SonicWall TZ Reviews

We use it for a variety of businesses and schools.

Its ease of installation has improved my organization. That's what I do most. I install the firewalls.

I don't have anything that I would say needs improving at the moment. The small business line has less PPS throughput and that's what you're going to lose on when you use WatchGuard. So they need to improve the throughput of the firewall in the small business line.

Easy to explain : 

                                 WatchGuard T70 vs SonicWall TZ600 
Firewall Throughput :       4Gbps          vs      1.9Gbps
Price :                             610€            vs       973€

I've only ever had one problem. I have a bank that has two NSAs in high availability. The only time I had a problem was with the high availability from the update. That's the only time. And that was last month. I did an update. I disabled the high availability and we reset it, the firewall, and installed the config again. And updated it one by one.

I have no negative impression of the scalability.

I haven't tried technical support yet, so I haven't needed support yet on anything.

Moved to new Employer.

The initial setup is straightforward. I deploy at least one solution a month, to different sites. You only need one person for deployment.

I did the implementation myself.

The pricing is where you might lose to WatchGuard now. I'm looking into moving some parts over to WatchGuard because they are on the small business side. But if you compare the TZ300 and 400 series against WatchGuard series, they are the same, but there is a price difference between them.

I wasn't a part of any decision making in terms of options. 

We use a variety of models, from the TZ300, up to the NSA 2600. For businesses, I recommend TZ400.

I would rate the solution 8 out of 10. I would rate WatchGuard itself 10, because I really like that product, and the ease of use. And when I say ease of use, I mean I know that product in and out. And it's very easy to set up external sites with the system management tool that comes free with WatchGuard.

Currently, I am using SonicWall TZ to connect our branches to the head office. We use it as a site-to-site VPN.

The primary benefit we have found with SonicWall TZ is its cost-effectiveness compared to other products like Palo Alto, which are more expensive.

One valuable feature of SonicWall TZ is the content filtering. Additionally, advanced features like real-time deep memory inspection are available in the head office's 2600 series.

The logs need improvement. SonicWall TZ should include a hard disk to keep log files for at least one week or maybe one month. This feature might be available in greater series but not in the basic product.

I have been working with SonicWall TZ for almost six months.

Stability is very good, even though the firewall has not been restarted for almost one month.

I would rate the scalability of SonicWall TZ a ten out of ten.

Technical support's response is delayed due to our process. We need to go through our reseller, who then contacts the local distributor, causing delays.

Positive

Previously, I used WatchGuard Firebox in my previous office.

The initial setup of SonicWall TZ is complex.

We get initial support from our local partner for the setup. Our team does basic configurations when needed.

SonicWall TZ is priced average compared to other products. We usually compare prices from different local suppliers to get the best deal.

The main competitor I considered was Fortinet.

It's recommended that their logging feature be improved by adding an in-built hard disk to store logs.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.

I use SonicWall TZ for my office remote access from outdoors.

The most valuable feature of SonicWall TZ is the double authentication, where it asks for one password and again asks for a four-digit code, which changes every 30 seconds.

The solution's antivirus checking could be improved so that we can have a deeper inspection of the packets.

I have been using SonicWall TZ for one year.

I rate SonicWall TZ ten out of ten for stability.

SonicWall TZ has good scalability. Around eight users are using the solution in our organization.

I rate the solution a nine out of ten for scalability.

The solution's technical support team is good, and they provide us with email notifications regarding new updates.

Positive

The solution's initial setup is easy because we do it once only and never make changes.

The solution’s deployment hardly took 30 minutes.

The solution is moderately priced, where it's neither cheap nor expensive.

The solution has improved our business network security, and I am satisfied with its performance. The firewall performance of SonicWall TZ has met our security needs. I would recommend the solution to other users.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

We use the tool for filtering and log management.

The product’s filtering and URL-blocking features are valuable. SD-WAN and VPN are also valuable features.

The solution must provide more ports.

I have been using the solution for six months.

I rate the tool’s stability a ten out of ten.

