We performed a comparison between Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls and SonicWall NSa based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Firewalls solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."It's a user-friendly firewall. Most of the tasks are very simple. It's simple to configure and troubleshoot this firewall."
"Overall, the pricing of the solution is very good. The product offers good value."
"Security solution with a straightforward and quick setup. It's a stable and scalable product."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiGate are the ability to work in proxy mode, which other solutions, such as Palo Alto cannot. There are some features that are better that come at no extra license or subscriptions cost, such as basic SD-WAN. The DLT is useful, other solutions have the same feature too, such as Palo Alto."
"It's an easy solution to set up."
"Fortinet FortiGate is a scalable solution."
"I like Fortinet's cloud management. It allows me to manage all my devices in different branches for three cloud accounts. Even though I use on-prem devices, I can manage everything on the cloud."
"The most valuable feature of Fortinet FortiGate is security. They are known for efficiency and are on the top of Gartner Quadrant reviews. Fortinet FortiGate has an easy-to-use platform with a good graphical interface. The configuration is simple and the solution provides an overall good layer of security."
"The App-ID, Content-ID, User-ID, and encryption and decryption are valuable features."
"The ease of use and the ease of configuration of our policies are the most valuable features."
"The scalability is very good."
"Application control, IPS, and sandboxing towards the cloud are the most valuable features. It is a very user-friendly product with a very easy-to-use interface."
"I like to install Palo Alto mainly on the data center side to have visibility into all VLANs. That gives full visibility into the core."
"You just need a web browser to manage it, unlike Cisco, which requires another management system."
"The fact that the Next-Gen firewalls are integrated with identity is the best. It gives us the ability to track what an individual is doing and helps us provide access to only what they need in order to do their job."
"The user ID, Wildfire, UI, and management configuration are all great features."
"The most valuable aspect of the solution is its ability to work like any other firewall."
"The solution can scale."
"SonicWall NS has a lot of valuable features. One of the best SonicWall NSa features is the ability to collect mini routers and get only one user connection."
"The most valuable feature is the Global Management System."
"SD-WAN is a good feature."
"SonicWall has USCS and anti-virus at the gateway level. Everything is filtered, and if it detects an intruder, it drops the line."
"Sometimes I have some queries, and the SonicWall support team resolves my queries."
"Easy to setup and implement"
"The license renewal process, annual renewal price, and the web application firewall features should be improved."
"It should have a better pricing plan. It is too expensive. It should also have a more granular view of the attack. I don't have FortiAnalyzer, and it is difficult for me to have a complete view when there is an attack on my server."
"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."
"Scalability is one of the disadvantages. When it comes to scalability, you have to actually change the box. If you want to upgrade it, you need to actually change the existing box and probably you take the system off to other sites."
"We had some issues in the beginning while setting it up, but after doing the firmware update, it is working fine."
"Fortinet could improve the windows opener or the virtual IP solutions for opening windows. The virtual IP settings need improvement as firewalls are trending in new development directions."
"I'm not sure if it's something that they already have or are developing something, however, we need some dedicated features for container security."
"I need user-behavior analytics, to find threat scenarios from inside the organization, insider attacks. That would be very helpful for us. In addition, I would like next-generation features for small and medium businesses. These businesses require UTM, all in one product. Fortinet must include it."
"From a documentation standpoint, there is room for improvement. Even Palo Alto says that their documentation is terrible."
"Overall it is good. It is reliable and easy to understand. However, the monitoring feature could be improved."
"The solution is not straightforward."
"I don't deal with it from a day-to-day perspective, but I can say that the evidence that I typically need is there, but sometimes, it's a task to actually get it and pull it out. They can make it easier to gather that evidence."
"I'm thinking about a new feature. They have decryption. It's a good idea to use decryption on Palo Alto. It would be good if they had offloading of the traffic, and if they could decrypt the traffic and offload it. Like, for example, ASM on our site. We have an SSL decryption to offload the traffic. We could use that on Palo Alto."
"In the last three years at least, they have been lagging behind their competitors. The main issue is the support that we can get... You have to wait for them to get back to you and sometimes it's random. And the biggest problem I have is that you have to wait hours on the line when you're calling them to get a hold of the next available engineer."
"The reporting and visibility are phenomenal, but you don't get that information out of the box. They can email reports regularly, and the functionality is all there. However, a lot of it is based on an older model for email, where customers have in-house email servers. The small and medium-sized business customers I deal with are moving toward Office 365 or some other cloud-based mail and not maintaining their own internal mail servers."
"The machine learning in Palo Alto NG Firewalls for securing networks against threats that are able to evolve and morph rapidly is good, in general. But there have been some cases where we get false positives and Palo Alto has denied traffic when there have been new updates and signature releases. Valid traffic gets blocked. We have had some bad experiences with this. If there were an ability, before it denies traffic, to get some kind of notification that some traffic is going to be blocked, that would be good."
"SonicWall NSa needs to make their product more user-friendly."
"Needs a more detailed reporting feature."
"The pricing for this product in India is high and the fees should be reduced."
"A room for improvement in SonicWall NSa is the log server because it could be more user-friendly compared to Fortinet and Palo Alto Networks. My company has many rule sets up for review, so sometimes, my team needs to use Excel for filtering, but the UI cannot support the Excel function."
"I'd like to see integration with Microsoft 365 for authentication."
"The implementation for VLANs is a little bit cumbersome. It would be good to make that a little bit easier."
"Vendor support needs improvement. The frequency of time and support should be increased."
"SonicWall NSa doesn't have a proxy. It also needs a quota management feature in specific scenarios where you must limit user bandwidth for a particular day."
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Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is ranked 6th in Firewalls with 162 reviews while SonicWall NSa is ranked 19th in Firewalls with 80 reviews. Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is rated 8.6, while SonicWall NSa is rated 7.8. The top reviewer of Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls writes "We get reports back from WildFire on a minute-by-minute basis". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SonicWall NSa writes "Great performance and security with reasonable pricing". Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is most compared with Check Point NGFW, Azure Firewall, Meraki MX, Sophos XG and Netgate pfSense, whereas SonicWall NSa is most compared with SonicWall TZ, Meraki MX, Sophos XG, Cisco Secure Firewall and Juniper SRX Series Firewall. See our Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls vs. SonicWall NSa report.
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