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 solution is stable."
"The SD-WAN feature is the most valuable. This feature evolved from link load balancing. It has helped us in terms of our uptime and privatizing applications whenever we experience an outage. The SD-WAN feature has been a plus for us. Two-factor authentication has allowed us to add more users in terms of remote working. We have two-factor authentication for remote workers to authenticate them before they get on the network."
"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."
"FortiGate Secure SD-WAN includes best-of-breed next-generation firewall (NGFW) security, SD-WAN, advanced routing, and WAN optimization capabilities, delivering a security-driven networking WAN edge transformation in a unified offering."
"The notable features that I have found most valuable are that it includes the antivirus, and also IPS, and even SD-WAN."
"This is a quality product with ok support, and it is better than the competition we've tried."
"The security features that they have are quite good. On top of that, their licensing model is quite nice where they don't charge you anything for the SD-WAN functionality for the firewall."
"We are very happy with the general bandwidth agility we have seen from one website to another website."
"The Inline Mode configuration works really well, and ASA works very impressively."
"The firewall and policy side are easy to use."
"It is extremely stable I would say — at least after you deploy it."
"The ASA has seen significant improvement due to the IPS."
"Network segmentation is the most valuable feature."
"The stability of the solution is very good. We can see that it gets even better with every release."
"The product is quite robust and durable."
"We get the Security Intelligence Feeds refreshed every hour from Talos, which from my understanding is that they're the largest intelligence Security Intelligence Group outside of the government."
"The installation is straightforward and took approximately 30 minutes."
"The most valuable features are security and technical support."
"The general feature is the antivirus policy, followed by the ransomware protection, and these are the features I was looking at."
"We like their interface very much. It's pretty easy to use."
"We are able to block whatever we want to block by using this product. It provides all required security features, such as content filtering, VPN, in one box. Before switching to SonicWall, we had specified all required features."
"SonicWall TZ think it's a good, solid, and stable product."
"It lets me monitor in live time if someone is 'hogging' bandwidth."
"The feature we found most valuable in SonicWall TZ is that it is user-friendly for an administrator."
"They've become quite expensive."
"The ease of use could be improved."
"We would like to see a better training platform implemented."
"Sometimes you do need to know some CLI commands, so it's a bit harder for technicians or new people that don't know it."
"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."
"It needs more available central management."
"The security of Fortinet FortiGate could improve."
"There are some license issues. Not every feature must have a separate license. There must be some of kind synergy between the license so we don't have to pay for every individual license that we would like to have."
"Report generation is an area that should be improved."
"The user interface isn't as good as it could be. They should work to improve it. It would make it easier for customer management if it was easier to use."
"The one thing that the ASAs don't have is a central management point. We have a lot of our environments on FTD right now. So, we are using a Firewall Management Center (FMC) to manage all those. The ASAs don't really have that, but they are easy to use if you physically go into them and manage them."
"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."
"Firepower's user experience should be a little bit better."
"They really need support for deployment."
"It is confusing to have two management interfaces, e.g., ASDM and Firepower Management Center."
"It seems very clunky and slow. I would like to be able to tune it to be a more efficient product."
"There is still room for improvement, and it's not advisable even if the organization has grown."
"The cost of the solution has room for improvement."
"I'd like to have cloud management at no additional cost. Unfortunately, leveraging SonicWall's cloud management capabilities is cost-prohibitive, so we don't use it. They should have a reasonable subscription or offer it to us at no cost as an MSP."
"GUI interface could be improved."
"The dashboard needs to be improved."
"The reporting analytics could be improved, it is very unstable."
"Full monitoring obviously needs to be improved. We need full monitoring covered under the security licensing."
"The quality of tech support can vary."
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 OPNsense. See our Cisco Secure Firewall vs. SonicWall TZ report.
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