I've never had a need to evaluate other options.

Our experience has been that Firebox actually performs a little better than some of its competitors as far as throughput goes. However, it depends on how much of their security software you get loaded, because they have different versions.

We have used other products. We've used SonicWall, Ubiquiti, and Cisco PIX. My personal favorite happens to be WatchGuard. Also, if we compare WatchGuard against Ubiquiti or Cisco PIX Firewalls, its ability to add multiple IP addresses and ports is much simpler than those. I can run several different networks off of ports that come on the hardware device. Depending on the model, there are anywhere from four to eight ports on the device, so you can plug it in at different levels.

We evaluated SonicWall, Sophos, Barracuda, and Fortinet for our firewall needs. WatchGuard not only was a great price point but also comes with so many great features without having to pay too much.

I can't remember what we looked at, at that time. I have looked at more recent solutions like Untangled, SonicWall, and the like, just to see what else is out there.

We have evaluated SonicWall and Cisco, but the choice to choose WatchGuard Firebox was based on cost and reputation.

We probably looked at SonicWall and ForcePoint, but it's been a number of years so I don't recall much of that process.

We didn't evaluate other options. The WatchGuard reseller was a company we had done business with before and they recommended it right out of the gate. We went with that.

I looked at a lot of stuff. I'm familiar with pfSense. I have used that a little bit here and there over the years, so if I went to an open-source solution I would go straight to that. And I looked at the professional versions and this one had a $700, three-year service contract on it and it handled VPN. The VAR supported it and they like it.

I don't really feel that it improves anything compared to a more common firewall device. It's certainly less capable or less configurable compared to something like a pfSense, an open source perimeter device that can be integrated with intrusion detection and network monitoring on a computer or on a virtual machine-type of setting.

The thing that the Firebox adds is it's managed and a VAR can support it. It's a known entity. It's supportable, whereas it's more difficult to support a pfSense-type of setup. You pretty much have to maintain the latter yourself.

It's there for a reason. It's there for VARs to be able to put in a known device that they can train on and the user doesn't need to manage it much. In my circumstances, I'm the IT guy of the company, and it's a small company. I'm also the owner and I understand this stuff. It's somewhat of a hobby for me to be able to configure and have a competent domain, without having to pay a VAR tens of thousands of dollars a year, and without having to pay subscription services. I'm not the targeted client for it. I'm more like the hobbyist and the super-geeks who use open source, freely available tools. The types of people who need this sort of service shouldn't listen to me. A hobbyist would never touch this product.

Before choosing WatchGuard Firebox, we evaluated other options. Some of the alternatives we considered included Norton and Barracuda. However, Barracuda was ultimately deemed to be out of our price range. Norton was also considered but not chosen, partly due to pricing concerns. Ultimately, a partner highly recommended WatchGuard, which influenced our decision to select it as our security solution.

We looked at Juniper, Check Point, and one more that was the most expensive.

The usability of the Firebox is good. But the UI is not as user-friendly as the model that I had used before, which was from Check Point. The design of the Firebox UI is restricted and needs an experienced network guy to understand the format and settings. When I used the Check Point a few years ago, the UI usually guided me on how to define a policy from the source to the target, and what the objects were, and how to group objects, and everything could be seen from a simple, table-based web UI. 

The interface of the Firebox is clumsier. The settings are like a tree structure, and you need to drill down to each node in order to get to the property. It serves the same purposes, but I won't memorize all the settings. A more user-friendly user interface would reduce the number of things I need to memorize and guide me in configuring policies. It's quite good, but is not the best I have seen.

The other brands provide more professional features for reporting, the application control, and the scalability. But the strong point of WatchGuard is their all-in-one features that are suitable for our size of company and our budget.

At the time we made the switch to WatchGuard we were also using two or three different solutions to manage security and our internet connection. We were using Symantec Gateway for antivirus protection, Websense for web filtering, Symantec IPS reporting, and Cisco.

The integration of all of those with our system was cumbersome and there were maintenance fees and license fees being paid to four or five companies. All licensing terms were different and it was really cumbersome to manage. With WatchGuard, everything is really in one place.

However, for one of our new locations we started using Meraki, which has cloud capabilities so I can remotely manage the setup of the firewall for remote offices. For ease-of-setup, Meraki is a little bit easier. If you want an easy solution in terms of setup, Meraki might be a better solution. But there is a lack of depth of setup on the Meraki, while WatchGuard is a real firewall solution. In the new office, we only have a five people, so the WatchGuard features may be a little bit too much that size of office.

Firebox has a very small model for personal use, a home-use product, but we did not test it out. That might be a good fit, but the value for a very small office may be a little bit of overkill.

I didn't evaluate other solutions, apart from Palo Alto, before using WatchGuard Firebox.

We evaluated SonicWall, Palo Alto, and Cisco, but this was the best.

I looked at some Cisco products. I only upgraded to this latest T35 last year, from the previous WatchGuard item. I also looked at SonicWall and a couple of others.

We investigated SonicWall back in about 2016 and decided to stay with WatchGuard because we felt the interface was a lot better. It's also easier to manage, easier to keep an eye on. We really despised the SonicWall. The support for it was awful. Dell already had it and it was bad. I had experience with SonicWall in the past, before it was a Dell company. The SonicWalls were pretty good then.

