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 inspection and web security features are most valuable."
"You can purchase switches and you don't need to do anything with them. You just put in the firewall and the switches get all the policies and rules that you already have in the firewall. With Fortinet, you just connect the FortiSwitch to the Fortinet and that's it."
"The GUI is good."
"It enables our organization to become more productive. Also, it protects our NEtWare from viruses and malware."
"The pricing is excellent. It's much less expensive than Cisco."
"The reporting and monitoring are very good."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"Its user interface is good, and it is always working fine."
"I like that it is easy to change the settings."
"The primary benefits of using Cisco Secure solutions are time-saving, a robust API, and convenience for the security team."
"If you compare the ASA and the FirePOWER, the best feature with FirePOWER is easy to use GUI. It has most of the same functionality in the Next-Generation FirePOWER, such as IPS, IPS policies, security intelligence, and integration and identification of all the devices or hardware you have in your network. Additionally, this solution is user-friendly."
"To be honest, all of the features that are provided, all the other vendor will also have. One feature we did find valuable was the CLI, it is more accurate. Additionally, I was happy with the customization, dashboards, access lists and interface."
"The architecture of FTD is great because it has an in-depth coverage and because it uses the AVC, (Application, Visibility, and Control) and also rate limits. Also, the architecture of fast paths is great."
"The most valuable feature we have found to be the VPN because we use it often."
"A stable and solid solution for protection from external threats and for VPN connections."
"It just works for us."
"It is very stable with no issues. The firewall's been up for the past 35 days non-stop. It's performed great. It has performed as it should perform."
"SonicWall TZ is a very cost-effective solution that provides good security."
"User-friendly firewall solution which scales well, is stable, and has high availability."
"SonicWall TZ is very user-friendly and has network MAC binding. Additionally, the firewall works well."
"I've found the technical support to be helpful."
"The installation is straightforward and took approximately 30 minutes."
"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."
"It is a scalable solution."
"Its reporting capabilities can be improved. It should have some out-of-the-box reporting capabilities and some degree of customization. The basic reporting that it currently has is not sufficient to create more usable reports. It needs some sort of out-of-the-box reporting. They try to make customers purchase FortiAnalyzer for this kind of reporting, which is an additional cost. Other firewall vendors, such as SonicWall and Sophos, provide this sort of reporting without any additional cost."
"The command line is complicated, and the interface could be better."
"At first glance, the interface for the device is very confusing."
"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."
"Improvement is needed in the Web Filter quotas to restrict users with allocated quotas."
"In the future, I would like to see improvements made to cloud-based management."
"I need user-behavior analytics, to find threat scenarios from inside the organization, insider attacks. That would be very helpful for us. In addition, I would like next-generation features for small and medium businesses. These businesses require UTM, all in one product. Fortinet must include it."
"You do need some IT knowledge in order to effectively work with the solution."
"You need to have a little bit of knowledge to be able to configure it. Otherwise, it would be very difficult to configure because there is no GUI. The latest software available in the market has a GUI and probably zero-touch provisioning and auto-configuration. All these things are not available in our version. You need to manually go and configure everything in the switch. In terms of new features, we would definitely want to have URL-based filtering, traffic steering, and probably a little bit steering in the bandwidth based on the per-user level and per-user group. We will definitely need some of these features in the near future."
"It can probably provide a holistic view of different appliances because many customers do not have only one brand, besides the traditional SNMP protocols, to cover all their devices. There are some specific requirements in terms of configurations or actions that sometimes have to be done in a very manual way because of the different versions or brands in a customer's infrastructure. It could also have some additional analytics capabilities. It has some very interesting ways to monitor the traffic and identify false positives from the architecture and the environment. It would be good if there is a way to patch with some other industry-specific solutions and synchronize some of the information, such as what other customers experience in their operations and probably share some additional information that could be leveraged or shared among the industry. Such information would be something interesting to see. It could have AI capabilities related to how the appliances could benefit from learning the current environment and different exposures."
"I would like to see the inclusion of a protocol that can be used to protect databases."
"This solution could be more granular and user-friendly."
"Make the IPS baked-in."
"There used to be information displayed about the packets in a module called Packet Flow, but it is no longer there."
"The cost is very high. Most organizations cannot afford it."
"The solution has not had any layer upgrades. It does not have layer five and upwards, it only has up to layer four. This has caused some problems for us."
"The cost of the solution has room for improvement."
"You need to be a certificate holder to set it up and configure it. It's really important because it looks easy, but it is complex. You need to have the knowledge and experience. But this is normal for technical products. It's not a product for regular user. It's for technical people. You need to have skills."
"Support for SonicWall TZ needs improvement, particularly the time it takes before you're able to speak to a support person, e.g. you have to wait for at least 30 minutes on the phone."
"The solution should provide some additional ports."
"The log analyzer in SonicWall TZ is something that they need to improve upon."
"The technical support has room for improvement."
"We encounter issues while generating new reports."
"The stability could be a lot better."
Cisco Secure Firewall is ranked 4th in Firewalls with 112 reviews while SonicWall TZ is ranked 11th in Firewalls with 19 reviews. Cisco Secure Firewall is rated 8.2, while SonicWall TZ is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Cisco Secure Firewall writes "Includes multiple tools that help manage and troubleshoot, but needs SD-WAN for load balancing". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SonicWall TZ writes "Highly acceptable on a small scale, straightforward out the box installation, with a good price point". 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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