We performed a comparison between Check Point NGFW 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."Customers are more inclined towards FortiGate because of application control, web filtering, and anti-spam features. The support from the FortiGate team is good, and price-wise, it is affordable."
"You can purchase switches and you don't need to do anything with them. You just put in the firewall and the switches get all the policies and rules that you already have in the firewall. With Fortinet, you just connect the FortiSwitch to the Fortinet and that's it."
"Fortinet FortiGate is user-friendly and affordable."
"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."
"The most valuable feature of Fortinet FortiGate is load balancing. It can provide central management and VPNA. Additionally, it has enhanced our security environment."
"The most valuable features are the policies, filtering, and configuration."
"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 the simple configuration."
"Now we can add application signature in the same rule base & don't have to create a different policy for that."
"Policy configuration has been consistent over the years, so there is not much of a learning curve as upgrades are released."
"We can build the new firewalls with minimum efforts."
"The edge security posture has dramatically improved as we can now detect and prevent threats from the public internet."
"Being able to access almost everything in one location manage all your gateways and get all your logs is great."
"We used Check Point for implementation, and they are top-notch. They know the hardware and software better than anyone."
"The configuration is one of the best features of this product."
"Everything is easily managed through their Smart Console dashboard. It's a very easy-to-understand dashboard that provides a detailed view."
"The most valuable aspect of the solution is its ability to work like any other firewall."
"The solution has many useful features, such as content management, user management, user filtering, and domain controller connectivity mapping."
"The most valuable feature of SonicWall NSa is the control aspect of the solution."
"We have utilized all the features. The most valuable are the URL filtering by category, DMZ zoning, load balancing and site-to-site VPN."
"Content filtering reduces the load on the available bandwidth and restricts employees from using distracting websites on the job, which leads to more productive hours."
"Valuable features include a web filter, DHCP, and monitoring capabilities."
"The most valuable features are the VPN, SSL VPN, and IPSec VPN."
"The stability is better than other products."
"We were not able to build a full-mesh VPN; however, I am not sure if this was the fault of Fortinet FortiGate."
"The cloud features and integration could be improved."
"Fortinet needs to overhaul its documentation."
"We had some issues in the beginning while setting it up, but after doing the firmware update, it is working fine."
"There are some problems that support cannot give you a logical reason as to why it happened. For example, I had a case where I was dealing with a WhatsApp application that was giving issues. Technical support gave more than one reason it could be giving issues, but none of them solved the problem. Eventually I solved the problem, but it was far from the solutions that support had given."
"The updates Fortinet provides are sometimes unstable."
"Some of the software stability could improve."
"The search tool needs improvement. It's very difficult to search for policies right now."
"Although there is a lot of automation and pattern that can be classified automatically, the IPS systems are sometimes a little bit complicated, and doing the fine-tuning in over 20,000 patterns is hard to do."
"Reporting has to be improved."
"The antivirus is less effective than its competitors' antivirus. The antivirus is good, but in other firewalls, such as Palo Alto, it's quite effective. Check Point should provide more output. Sometimes it provides comprehensive information and sometimes it doesn't."
"It should allow more than two internet providers in its configuration of "ISP Redundancy"."
"I would like to see Check Point add more cloud management features and better integration with LAN software-defined networking."
"Heavy load causes a higher CPU to peek which causes us to need to reboot the device. Malicious activity database corrupts the directory or path and restoring it takes a lot of time."
"They could make the licensing a bit easier to deal with, especially for enterprise-level options."
"Sometimes debugging is a hassle."
"Overall, Im satisfied with SonicWall NSa, but it would be better if they could add a small terminal to each device. This would help me deal with certain issues by running a small bot onto any PC."
"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."
"The content ID needs to be improved."
"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."
"Competitors provide SSL encryption licenses for free, whereas SonicWall only provides two licenses by default, but you have to pay for the rest of the licenses."
"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."
"Needs a more detailed reporting feature."
"Port forwarding could use streamlining."
Check Point NGFW is ranked 5th in Firewalls with 277 reviews while SonicWall NSa is ranked 19th in Firewalls with 80 reviews. Check Point NGFW is rated 8.8, while SonicWall NSa is rated 7.8. The top reviewer of Check Point NGFW writes "Good antivirus protection and URL filtering with very good user identification capabilities". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SonicWall NSa writes "Great performance and security with reasonable pricing". Check Point NGFW is most compared with Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Sophos XG, Cisco Secure Firewall, Netgate pfSense and Sangfor NGAF, whereas SonicWall NSa is most compared with SonicWall TZ, Meraki MX, Sophos XG, Cisco Secure Firewall and Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls. See our Check Point NGFW vs. SonicWall NSa report.
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