SonicWall NSa Reviews

We use SonicWall NSa for security, site-to-site connectivity, and a VPN. 

The tool's most valuable feature is application security. I am satisfied with its threat-prevention capabilities and have no issues with its incident response rate.  We have no issues with its integration. 

The tool needs to improve its reporting features. 

I have been using the product for 10-15 years. 

I rate SonicWall NSa's stability as nine out of ten. 

I rate the product's scalability a nine out of ten. 

SonicWall NSa's support takes longer to respond. 

Neutral

We worked with Microsoft before SonicWall NSa. We chose SonicWall NSa because of its pricing and local support. 

SonicWall NSa's deployment is easy and takes only a few hours to complete. We have two engineers for the solution's maintenance. 

SonicWall NSa's pricing is subscription-based and I rate it a six out of ten. 

I rate the overall solution a nine out of ten. 

Our primary use case for SonicWall NSa is as a public firewall, as an interface between our private network and the public network.

The product is working okay. The product is working feature-wise.

I would rate SonicWall NSa as an average product, not a very highly recommended one. It is an average product.

The stability is not there. The features are there, but they are not stable. They need to improve on this product because I feel that they have launched this product without much R&D.

We are using SonicWall NSa for quite a long time, around 10 to 12 years, but that includes the the older model, which was the 5500. Now we have been using the 5600 model for the last two, three years.

Performance wise, they are good - not very good, but they're okay, just good.

They are not stable. It is a very unstable product.

For maintenance, we require one engineer from the support partner, one from the tech side, and one from our side, so three engineers and one manager.

At any point in time we have more than 600 users.

We do not have plans to increase the number of users.

Tech support is okay, but the product needs much improvement.

We were not using a different solution before. We have always been using SonicWall, just the older model, which was 5500. We upgraded to 5600.

The installation part of the initial setup was a painful experience. I felt at the time that it was not a finished product. They have to do more R&D on this product to improve it.

It took a very long time to set it up, to be honest. It took very long because they had some bugs and fixes. After so many fixes, it took them very long to install this product.

Obviously, no OEM deals directly with them. We have their channel partners who did the installation.

To be very honest, we are not satisfied with the 5600 product.

On a personal level, I would not recommend SonicWall NSa.

On a scale of one to ten, you can rate SonicWall NSa a six.

The license and the hardware both need to be renewed. The annual maintenance contract is there. So they have to renew the licenses.

We primarily use the solution just for IPsec tunnels. It's two routers between locations with IPsec tunnels, nothing more. We don't use their firewall capabilities.

The functionality is the same whether it is on hardware or a virtual appliance. The interface is the same. It's nice that it's standardized.

The solution is a good product with a good value for money.

The security capabilities and policies are good. They can do a lot of tasks with ease. 

The product is very useful for organizations with many locations. If you've got a lot of locations, the product can save you money as you don't need a physical box at each location.  

The scalability is very good as it really can cover multiple locations.

SonicWall offers NG capabilities in virtual appliances.

It's not as easy to use, as, for example, Palo Alto.

Some of the configurations could be better.

The solution is stable. We haven't had any issues so far.

The scalability is quite good. You can scale well across locations very well for not too much cost. If a company needs to expand, it can do so relatively easily.

Also, cost-wise, it's very affordable to scale up. It's not expensive to add hardware and licenses as needed. They make upgrading very cheap.

We have 200 people on the solution. That said, they are using with IPsec tunnel. They don't use all of the capabilities of the hardware. They are using it just to encrypt tunneling between the sites.

We may not continue to sue the solution as we have found a solution that is better and that can help us get faster than IPsec can. We're looking instead at MACsec.

I've never opened up a technical support case with the product. It's worked quite well, and we haven't run into trouble that would require us to reach out. I can't really speak to how helpful or responsive they are due to the fact that I have no experience with them.

We've also worked with Palo Alto, Barracuda, and Sophos.

Palo Alto is more expensive to use and to scale. Sophos is very easy to set up. Barracuda also has NG capabilities, like SonicWall, and has the same limitations in terms of security policies. It also can take a bit longer to set up.

I have ten years of IT experience, and therefore, for me, the entire implementation process was not overly difficult. They have good manuals that you can read through at the start. It's not a difficult process, especially if you are already comfortable with the technology.

Of course, it's not quite as straightforward as something like Sophos, which you can just plug in and have the vendor configure for you. However, that said, it's not too difficult.

SonicWall still is only a dollar or Euro per gigabit. This means, of the IPsec, it's the cheapest solution. 

Due to the fact that we've got some projects now, we might abandon IPsec, as we had two Blade fibers with separate paths to a secondary location and we will start using MACsec. It's a layer 2 security. Therefore, we don't need IPsec anymore.

Originally, actually, we bought it without any licenses, just boxes with IPsec capabilities.

The pricing, in comparison to some solutions, such as Palo Alto, is much better.

We're just a customer and an end-user.

I'd recommend the solution to other organizations. I tell everybody, if your business is a lot of locations and not so many personal policies, to check the SonicWall portfolio. You can configure it with two boxes and if you need to you can scale it without any trouble into the tens or hundreds.

In general, I would rate the solution at a seven out of ten.

We are using SonicWall NSA 2600 for firewall purposes. We have its latest version.

It is able to fulfill my requirements. It protects our network environment. It has control over IPS, signatures, and it can also manage bandwidth and mapping. It is also stable and has good support.

