SonicWall NSA Overview

SonicWall NSA is the #13 ranked solution in our list of best firewalls. It is most often compared to Fortinet FortiGate: SonicWall NSA vs Fortinet FortiGate

What is SonicWall NSA?
Achieve a deeper level of security with the SonicWALL Network Security Appliance (NSA) Series of next-generation firewalls. NSA Series appliances integrate automated and dynamic security capabilities into a single platform, combining the patented, SonicWALL Reassembly Free Deep Packet Inspection (RFDPI) firewall engine with a powerful, massively scalable, multi-core architecture. Now you can block even the most sophisticated threats with an intrusion prevention system (IPS) featuring advanced anti-evasion capabilities, SSL decryption and inspection, and network-based malware protection that leverages the power of the cloud.

SonicWall NSA is also known as NSA 250M, NSA 2600, NSA 3600, NSA 4600, NSA 5600, Dell SonicWALL NSA.

SonicWall NSA Buyer's Guide

Download the SonicWall NSA Buyer's Guide including reviews and more. Updated: January 2021

SonicWall NSA Customers
Orange County Rescue Mission, First Source, Michaels & Taylor, Green Clinic Health System, Aspire Chiltern Skills and Enterprise Centre, UnitedStack, Faith Lutheran College Redlands, Celtic Manor Resort, Star Kay White, Air Works, Unimat Life, NHS Yorkshire and Humber Commissioning Support (YHCS), Hutt City Council, Mato Grosso do Sul, Nspyre
SonicWall NSA Video

Pricing Advice

What users are saying about SonicWall NSA pricing:
  • "Licensed features provide application control, content filtering, antivirus, and anti-malware all in a single appliance."
  • "The CPUs are not able to compete with a similar price point to the Fortinet, WatchGuard, or Palo Alto product."
  • "A firewall doing anti-spam might be a low cost solution, but it is not your best strategy."
  • "You need their analyzer to properly generate reports. This is an expensive, licensed feature, with a complex application or appliance back-end."
  • "In our evaluation, we found that the costs of deploying the solution, and also purchasing the hardware and licenses, were very attractive."

SonicWall NSA Reviews

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Manoj Nair
Tech Specialist at Select Softwares
Real User
Top 5Leaderboard
Oct 25, 2020
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A rugged solution capable of defeating advanced threats

What is our primary use case?

I am a consultant. I work with a software dealer in the IT security business. I deployed SonicWall for a customer just last month.

Pros and Cons

  • "It's very simple to use and the support is great."
  • "They should consider upgrading the capabilities within the GUI."

What other advice do I have?

I would definitely recommend SonicWall for their simplicity of use, but if you can configure SonicWall, have a look at Sophos also. Sophos has put a lot of hard work into their connections and the GUI. SonicWall's GUI is slightly lacking compared to Sophos' GUI; however, capabilities-wise, Sophos doesn't have a lead over SonicWall. If I had to make a recommendation to a customer, I would tell them to look at both products. I would push the Sophos box because it has certain advantages, technologically, compared to SonicWall. For example, they have their own antivirus solution — the Sophos…
See Entire SonicWall NSA Review (983 Words) »
SSL
Senior IT Consultant at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees
User
Top 5
Apr 6, 2020
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Weak firewall. Licensing mechanism is a trap. Woefully inadequate VPN clients and methods. Look elsewhere

What is our primary use case?

Firewall/VPN appliance for SMB clients. Firewall provides advanced threat protection to internal hosts. It also provides a secure mechanism for remote access.

Pros and Cons

  • "It allows us to block applications, i.e., websites by application type category. It is far more capable than content filtering alone."
  • "Support has improved dramatically since their separation from Dell."
  • "Setup is easy. Anyone with basic firewall experience can do it."
  • "The anti-spam requires a specific Java version on the server side (do not update it, otherwise it will break)."
  • "They are not ready for managed security services. Their Cloud GMS product is weak, barely out of beta (buggy)."
  • "Do not even consider NetExtender - probably one of the most horrific, nightmare grade Java-based VPN clients. We have but all given up trying to make it work reliably."

What other advice do I have?

Avoid this company. They have no idea what they are doing, except a slick marketing campaign. They don't listen to their customers. The only evolution of the product in the last few years was a slight redesign of the web interface and DNS proxy. They will push their SonicWall "Capture" but this has nothing to do with the Firewall product itself, it is a windows based NextGen A/V based on Sentinal with ATP.
See Entire SonicWall NSA Review (927 Words) »
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reviewer1120704
Manager with 51-200 employees
Real User
Jul 25, 2020
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Good content filtering but needs better software and has a faulty DPI SSL feature

What is our primary use case?

The solution is primarily used as a perimeter firewall for a gateway toward public internet traffic. Basically, it is a gateway between our internal network and public traffic.

