SonicWall NSa Reviews

Primary use is Office 365, all our users have cloud-based email. The rest is business emails, business procurement, etc. And if users are on after hours and they want to see more, we allow it, but still, blocking is difficult on the SonicWall. It's not easy. We have about 300 users who go through the internet.

At the moment, none. It just doesn't do its task. Users, no matter how you configure it - and it's configured quite carefully in the sense of censoring - seem to be able to punch to the file. It just doesn't do its job.

It seems to have all the features, it's just not performing.

It has good reporting, the reporting is marvelous, but reporting is always after the fact and you want to be proactive if you're a firewall. You don't want to be saying “Ah! We had a bot running on the network,” while SonicWall itself didn't give that indication in an active way.

The problem primarily with SonicWall is it's a Unix box. And it's all software, all the activities, blocking, censoring, everything has to happen in the software. If you start hitting the box with a lot of sessions it slows down and that's not what I expect from a firewall.

I have worked with this box for six months, and it's a daily task to manage this thing. You don't have to always have time to do this.

The room for improvement is to step away from the Unix platform. It needs to be a specialized system that manages firewall activity. You don't want to rely on two systems, one being Unix and one being the firewall. Unix is a powerful system, I have no doubts about it. I've set up Unix systems my whole life and they're very powerful. However, when it comes to dedicated tasks it's not suitable. That's Unix. Unix is general. It does everything. And by doing everything, it's not always as powerful as a dedicated system like a hardware solution, like Fortigate.

It's fairly stable. In the last six months, I've had to restart the box about five or six times because it just didn't do what it needed to do. And after the restart it started working again. So it's not as reliable, in my view.

It might be working in other environments, but in my view - we have a satellite connection of only 8 megabits - it's very hard to control bandwidth on the SonicWall to allow certain types of traffic to have priority. You can't really dedicate certain bandwidth for, let's say, an Office 365 solution. It's all very global. And global makes it hard to manage on a slow link, and 8 megabits is a slow link.

I don't know about scalability because I have only worked with this box. There are probably faster boxes on the market. This box should be sufficient for 300 employees and my impression is that performance is suffering if too many people are trying to get through it.

The main reason this was bought was it was cheap. We all know that Fortigate is far more expensive. But, then again, it's more like the Rolls-Royce of firewalls. And what you can do with it in hardware has no comparison with any of the software solutions on the market. Yes, everything performs, every firewall-type solution, whatever you want to use, does its job. But you want to have a management-free solution. If you look at Fortigate, no matter how you look at it, you know it works. With Unix boxes, you never know. It's a Unix system and, for whatever reason, it can stop working and you have to reboot the machine, which is not the most beneficial solution.

I've used Fortigates. Fortigates have no problems if you start adding a thousand users, depending on what kind of service provider you have. A big difference is that it's global censoring on the SonicWall. On the Fortigate you can censor per rule, and that's a big difference if you are in a multi-user environment where you have different types of actions.

At my current company, this was set up at the beginning, when the company started. They have never had a different solution. They have another location with Zyxel firewalls, which will also be replaced with Fortigates. They all perform. That's probably the best thing I can say about them. What we're going to implement now is a far broader solution with authentication and everything else. At this stage, that is not implemented on the SonicWall. My fear is that if we implemented that on the SonicWall, we would have more problems. It's really not that flexible.

My most important criteria when selecting a vendor are manageability and the features, and by features I mean complete management of the firewall.

The setup is fairly simple. That's why I'm surprised that this box is struggling. That's not what I would expect from this type of solution.

Do your homework. Go to your website, compare firewalls, not only SonicWall, not only Fortigate. Compare them for the task that it needs to run for your company. That's the bottom line. There are small firewalls which will suffice for certain companies. You might need bigger ones, you might need more features. So really, you have to do your homework.

I work in an African country, knowledge is something they are still gaining, and SonicWall is too difficult for most people to manage, versus a Fortigate where it's really a step-through and you know what you're doing, you can see what you're doing. You can't really see that on a SonicWall.

It's very hard to manage this box. You really need a lot of skills to operate the SonicWall. There is training and the like, but it's just hard to manage. Even if you have the knowledge, there are too many options. The menus are not very clear, where you should find the information.

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. 

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. 

We are using SonicWall NSa as a network firewall and for segmentation on internal networks. We are using this firewall on the application level ID. We are using it for specific segmentation between production LANs and between technologies.

Overall SonicWall NSa is a good solution for our use case.

The solution's price could be reduced. It is expensive.

I have been using SonicWall NSa for approximately four years.

SonicWall NSa is highly stable.

The scalability of SonicWall NSa is good. We have approximately 2,000 users using it.

I did not use the support from SonicWall NSa.

We have used other solutions such as pfSense and Linux native firewalls. I prefer SonicWall NSa but if you are going to use something for an enterprise you need another solution.

We have been using the solution for many years which has made the initial setup easy for us.

SonicWall NSa is worth the money we paid.

The price of SonicWall NSa is expensive.

The solution does not require a lot of maintenance. We have a specific team now for all technology, all for all infrastructure technologies.

I rate SonicWall NSa a seven out of ten.

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 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. 

My primary use case is web filtering, VPN, and sometimes UTM. I can check a VPN for point-to-point connectivity with this solution.

The features I found most valuable are email security and web filtering.

The features I would like to see improve are the dashboard and the UI.

In the next release, I'd like to see APIs included.

I have been working with SonicWall for approximately two to three years.

I would rate the stability of this solution a nine, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

I would rate the scalability of this solution an eight, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

I would say the initial setup was easy. I'd rate it an eight, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

When deploying, you first use a gateway, ISP terminated in the firewall, and then terminate to the user end. Usually, deployment takes two to three years.

The deployment was done by one or two engineers.

I have experience with Fortinet and I would say this solution is much better suited for SMB customers, while SonicWall is better for large enterprises.

I would recommend this solution to enterprise customers.

Overall, I would rate this solution an eight, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

Our primary use case is at the perimeter of all of our customer's sites with all of the security services turned on. That is anti-malware, anti-spyware, geo IP filtering is an important thing for us, web filtering and the Capture ATP. We are looking at preventing downloading of any virus-infected files.

Geo-IP filtering has made a large impact on us and it is very important to us.

The most valuable features to us are the security services which is a critical factor in our deployment. Today we need to have all the security services enabled because firewalls are not enough.

When it comes to security I think all of the features are currently open to improvement.

I have been using SonicWall NSa for the past ten to fifteen years.

Technical support used to be very good and now we are dealing with long response times.  On a scale of one to ten today we are looking at a four or five instead of a nine or ten.

The setup is straightforward however you want to have a good technical support individual involved for proper deployment.

I would rate SonicWall NSa a nine out of ten as an overall solution in security.