We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Firewall and SonicWall NSv 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."It does a lot for you for intrusion protection and as an antivirus. The threat management bundle is worth the money. You don't need another company to monitor your web traffic for you. You can do everything yourself on the firewall. You restrict your own black list for people on the firewall. You don't need to pay some other company for another product to do that for you. The firewall can do that for you. So, it's an easy-to-use product for people to be independent. They don't need to rely on other vendors to do what the firewall can do. They can do everything."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiGate are it is one of the most mature firewalls in the UTM bundle."
"The license management is very valuable. You can get a new license each year, or you can enroll every two to four years. You can get the logs, and you will get the information on the risk in your network and the entire organization. With this information, you can take action on your actives, computers, or devices. You can bring your own device as an SSE."
"The solution has very good threat and content filtering switches."
"There are great templates, so you don't have to customize them if you don't want to. You do have the option to custom create some folders and some reports, however, with what is there, you don't really need to go through extra effort, as they already give you a lot of predefined views of reports and so forth."
"It's very easy to configure."
"The solution is very, very easy to use."
"Offers good security and filtering."
"URL filtering is valuable."
"When it comes to the integration among Cisco tools, we find it easy. It's a very practical integration with other components as well."
"The most valuable feature of the Firepower solution is FireSIGHT, which can be easily managed and is user-friendly."
"The product is quite robust and durable."
"The main thing that I love the most is its policy and objects. Whenever I try to give access to a user, I can create an object via group creation in the object fields. This way, I am not able to enter a user in the policy repeatedly."
"A stable, reliable solution used to protect the network's perimeter."
"One of the most valuable features of Firepower 7.0 is the "live log" type feature called Unified Event Viewer. That view has been really good in helping me get to data faster, decreasing the amount of time it takes to find information, and allowing me to fix problems faster. I've found that to be incredibly valuable because it's a lot easier to get to some points of data now."
"Firepower has reduced our firewall operational costs by about 25 percent."
"We purchased the AGSS Bundle (Advanced Gateway Security Suite) for the security services, such as antivirus, intrusion prevention system, and anti-spyware botnet GUI."
"The product helps improve our security."
"SonicWall NSV is easy to use, and you can use it to manage the logs easily."
"One of the standout features of SonicWall is its simplicity in creating and managing rules."
"The security of this system is fantastic, including the IPS and IDS."
"The solution has no additional charges and no restrictions on the number of users."
"The customization of firewall rules provides great value to our customers as it allows them to lock things up in the way that they desire. When it is used for internal access, with a VPN in place for remote workers, the firewalling services provided by Azure, such as the default services that can be turned on, are applied. However, the use of a software-based virtual firewall gives us greater flexibility in introducing security controls for customers who are publishing applications that are publicly accessible from the public cloud. This virtual firewall provides an additional layer of security and more extensive security control options to ensure the protection of our customers' valuable information and assets."
"Its reporting can be improved. Sometimes, I don't get proper reports."
"If I had any criticism that I would give FortiGate, it would be that they need to stop changing their logging format. Every time we do a firmware upgrade, it is a massive issue on the SIM. Parsers have to be rebuilt. Even the FortiGate guys came in and said that they don't play well in the sandbox."
"We would like to see a better training platform implemented."
"There were quite a few problems with the stability of the system."
"The pricing could always be better."
"FortiOS is not simple."
"We sometimes have issues with FortiGate's routing table in the latest firmware update. We had to downgrade the device because our customers complained about bugs."
"Some features of Fortinet FortiGate are actually fee enabled that are inconvenient for deploying in production. Other issues relate to isolation with Cisco products and your server."
"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."
"One of the problems that we have had is the solution requires Java to work. This has caused some problems with the application visibility and control. When the Java works, it is good, but Java wasn't a good choice. I don't like the Java implementation. It can be difficult to work with sometimes."
"The access layer of this solution could be improved in terms of the way the devices interconnect with our network. We need to be able to analyze the traffic between the different interconnection in these areas."
"The reporting and other features are nice, but there is an issue with applying the configuration. That part needs some improvement."
"Security must be increased when a new user connects over the LAN and an alarm must be generated."
"The solution's deployment is time-consuming, which should be minimized and made more user-friendly for us."
"I think they need to review their whole UI because it feels like it was created by a whole bunch of different teams of developers who didn't fully talk to each other. The net policy screen is just a mess. It should look like the firewall policy screen, and they should both act the same, but they don't. I feel like it's two different buildings or programming, who don't talk to each other, and that really annoys me."
"The license system is also good but it's not very impressive. It's a very regular licensing system. They call it a smart license which means that your device will connect to the internet. This is a little bit of a headache for some customers. It doesn't make the customer happy because most of the customers prefer not to connect their firewall or system to the internet."
"There are limitations to bandwidth management."
"I would like to see the reporting opened up and have several more opportunities for automatic reports."
"It has been brought to our attention by a few customers that they are dissatisfied with the fact that our virtualized service is only offered as a subscription option on the cloud. However, it is worth noting that many other similar services are also offered through a subscription model on the cloud and not through perpetual licensing. It is unclear why these customers would have an issue with this subscription service when so many others are utilizing similar methods."
"SonicWall NSV's SSL VPN could increase its number of users to 100-plus users."
"An area that could be improved is the export and import settings functionality."
"We face some challenges when we upgrade the solution."
"SonicWall NSV's initial setup is complicated and requires good knowledge."
Cisco Secure Firewall is ranked 4th in Firewalls with 404 reviews while SonicWall NSv is ranked 35th in Firewalls with 7 reviews. Cisco Secure Firewall is rated 8.2, while SonicWall NSv 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 NSv writes "Easy to use, stable, and the security features work well". Cisco Secure Firewall is most compared with Palo Alto Networks WildFire, Netgate pfSense, Meraki MX, Sophos XG and Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, whereas SonicWall NSv is most compared with Azure Firewall, SonicWall NSa, SonicWall TZ and Fortinet FortiGate-VM. See our Cisco Secure Firewall vs. SonicWall NSv report.
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