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.
"Anti-Spam web content filterinG."
"Using this product makes the VPN seamless and almost invisible to me in the sense that I don't have to think about it."
"The customization potential is quite impressive."
"We use a lot of function on the IPS and it works well for us."
"We purchased Fortinet because of the pricing, its functionality, because it met our requirements, and the total cost of ownership over five years was quite reasonable. In the market, Fortinet is rated quite well."
"It is a one box solution, which covers most of the edge device’s requirements."
"The web filtering facility and application control are the most valuable features from the point of view of our clients. The VPN feature is also quite popular amongst our clients. Two-factor authentication is one of the good features in Fortinet. These features are important for the current scenario of security. Security has become a necessity nowadays. With cyber-attacks becoming more common, protecting an organization's data is one of the major tasks. It is also very stable and scalable, and it is very straightforward to configure. Their technical support is also good."
"We've found the solution to be pretty stable."
"The clusters in data centers are great."
"Network segmentation is the most valuable feature."
"Clustering architecture which offers zero downtime upgrades, keeping uptime close to 99.999%."
"ASA integrates with FirePOWER, IPS functionality, malware filtering, etc. This functionality wasn't there in the past. With its cloud architecture, Cisco can filter traffic at the engine layer. Evasive encryptions can be entered into the application, like BitTorrent or Skype. This wasn't possible to control through a traditional firewall."
"The most valuable feature must be AnyConnect. We have quite a few customers who use it. It is easy to use and the stablest thing that we have. We have experienced some issues on all our VPN clients, but AnyConnect has been the stablest one."
"Its in-depth monitoring and analysis help us to make better decisions and policies."
"The solution is used for the protection of the mobile data network. It is protecting 3G/4G Internet customers and the Private APN."
"Integration with all the other Cisco tools is valuable."
"They give good protection to my network and support it."
"The feature we found most valuable in SonicWall TZ is that it is user-friendly for an administrator."
"The most valuable features are unified threat management which provides security intelligence and the VPN for both site-to-site and remote access."
"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."
"The scalability of SonicWall TZ is good and easy to add users."
"Most of the features are useful. It is easy to configure and easy to troubleshoot. I can see the utilization of different networks, and there are also App control features."
"SonicWall TZ is a stable product."
"The general feature is the antivirus policy, followed by the ransomware protection, and these are the features I was looking at."
"Fortinet currently has many products bundled with FortiGate including the basic firewall and load balancer, and I think that that they need to have separate product portfolios for each of these specialized services."
"Fortinet needs more memory to save the log files. We need it to save the logs on the hardware and not in the cloud. I know this feature is available in FortiCloud, but if we need this log locally, it is not available."
"In terms of what could be improved, the SD-WAN is quite difficult, because if you install the new box, 15 is okay, but if you change from an old configuration, if there is already configuration and a policy when you change to SD-WAN, you must change the whole policy that you see in the interface."
"Some of the features in the graphical user interface do not work, which requires that we used the command-line-interface."
"The support is the main thing that needs to be improved."
"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."
"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."
"For the migration, everyone has a firewall in use and I am selling Fortinet. Typically, I am replacing another firewall. Previously, there was a tool available to convert configurations from one firewall, such as Palo Alto, to Fortinet, but this tool is no longer free. If it could be made free again, it would be very beneficial."
"One area that could be improved is its logging functionality. Your logs are usually displayed on the screen, but if you want to go back one or two days, then you need another solution in place because those logs are overwritten within minutes."
"It has poor performance."
"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."
"I would like the ability to pick and choose different features of it to run in a packaged infrastructure or modules, therefore I would like to have more customizability over it."
"Most users do not have awareness of this product's functionality and features. Cisco should do something to make them aware of them. That would be quite excellent and useful to organizations that are still using legacy data-center-security products."
"The integration between different tools could be improved. For example, with SecureX, I am yet to find out how to forward security events to different tools such as Microsoft Sentinel, which is what we use for log detection."
"<p>If there is old hardware, or appliances, it does not necessarily work with the new Cisco generation firewalls."
"If I want to activate IPS features on it, I have to buy another license. If I want Cisco AnyConnect, I have to buy another license. That's where we have challenges."
"The solution has lost the trust of its customers because of moving from one company to another."
"The technology in this particular version is very old."
"The cost of the solution has room for improvement."
"Full monitoring obviously needs to be improved. We need full monitoring covered under the security licensing."
"There can be an improvement in analysis and reporting. We need enhancement on the reporting side."
"The technical support has room for improvement."
"Pricing could be lowered slightly."
"In an upcoming release, SonicWall could improve by adding cloud management for all devices for free or at a nominal cost. Currently, they have a cloud management platform but is not free. We have the MySonicWall portal for purchasing from them for software updates and renewals."
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.
See our list of best Firewalls vendors.
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.
