We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Firewall and Sonicwall TZ based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Of the two solutions, Sonicwall TZ seems to be the more desirable product because of its easy deployment, great set of features, and affordable price.
"UTM/NGFW features and FortiCloud for logs and backups are awesome."
"One of the valuable features is a standardized OS."
"The features that I have found most valuable are the SD-WAN and their IP4 policy."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiGate are remote access, web filtering, and IPS."
"Advanced routing (RIP, OSPF, BGP, PBR). It gives you a seamless and simple integration into a large network."
"It is a safe product."
"The GUI is good."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is Quota."
"The dashboard is the most important thing. It provides good visibility and makes management easy. Firepower also provides us with good application visibility and control."
"It protects our network."
"The whole firewall functionality, including firewall policies and IPS policies, is valuable. It has all kinds of functionalities. It has IPS, VPN, and other features. They are doing quite a lot of stuff with their devices."
"Sourcefire has been a great addition. The visibility and control have been nice."
"The most valuable features are the provision of internet access, AnyConnect, and VPN capabilities."
"One of the most valuable features is the GUI front end, which is very easy to use. But I'm also a command-line guy, and being able to access the device via command-line for advanced troubleshooting is quite important."
"Its ability to discover attacks is a valuable feature. All of the other features that have to do with security are good."
"The integration of network and workload micro-segmentation helps a lot to provide unified segmentation policies across east-west and north-south traffic. One concrete example is with Cisco ACI for the data center. Not only are we doing what is called a service graph on the ACI to make sure that we can filter traffic east-west between two endpoints in the same network, but when we go north-south or east-west, we can then leverage what we have on the network with SGTs on Cisco ISE. Once you build your matrix, it is very easy to filter in and out on east-west or north-south traffic."
"SonicWall TZ is a stable product."
"We use the content filter quite a lot because it's an office setting. During working hours, we like to censor the sites users can visit so it increases productivity. Therefore, the content filter has been good for us."
"I have found the stability of this product to be excellent."
"The most valuable feature is the user-friendly navigation."
"From our point of view, the most valuable feature was the ease of deployment."
"The feature we found most valuable in SonicWall TZ is that it is user-friendly for an administrator."
"The site-to-site VPN connections, content filtering, and in our current remote working situation, SSL VPN remote desktop connectivity are the most valuable features."
"SonicWall TZ is a very cost-effective solution that provides good security."
"At first glance, the interface for the device is very confusing."
"When we cluster the two Fortinet FortiGate boxes together we have some issues."
"The command line is complicated, and the interface could be better."
"The pricing could always be better."
"With FortiGate, the main complaint that I have heard is about the technical support."
"Reporting is limited to providing an external appliance for improving the reporting capabilities of the FortiAnalyzer. It does not offer a central management and is also sold separably as an appliance."
"Technical support for this solution can be improved."
"The captive portal could be improved."
"Setting firewall network rules should be more straightforward with a clearer graphical representation. The rule-setting method seems old-fashioned. The firewall and network rules are separate from the Firepower and web access rules."
"The pricing is a bit high."
"I would like more features in conjunction with other solutions, like Fortinet."
"Cisco provides us with application visibility and control, although it's not a complete solution compared to other vendors. Cisco needs to work on the application behavior side of things, in particular when it comes to the behavior of SSL traffic."
"Migration with other appliances is not easy. It has to be done manually, and this takes a long time."
"We see a lot of vendors in the market with a lot of niche products. I understand that it's difficult to cover everything, but making it more open for integration with other vendors would be a value add for Cisco."
"It is slowly not supported and other vendors are a few years ahead of Cisco in development."
"Critical bugs need to be addressed before releasing the version."
"There can be an improvement in analysis and reporting. We need enhancement on the reporting side."
"Full monitoring obviously needs to be improved. We need full monitoring covered under the security licensing."
"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 reporting analytics could be improved, it is very unstable."
"The small business line has less PPS throughput."
"The solution has lost the trust of its customers because of moving from one company to another."
"The solution should provide some additional ports."
"We encounter issues while generating new reports."
Cisco Secure Firewall is ranked 4th in Firewalls with 404 reviews while SonicWall TZ is ranked 12th in Firewalls with 78 reviews. Cisco Secure Firewall is rated 8.2, while SonicWall TZ is rated 8.0. 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 TZ writes "Has efficient user access control feature and good technical support services ". Cisco Secure Firewall is most compared with Palo Alto Networks WildFire, Netgate pfSense, Meraki MX, Sophos XG and Azure Firewall, whereas SonicWall TZ is most compared with Sophos XG, Netgate pfSense, Meraki MX, SonicWall NSa and WatchGuard Firebox. See our Cisco Secure Firewall vs. SonicWall TZ report.
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