We performed a comparison between SonicWall NSA and Sophos XG based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Sophos XG’s single pane of glass makes it easy for users to manage the entire solution from anywhere. The solution is very light, stable, and provides excellent real-time control. Many users have experienced stability issues with SonicWall NSa. They feel it can be a bit buggy, resulting in occasional freeze-ups and downtime. The solution does not scale easily.
"With FortiClient, you can easily connect when you are home, check out what you want to do, and connect to your network when you are not at work. You can switch on servers and you can check what is wrong."
"It's very easy to set up, it's very easy to make policies and, for an organization, that means you don't need IT expert in firewalls. You just need to have somebody who knows a little bit of IT, and that's it. With other products, you need someone with a "Masters" degree in firewalls."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the analytics."
"The product offers very good security."
"The main reason why I purchased the particular unit was that it had good reviews and what other people were saying as far as its completeness and its leading capabilities in terms of endpoint security was very good."
"Fortinet FortiGate is user-friendly and affordable."
"The feature I like most is the SD-WAN. It allows you to manage more than one ISP at the same time. And there is a high-availability mode, so if one of your ISPs is down, you still have a backup."
"Fortinet FortiGate has many valuable features, such as IDS, and intrusion detection. It has security features that are in part with the technologies that are available in the market."
"We have utilized all the features. The most valuable are the URL filtering by category, DMZ zoning, load balancing and site-to-site VPN."
"They offer good antivirus solutions."
"Support is usually good when it comes to helping with issues."
"Our old firewall was running as HA (High Availability) on two different but identical rack mounted servers. Moving to SonicWall allowed the company to move to one unit, yet accommodate more connections because it had sixteen ports and handled fail-over better than the old firewall solution."
"SonicWall has USCS and anti-virus at the gateway level. Everything is filtered, and if it detects an intruder, it drops the line."
"We can do the hosting and security all under one box. The UTM is a good feature."
"Support has improved dramatically since their separation from Dell."
"The most valuable features of this solution are the GUI pre-filtering and the ATP (advanced threat protection)."
"The installation is easy. There is a wizard that can be used for a single connection making it simple and if you have multiple connections you can configure it manually."
"I like their firewall and the intrusion detection feature"
"The feature that we find most valuable is the VPN, which ensures that people working remotely have a secure connection."
"The most valuable feature of Sophos XG is the VBM."
"I like the dashboard, the interface, the management console, and the remote login."
"If you want to install antivirus and firewalling on endpoints, then Sophos is the best option."
"Compared to other firewalls that I had looked at, I thought Sophos was the better solution. It just seems to be easier to manage versus Cisco, Fortinet, or one of the other options I was looking at."
"The cloud-based interface makes it easy to manage."
"Lacks sufficient security options."
"Fortinet FortiGate is a stable solution. However, my issue is the performance only. When I use all the profiles, this affects the performance. From the beginning, I should have had a better sizing of the box."
"The room for improvement is about the global delivery time period. Usually I need to wait for almost one month to deliver it overseas. So if you can shorten the deliver time it'd be great."
"It should be more stable. There should be full integration within Fortinet products themselves as well as with other third-party products. Especially when you're not dealing with SIEM and the correlation of the security box, we want Fortinet to be able to share that information with as many other products as it can."
"The stability could be a bit better."
"The solution lacks sufficient filtering."
"There are some tiny bugs that sometimes affect the operations. In the past revision of it, there was a bug. Because of the bug, we had to downgrade the version. It happened only with the last revision."
"The support structure needs to be improved because every time we contact them, there is a delay in the response."
"The detection of malware can improve in SonicWall NSa."
"I feel that the SSL VPN client software needs a lot of improvement."
"The ongoing service fees are high."
"I would like to have a built-in vulnerability scanner in the firewall. It would be great to have such functionality. Its price could also be better. It would also be good to have a local warehouse. It doesn't get damaged a lot, but if a customer needs a replacement, currently, it has to come from Miami or Mexico, which can take a few days. It would be better if they have a local warehouse from where we can just pick replacements and quickly solve a client's needs in terms of replacing equipment. It would be great to have it locally instead of waiting for it from Mexico or the USA."
"Potential improvement around the associated VPN cost"
"You can do zero-trust networking with them, but it's not easy."
"It would be useful to have an application firewall that prevents the outside world from seeing your private IPs. You don't need to publicize your private IPs to the outside world, and you can create a barrier, like a proxy server."
"The only thing that we would want would be single-pane management, which it has, but the GMS is not very good. It's purely the management of multiple devices for multiple customers, that's the only thing that it's lacking."
"The pricing can be high unless you choose a longer contract."
"The first area that needs to be improved is customer support."
"The initial setup is not straightforward."
"The reports could improve, they do not seem complete and more information could be added."
"It is performing well. However, the only challenges that we are facing are the effectiveness with blocking the proxy and tuneling applications, aside from proxy and similar applications. So the application filter on the product is not really performing 100%. Every now and then there are some updates that are happening on such applications, and it takes time until it gets the appropriate updates and becomes capable of capturing such applications and blocking them. A new feature I would really like to see would be some sort of an enhanced application filter with greater efficiency when it comes to the applications that can bypass firewall policies. These applications are really a nightmare. Once they are on the network and not detected, or the appliance is not really successful in capturing them and unblocking them, the bandwidth gets wasted all the time."
"The initial setup, specifically when activating the license, is a nightmare and is quite difficult."
"There have been some issues when upgrading. For some reason, parts of the configuration become unconfigured, I then have to reconfigure it. I should not need to keep reconfiguring it after upgrades."
"It would be great if the user can have a portal to check on activities related to their account."
SonicWall NSa is ranked 19th in Firewalls with 77 reviews while Sophos XG is ranked 7th in Firewalls with 192 reviews. SonicWall NSa is rated 7.8, while Sophos XG is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of SonicWall NSa writes "Great performance and security with reasonable pricing". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sophos XG writes "Easy to use and deploy with an improved pricing structure in place". SonicWall NSa is most compared with SonicWall TZ, Meraki MX, Cisco Secure Firewall, Netgate pfSense and WatchGuard Firebox, whereas Sophos XG is most compared with Netgate pfSense, OPNsense, Sophos XGS, SonicWall TZ and Untangle NG Firewall. See our SonicWall NSa vs. Sophos XG report.
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