GUI so that it doesn't look like it was made in 1995."
"In the next release, I would like to see the VPN and UTM features included."
"Comparing Cisco solution to others, it is expensive, it would be better for it to be cheaper."
"It is my understanding that they are in the process of discontinuing this device."
"The price can be better."
"I would say that in inexperienced hands, the interface can be kind of overwhelming. There are just a lot of options. Too much, if you don't know what you are looking for or trying to do."
"The GUI interface could be improved when compared to other solutions."
"I don't have to see all the object groups that have been created on that firewall. That's just something that I would really appreciate on the CLA, even though it already exists on the GUI."
"It's very hard to manage this box. You really need a lot of skills to operate the SonicWall. There is training and the like, but it's just hard to manage. Even if you have the knowledge, there are too many options. The menus are not very clear, where you should find the information."
"After-sales support and hands-on training facilities are not available in my country."
"It is very modular and with native resources which are much lower than its competitors."
"It is not scalable. If your enterprise is growing hard then you have to buy another, bigger product. Maybe if you use it virtually it is more scalable."
"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."
"Sometimes I found the GUI and some of the features a little bit hard to navigate, as opposed to Fortigate, which is much more user-friendly."
"The scalability is something that should 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."
Cisco Secure Firewall is ranked 4th in Firewalls with 404 reviews while SonicWall NSa is ranked 19th in Firewalls with 77 reviews. Cisco Secure Firewall is rated 8.2, while SonicWall NSa is rated 7.8. The top reviewer of Cisco Secure Firewall writes "Highlights and helps us catch Zero-day vulnerabilities traveling across our network". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SonicWall NSa writes "Great performance and security with reasonable pricing". Cisco Secure Firewall is most compared with Palo Alto Networks WildFire, Netgate pfSense, Meraki MX, Sophos XG and Huawei NGFW, whereas SonicWall NSa is most compared with SonicWall TZ, Meraki MX, Sophos XG, Netgate pfSense and WatchGuard Firebox. See our Cisco Secure Firewall vs. SonicWall NSa report.
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