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.
"The most valuable feature of Fortinet FortiGate is security. They are known for efficiency and are on the top of Gartner Quadrant reviews. Fortinet FortiGate has an easy-to-use platform with a good graphical interface. The configuration is simple and the solution provides an overall good layer of security."
"A strong point of FortiGate is the graphical interface is complete and easy to use."
"FortiGate has a strong security topic which allows all of the Fortinet devices to communicate and share information which makes their security more powerful."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiGate are the ability to work in proxy mode, which other solutions, such as Palo Alto cannot. There are some features that are better that come at no extra license or subscriptions cost, such as basic SD-WAN. The DLT is useful, other solutions have the same feature too, such as Palo Alto."
"The most valuable feature is the policy routing and application control."
"I like that they have given me a solution at a fair price."
"This is a quality product with ok support, and it is better than the competition we've tried."
"The most valuable features of the solution are SD-WAN, filtering testing applications, web filtering, and the new VPN."
"One of the nice things about Firepower is that you can set it to discover the environment. If that is happening, then Firepower is learning about every device, software operating system, and application running inside or across your environment. Then, you can leverage the discovery intelligence to get Firepower to select the most appropriate intrusion prevention rules to use for your environment rather than picking one of the base policies that might have 50,000 IPS rules in it, which can put a lot of overhead on your firewall. If you choose the recommendations, as long as you update them regularly, you might be able to get your rule set down to only 1,000 or 1,500, which is a significant reduction in a base rule set. This means that the firewall will give you better performance because there are less rules being checked unnecessarily. That is really useful."
"They are easy to maintain."
"I like them mostly because they don't break and they have great diagnostics."
"It's got the capabilities of amassing a lot of throughput with remote access and VPNs."
"The web interface was easy for me. The configuration is logical, so it's easy to use and easy to understand how to protect, how to open a port, how to manage and how to route a device. That's why I prefer Cisco. It's robust and I never have issues with the hardware. That's why I choose Cisco and not another vendor."
"Cisco ASA NGFW significantly improves our bank. It protects any high-value products that we use from hackers, viruses, malware, and script-bots. It gives us metrics on network traffic as well as what kind of attacks we are getting from the outside."
"Its efficiency and security are the most important. We are more efficient and more secure."
"The feature set is fine and is rarely a problem."
"It's a stable solution."
"It is a scalable solution."
"It does what it says it is going to do."
"The most valuable feature is content filtering and app control."
"It lets me monitor in live time if someone is 'hogging' bandwidth."
"It is very user-friendly, and there is no problem in using its interface."
"SonicWall TZ is a very cost-effective solution that provides good security."
"We like their interface very much. It's pretty easy to use."
"Maybe they could make some features more accessible, such as a way to translate directions between two networks that share the same subnets."
"I use the FortiGate 60D model and realized the 300Mbps bandwidth limitation. Because it is a product that offers many services, I think it could have greater bandwidth capacity."
"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."
"It is stable, but its stability can be improved."
"I don't like that anything more than very basic reporting is not included."
"We would like to see better pricing."
"Fortinet FortiGate is not very easy to use. The navigation could be improved to make it easier to use."
"Scalability for Fortinet FortiGate needs to be improved. SD-WAN security for this solution also needs some improvement."
"I have worked with the new FTD models and they have more features than the ASA line."
"Cisco ASA is starting to get old and Firepower is taking over. All the good things happening are with Firepower."
"In my experience, a number of engineers get tunnel vision with devices. This is exacerbated by vendors fostering a silo mentality in disciplines."
"When comparing the graphical interface of this solution to other vendors it is more difficult to configure. There is a higher learning curve for administrators in this solution."
"It's not unexpected, but it's a common scenario where customers request dual layers of security. For instance, when dealing with regulatory compliance, especially in financial sectors regulated by entities like the Central Bank, having two distinct units is often mandated. If a client predominantly uses a solution like Palo Alto, they may need to incorporate another vendor such as Cisco or Forti. Importantly, there's a significant disparity in interfaces and management platforms between these vendors, necessitating careful consideration when integrating them into the overall security architecture"
"An area of improvement for this solution is the console visualization."
"There was an error in the configuration, related to our uplink switches, that caused us to contact technical support, and it took a very long time to resolve the issue."
"The annual subscription cost is a bit high. They should try to make it comparable to other offerings. We have a number of Chinese products here in Pakistan, which are already, very cheap and have less annual maintenance costs compared to Cisco."
"I currently have two of the issues from SonicWall. One issue is that the IP is not the public IP. Sometimes it moves to an alternate source and I have to refresh the new IP then we can go on."
"The VPN that is available in the new version is a bit bulky and slower in speed."
"The stability could be a lot better."
"The areas we would like to see improvement include more features available similar to the equivalent FortiGate appliance, e.g. SSL encryption and inspection. Two-factor authentication capability would be another additional feature that could be included in the next release."
"The solution's cost needs improvement."
"There can be an improvement in analysis and reporting. We need enhancement on the reporting side."
"The market seems to be going to a cloud-supported, new generation of firewall products. I think that's probably going to be important to us, the next time around."
"I would like to see a SonicWall integration with the DLP tool, this would be interesting. Data Loss Prevention integration."
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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We monitor all Firewalls reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