I rate the tool’s scalability a ten out of ten. We have around 100 users. We use the tool daily.

We used Sophos before. We switched to SonicWall TZ because it provides high availability.

I rate the ease of setup a ten out of ten. Setting up the users and accounts according to the groups and categories takes a few hours. The whole setup requires a few days.

We deploy the solution in-house. We need three people to deploy the tool. We need one knowledgeable person who has mastered firewalls to maintain the product.

The product is worth the money.

The product is not expensive, but it is not cheap. I rate the pricing a six out of ten.

We set up new environments and implemented firewall solutions in our organization. Overall, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

SonicWall TZ is mostly used for firewalls.

SonicWall TZ is a very cost-effective solution that provides good security.

The solution has lost the trust of its customers because of moving from one company to another.

I have around five to seven customers for SonicWall TZ.

The solution's initial setup is easy and not difficult.

The solution's installation is a simple plug-and-play process. You get the internet, and you have to go to the wizard to complete the customization for your network.

The sales of SonicWall TZ have been very low. The solution has lost the trust of its customers because of moving from one company to another. People have lost their trust in SonicWall TZ and are changing to other products. The marketing was very low for SonicWall TZ for some time. SonicWall TZ is a very cost-effective solution that provides good security. People who work with SonicWall more than Sophos find its interface very user-friendly.

Sophos completed its portfolio for security by having its own endpoint and email security. All of these products are synchronizing with each other. This is what gave Sophos a push-up to go through the market. Currently, SonicWall TZ has had its own endpoint for the last two to three years.

We ask customers who have experience with SonicWall TZ to continue using the same solution because it will be better for them. When a user has a better understanding of a solution, it's not good to change them to another product.

When a user changes the solution, they will have a lot of questions, and they will make a lot of mistakes during the installation and configuration. We don't prefer Sophos, SonicWall, or Fortinet, but we sell Sophos because we are a gold partner for Sophos and get a better rate and better margin.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

In some cases SonicWall is used to outfit a company, replacing existing infrastructure and getting site-to-site VPN set up for easier management. It provides ease of use for VPN setups. We are customers of SonicWall and I'm a senior system analyst. 

The solution offers the right amount of control without being incredibly convoluted and frustrating, or without being too dumbed down where you don't have options to do certain things. It's very to the point with the controls and simplifies things for us. It's great value for money. 

The solution has a lot of robust options and it's easy to use. NSM is a good feature, a single pane of glass security center where you can monitor SonicWall for different clients and troubleshoot without it requiring individual access. The product has good integration with their SMA solution, which we deployed for one of our financial firms, and we've also provided a remote access solution for people with PCs at home who want secure access. It offers good content filtering.

I would probably say their GSM or their Sonic Analyzer could be improved. I have always found it difficult to manage and not very intuitive. I'd like to have better visibility of what each endpoint is doing. That's something Meraki has that is very easy to use.

I've been using this solution for over seven years. 

The solution is stable. We're an MSP, so if our clients have any dated hardware, we'll make a plan to switch to SonicWall, otherwise there can be issues with the internet or configuration where we can't get in and troubleshoot. We need to know we can get into the firewalls and make sure that they're online, as opposed to having to schedule someone to come in and deal with the basic physical connections or troubleshoot.

The scalability is very good because if you know how to work the base model, the old solution or the TZ 105, all the way up to the NSAs, they just scale up in terms of features and functionality and you don't change a whole lot. They have good terminology that sticks throughout, so if you work with one, you can work with them all. It means upgrading and scaling is very easy. We manage about 1300 users or so across about 100 different clients. For the most part, maybe 80% of them are on SonicWall, and we try to push that just because it makes our lives a lot easier.

We don't use the technical support very often, but the last call I had with them, everything was resolved within the hour. I spent more time on hold than I did with the person. It was 15 minutes on hold, for 10 minutes to resolve the issue. Otherwise, it's great. 