Pros and Cons

  • "The basic firewall rules of the solution are great."
  • "The product has a lot of bugs, actually. We are facing some issues with this product. The DPI SSL feature which is there, it is not working properly."

What other advice do I have?

We're just a customer. We don't have a business relationship with SonicWall. I wouldn't recommend the solution, actually. It's hard to set up and the stability takes a while to establish. They need to do better on their software side, and other solutions, like Sophos, have more flexibility in their configuration capabilities. I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.
See Entire SonicWall NSA Review (724 Words) »
reviewer1314267
Director of IT at a consultancy with 11-50 employees
Real User
Oct 20, 2020
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Easy to configure and maintain with the capability to scale

What is our primary use case?

We primarily use the solution for just securing our users and creating a LAN through VPN tunnels. We use it to provide remote access to a cloud service.

Pros and Cons

  • "The most valuable aspect of the solution is its ability to work like any other firewall."
  • "We still get phishing emails that manage to come through from time to time."

What other advice do I have?

The version we are using is NSA 20 or 60. If a company is looking for a good product that's easy to configure, I would suggest they consider SonicWall. I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. If we didn't have that trouble with the VPN tunnel, I would give it a perfect score.
See Entire SonicWall NSA Review (615 Words) »
reviewer1112532
President at a tech services company with 1-10 employees
Reseller
Top 5
Nov 6, 2020
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A reliable firewall but other options should be considered

What is our primary use case?

Mainly our customers use this solution as a general firewall. Currently, our most popular firewall is Fortinet FortiGate 40F. We do have all the way up to 100's, but most of our customers are small, medium-sized businesses. We have a FortiAnalyzer that resides on Azure and we're getting a FortiManager because of the new capability to roll them out based on the serial number With FortiManager and FortiAnalyzer, you have many more capabilities than you do with SonicWall.

Pros and Cons

  • "It's very flexible and meets our customer's needs."
  • "You can do zero-trust networking with them, but it's not easy."

What other advice do I have?

If you're interested in SonicWall, consider checkpoint or Fortinet first. On a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of seven. They don't have independent testing. They haven't been independently rated — or another way to put it: Gardner rates them poorly. Because of this, we can't sell SonicWall to customers as easily as we can sell Fortinet or Checkpoint.
See Entire SonicWall NSA Review (594 Words) »
reviewer1383846
IT Head at a construction company with 51-200 employees
Real User
Jul 29, 2020
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It's a user-friendly solution, so I don't experience any problems with the device

What is our primary use case?

In the main office we have set up a SonicWall TZ device, and then from the branches, we have set up a lower branch model, the SonicWall, and then created site-to-site VPN. We then deployed the VoIP between those branches to the main office. We also deployed the firewall and the URL filtering between sites and the main office. So, we just enabled and created the different DMZ zones from the devices.

Pros and Cons

  • "We have utilized all the features. The most valuable are the URL filtering by category, DMZ zoning, load balancing and site-to-site VPN."
  • "We also need to increase the throughput because the other devices are slower. The throughput will become slow. Since we're using VoIP, it tends to affect the voice quality. Even if you're using a quality service, it tends to decrease."

What other advice do I have?

The quality and security support should be improved in the next release. I would rate SonicWall NSA an eight out of ten.
See Entire SonicWall NSA Review (567 Words) »
Flavio Soares
Senior Systems Administrator at Prodomax
Real User
Top 20
Aug 23, 2020
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A very intuitive solution with very user friendly graphic interface

What is our primary use case?

We are end users of this solution and I'm a senior systems administrator.

Pros and Cons

  • "User friendly and intuitive."
  • "Needs a more detailed reporting feature."

What other advice do I have?

If I knew what I know today and I was starting from scratch with a SonicWall firewall, I'd get a consultant in for some advice. There are a couple of tricks that for me it would have been nice to know from the beginning because there are some rules in the defaults that I would've been happy to have known before. I would recommend getting a consultant to explain how the thing works, even if it's for a couple of hours. I would rate this solution an eight out of 10.
See Entire SonicWall NSA Review (566 Words) »
Marcio Vieira
Solutions Specialist with 201-500 employees
Real User
Jul 15, 2019
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Regularly updated signatures for IPS, Application Control, and Web Content filter

What is our primary use case?

Our operation depends heavily on Internet access and we depend on a solution that can provide us with productivity and security for the continuity of our business. With this need, we implemented a SonicWall NSA firewall to control all access to and from the Internet.

Pros and Cons

  • "With the deployment of the SonicWall NSA solution, we never suffered a problem due to invasion or contamination of any kind."
  • "This product is unable to secure access to endpoints for our external employees."
See Entire SonicWall NSA Review (552 Words) »
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