It doesn't require much improvement. The only improvement area is that cloud reporting, assessment reporting, and other reporting features should be available with the subscription. They should provide reporting features with the subscription base, which is currently not there. We bought the reporting tool, but there are some complications. They have made some changes to the application, and now the reporting management is completely on the cloud. 

I have been using this solution for four years.

It has been stable. There are no issues with its stability.

It is not scalable. We can upgrade to a new box depending on the subscription. We have a three-year subscription, so we will continue with it for three years. After that, we would look for an alternative tool based on our requirements. Currently, we have approximately 250 plus users.

We have a license for support. We can raise a ticket if we need any assistance from their support. They are good, and I am satisfied with their support. They always take care of customer satisfaction. There might be a delay or something, but at the end of the day, they resolve the issues.

I have used other solutions. Palo Alto and Sophos are good solutions. FortiGate is also good, and it allows you to see and manage everything from one control. Some of the features available in other solutions might not be available in SonicWall NSA, but it is fulfilling my requirements.

We don't really need any support with the installation. There are a lot of knowledge documents. We also have a license for support, and if required, we can get support.

We have only two people who have been managing it for the last three years or so. We didn't face any challenges.

Its price is okay.

I would recommend this solution to others. I am satisfied with this solution.

I would rate SonicWall NSA an eight out of ten. 

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.

I wouldn't say that. If it has no impact on them, it's doing its job correctly.

There are no specific features that you can say are better than anything else. It's very flexible and it meets our customer's needs.

The Fortinet Firewall is not the easiest firewall to maintain, nor is to set up and configure. Checkpoint and Sonos are much easier.

SonicWall, from my point of view is the same category as Fortinet. Checkpoint and Sonos are easier to use, but they don't have as many features as SonicWall.

You can do zero-trust networking with SonicWall, but it's not easy. Also, their desktop anti-virus sucks.

I have been using SonicWall since it was Netscreen — which was years ago.

When you buy it based on the load that you expect to use, there are no scalability issues, unless you swap them out.

SonicWall has exceptional tech support. I would rate checkpoint support best, SonicWall next, and Fortinet would be third. I would give SonicWall's tech support a rating of 7.5 to eight.

The structure of dealing with them is good. Once you get through to a support person, the support is very good. But getting through, getting to the point where you have someone on the line can be difficult. 

Overall, they're good at their job and they speak English.

The level of tech support varies: sometimes you get lucky and they're exceptional, and sometimes it's somebody that isn't that good.

If you don't set it up correctly, you are putting your customer's network at risk. They still haven't fixed a lot of the little issues that Dell introduced into the product line, but they're trying.

There are settings that if you don't set them correctly, you could potentially jeopardize your customer's network. 

SonicWall is probably easier to set up than Fortinet.

The pricing of SonicWall is still in line with Fortinet and Checkpoint. Personally, if I were presented with a decision between SonicWall, Checkpoint, or Fortinet, it would be a no-brainer.

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.

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

At the end of the day, all the solutions in this category are more or less alike. They all do the same thing in different ways. I've found the best features of NSA are the graphic interface which is very user friendly and I also find the solution to be very intuitive. The product has more features than I can use. 

The reporting solution from SonicWall is not the greatest. We have more than two firewalls and I expected we'd get more information from the reporting than we actually do. That area could definitely be improved. I've seen a couple of features on the firewall that I don't have use for because we're not a huge company, we're a 200-user company. The reporting feature is there, it would be nice if it was more detailed. 

The firewall itself has the reporting tool. Obviously, it's not as complete as the solution that they want to sell because they provide it for free. It means that you need to get the software separately in order to get a better understanding of what's going on in your firewall. A good additional feature would be improvement on the firewall reporting feature without needing extra software or extra expense.

I've been using this solution for five years. 

The firmware is very stable and I've never had issues with the stability of the operating system and I was several versions behind until recently. There were some minor bugs but that's because the firmware was not updated. 

The technical support is great. I've never had an issue where I've needed to wait more than a few minutes for them to fix it.

At this office, the firewall was already configured when I started working here, so I only needed to make some adjustments. We have another office that we acquired recently, and I implemented the firewall there. The configuration was pretty straightforward. The graphical interface is very intuitive and that helps. 

Our licensing fees are paid annually. It's on par with whatever is on the market. They are all the same, so it's not high or low. It's on the same level as any other hardware in the same category.

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. 

I walked into a job where we had an end of life ns2400 that was a mess. Coming from a Meraki environment there was a learning curve on how to navigate the sometimes overly complicated user interface. Tasks I should have been able to complete in 10-15 minutes took longer and I bounced between menus to hash out NAT rules and port forwarding.

There is no Network Engineer on site, and there are too many piecemeal options to realize the full effect of the firewall's capabilities.

Support is usually good when it comes to helping out with issues. Once the matrix is learned, it becomes a much better tool, but the learning curve is pretty large.

Port forwarding could use streamlining. Otherwise, once you learn the user interface, the capabilities of the firewall are good.

The solution helps with VPN. 

The most valuable feature I've found is VPN and web protection, particularly with navigation assessment. We use the application control feature to create rules controlling specific application navigation. 

The web interface administration of SonicWall NSa could be improved. Compared to Sophos and FortiGate, making rules is easier with those systems.

The solution is expensive. Its pricing is based on the number of users. 

I rate the overall product an eight out of ten.