The initial setup was very straightforward. Deployment time depends on the client but if we're starting from scratch, you can have it updated and deployed within an afternoon without issue. We have our own techs with experience who can get things set up to the best of our ability. Implementation takes one person who knows what they're doing, but we have a team that can help out and troubleshoot if we run into issues. 

I'm not sure of licensing costs, but the price point isn't bad. In addition, you need to buy the hardware. There is also a standard support license, and they offer an advanced security gateway with other intrusion detection, prevention, content filtering, etc. There are some additional options we usually go with, but things like content filtering are hit and miss, and depend on what the client wants.

I've tried Meraki, but their price points are ridiculous and feature functionality is somewhat lacking. After Dell sold SonicWall, things improved a lot, and they've come a long way. There were some things about Meraki that I liked such as endpoint visibility. You can see the list of connected devices and apply a policy. You can get very low network so that bandwidth is not eaten up if someone is watching Netflix all day but they can still receive emails. Those kinds of things are what's missing in SonicWall. I've never been able to do something like that easily on the firewall side. Unfortunately, the cost of Meraki is really prohibitive. We tried a few other solutions and they just didn't pan out. If you want a good firewall, you have to pay thousands of dollars for what SonicWall does in a way that's easier to manage.

I would recommend trying the product, it's not too difficult, whether it's the setup or the cost. If you're looking for a really low-cost solution, you'll probably end up using something like pfSense which doesn't really compare to SonicWall. There are probably better solutions out there, but there are things that SonicWall does better, it just depends on your budget.

I rate the solution eight out of 10. 

Our customers use SonicWall TZ for network security and also for connectivity, e.g. when our customer is a company with HQ and branches, and they want to secure their branches the way they secure their HQ, we recommend SonicWall TZ so we're able to protect both the users in the HQ and the users in the branches. We also use this solution to optimize the bandwidth that they have by configuring SD-WAN services.

Another use case for this product is when using switches, e.g. when people want to connect their IP phones, their access points, and their access control devices, we recommend the switches and utilize SonicWall TZ, but mostly this firewall solution is for network security monitoring, analytics, and reporting.

SonicWall TZ has a number of benefits to customers.

One benefit is the visibility of the network and activities that are happening on the network, which enables customers to improve on their policies. For example, if a  customer sees that YouTube is consuming a lot of bandwidth, they can revise the policies and allocate less bandwidth to YouTube, then give more bandwidth to business critical applications.

Another benefit of this solution is that it's able to bring a lot of visibility to things that are hidden from a normal IT person's view, so now that these things are visible, users are able to make quick decisions. For example, there was an organization that was complaining that they have less bandwidth, so we implemented the firewall and noticed that whatever they were getting, they needed to add more, before they're able to add more bandwidth from their ISP. 

The simplicity of SonicWall TZ is also one of the things I like about it.

I found many features in SonicWall TZ that are valuable. The NSM (Network Security Manager) is great when you have more than one firewall, e.g. two, three, five, etc., because it's a central place where you can configure the firewalls.

Even for users who only have one firewall, SonicWall TZ is great, because it's very easy to use. It's user-friendly. I have used other firewalls, and I've worked with Fortinet and Palo Alto, and if I compare their user interface with SonicWall TZ, this solution has an interface that's so much easier to use.

In this product, configuring the policies and everything else that needs to be configured is straightforward. You don't have to move through multiple pages and tabs. It's easy to configure and use.

The analytics feature of SonicWall TZ is also good, because users are able to see information on bandwidth utilization, including applications that are traversing the network.

I also like the Capture ATP (advanced threat protection) feature of this solution, because it shows the unknown files that have been detected in the network, how they were scanned, and what the results are. It's a very good feature.

I like the licensing scheme of SonicWall TZ. If you have high availability requirements, you don't need to buy two licenses. You just buy one. This is cost-effective for the customers. I also like the secure upgrade promotion, e.g. If you have an existing firewall from Cisco, Fortinet, or another competitor, SonicWall will give you a two-year license for the price of a one-year license.

SonicWall TZ has good features that I can really position to my customers, and that's how we're able to win new business.