We looked into Barracuda. We didn't actually test it. We used some other Barracuda stuff, but we didn't actually even test their firewall. I don't remember why we didn't go with them. That was a decision made three years ago. We use their backup appliance and couldn't be happier with it, so it wasn't a support issue or a reputation issue. I don't know if there was a little difference in pricing which was the reason that we didn't try it.

We investigated the other one, we actually put the test box in, and Firebox was far superior to what we tested.

They figured if they were going to get something different then it would have to be something very user-friendly for the administrators, because I'm the only one who is certified to work on Cisco. We evaluated the Barracuda NextGen Firewall. We also looked into Juniper and the Meraki firewall, because all our switches are Meraki switches. 

But we decided to stay with the WatchGuard. The prices were a little bit better than Meraki and, since everything was pre-configured, to upgrade to a newer WatchGuard all we had to do was just save the config file and upload it to the new one, and that was the end of that.

We did consider other vendors. I don't think there's a need for us to switch right now. In the future, there might be. However, we're pretty happy right now with what we have.

We also looked at Palo Alto, Cisco, and Juniper NetScreen. We looked at Juniper because we have a lot of Juniper switching infrastructure. WatchGuard's price point worked, which is the reason why we stayed with WatchGuard.

The reseller recommended WatchGuard, so that's what I went with.

FortiGate and WatchGuard were the only two I've evaluated recently.

WatchGuard was brought in by one of my predecessors. I left this company for a little while and went to go work for a credit union, and that was a completely Cisco shop, so I got to experience both of them at different times.

I don't think I've actually used anything other than the Cisco ASA. With the WatchGuard it's easier to create policies, that's for sure. I like the flexible stability of being able to leverage objects in Active Directory. I also like being able to not have to create all my policies using IP addresses, and that I can actually do web domain name lookups every time. That's very handy for large, distributed stuff where you have no idea where the actual source is going to be coming from. The cloud bounces traffic from all over nowadays. So crafting rules with fully qualified domain names, FQDN, is definitely something that I did not have in my Cisco ASA.

The Cisco was a little less confusing and more straightforward. It didn't do all of the things that the WatchGuard does, so in that sense it was a little bit easier to understand. That is particularly true once you start getting into proxy actions and setting up: "Okay, cool. Once this rule gets triggered, what actions have to happen?" I do know a few people who use WatchGuard and they still have to get assistance when they look at that. So I would file that as a con for WatchGuard. Proxy actions can be a little bit complicated.

There were other options. We took a look at Dell but this was the best one at the time. The usability and setup of the WatchGuard were better. Also, the maintenance was very minimal. It's almost nothing.

The other solutions had their features that were nice, but there wasn't anything that really drew us or made it stand out from WatchGuard. We're pretty happy with WatchGuard right now.

We looked at Cisco in addition to WatchGuard. We didn't look at anything else.

One of our customers wanted us to compare this solution against Azure Firewall to see which would be better. We're still looking into that.

We evaluated some other solutions.

I used the SonicWall at another hospital in southwest Arkansas. 

WatchGuard has come quite a way, as far as the Fireware Web UI goes. The GUI application has become better, making it easier to navigate through setting up policies and setting up VPN tunnels, etc. SonicWall had been there quite a while longer than WatchGuard, in terms of being user-friendly. But I can't complain about the WatchGuard now. When I first moved here, it was very cumbersome to navigate through, but with the Web UI it's really improved.

They do have a client that you can connect to the WatchGuard if you want to use that client. It's still kind of clunky for navigating and I very seldom use it anymore. They call it the WatchGuard System Manager. It's not quite as friendly as the Web UI. It's usable, it's just not really friendly. But the Web UI is very well done.

I did try pfSense and FortiGate and decided WatchGuard Firebox was what I needed.

We looked into offerings from Dell EMC, from Fortigate, and Cisco. But it was just going to be too much of a nightmare.

We were evaluating a Cisco solution as well. 

Before selecting WatchGuard Firebox, we evaluated the Cisco FirePOWER firewall and, in comparison, Firebox is much easier to use.

Also, WatchGuard’s solution, in terms of the cost-per-value ratio, is very balanced.

We did look around at a few different things. We just kind of settled on WatchGuard. It seemed to have the features that we needed, so we went in that direction.

I just went by what my IT guy recommended, so I didn't really evaluate any others because he's very knowledgeable on all of these type of things. I just went off of his recommendation.

Yes - SonicWall, Baracuda and Dell.

We had considered several other solutions such as pfSense, MikroTik, and Fortinet. However, we became a WatchGuard distributor for the territory of the Russian Federation, so we are using only WatchGuard solutions.

We evaluated Fortinet and Cisco. We chose WatchGuard because we wanted our engineers to be able to learn and work with the product in a very short amount of time.

When comparing Fortinet and WatchGuard, in the past, Fortinet was before WatchGuard in providing the features for directly resolving DNS names and hostnames and making additions to the rules. A few months later, WatchGuard also implemented these features. Nowadays, it goes both ways.

There is not a product that compares to this one.

We evaluated between WatchGuard and what we already had at the time.

The Juniper that we had at the time, which was fine, was complete overkill for our needs, but when realised it was already sunk cost.

I evaluated Sophos, but the cost was a little bit higher than this solution, so we went with this one instead. 

My customer was looking into Sohpos, but because the budget was drained they opted for WatchGuard. It was a cheaper solution.