I also like the form factor uniqueness of this product. You can use it even in an office with 10, 15 people. That's very great. That's a day one capability, and it's not licensed, e.g. it's something you can get out-of-the-box. I also believe that SonicWall TZ 570 and 670 series can accommodate SFP (small form-factor pluggable), and I find that very unique.

SonicWall TZ also has high availability, so it's a perfect solution.

Support for SonicWall TZ needs improvement, particularly the time it takes before you're able to speak to a support person, e.g. you have to wait for at least 30 minutes on the phone, and this needs to be improved.

This is an affordable solution, but a competitor like Sophos can give SonicWall a run for their money. Sophos and Fortinet are major competitors of SonicWall, and the way they package their solutions, especially Sophos, they're cheaper, so for some customers who aren't technical, they will just run to these competitors because they're cheaper. However, once you explain to the customer that this is the situation, mostly we're able to win the business for SonicWall.

An additional feature I'd like to see in the next release of SonicWall TZ is enhanced automation.

I've worked with SonicWall TZ since 2019. I've been working with it for three years now.

I didn't have any issues with SonicWall TZ in terms of stability. I started working with SonicWall in 2019, and all the customers I sold this to, not a single device has failed, apart from one customer who had a failure in Ethiopia last year, but that customer bought the device for quite some time, e.g. in 2018 or 2019, so that one had been onsite. I've not heard of any breakage apart from that one, so this product is stable.

SonicWall TZ is scalable. I just have one customer here who is suffering because of issues with sizing and scoping initially, but from what I've seen, this solution is scalable. It scales well.

I was able to contact the SonicWall technical support team a few times, but before I was able to talk to a support person, I had to stay on the line for almost 30 minutes, sometimes even longer than 30 minutes. This is something that they need to improve.

The initial setup for this solution was very straightforward. I don't have an issue with setting up SonicWall TZ.

I find the licensing scheme of SonicWall TZ cost-effective for customers. SonicWall also has a secure upgrade promotion that lets you enjoy a two-year license for the price of a one-year license, if you have an existing firewall from competitors, e.g. Cisco, Fortinet, etc.

I was able to evaluate Fortinet FortiGate briefly. I also evaluated Palo Alto.

I've used Fortinet FortiGate briefly. SonicWall TZ is what I'm using at the moment. We are an authorized distributor of SonicWall, so we sell SonicWall products, including SonicWall TZ, to resellers and partners.

We deal with the latest versions of this solution: the gen 7 series and the gen 7 NSa series. These are what we've been selling to most of our customers.

We have not been able to sell SonicWall TZ on cloud. We have received requests for quotes, particularly for cloud deployment, but what we were able to sell were on-premises deployment, e.g. physical devices.

Deployment of this product usually takes less than a day, but it really depends with the setup, with the network. We recently had one that took two days, but it's usually just less than a day.

We sell SonicWall TZ to different companies. One company has 10 users. Another company has a hundred users. There's another company with 500 users. We sell to partners, and that's our main job. The partners sell to the customer, so you'll find one partner has five customers, another partner has two customers, etc. We are just not covering Kenya. We cover east Africa all the way up to Congo, Ethiopia, Djibouti, and Eritrea. We cover all those areas.

What I usually tell people who are looking into implementing this product is that it's the easiest to use among the many firewalls I've seen.

I have not been disappointed with SonicWall TZ, so I'm giving it an eight out of ten, not a perfect score, because there's still room for improvement.

We use the solution for work filtering and application control.

The solution has helped streamline our internet usage. Unnecessary sites are blocked. The solution has increased the productivity of the employees, and VPN connections have been added for security measures.

Access restriction and IP whitelisting are the most valuable features.

The technical support has room for improvement. We have had some issues that have not been resolved.

SonicWall TZ can increase the number of built-in VPN connections. I would like to have 30 VPN connections in the next release.

I have been using the solution for one year.

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable. 

We have 150 people using the solution.

The technical support was not able to resolve some of my issues.

The initial setup for a new user is a bit confusing. I had previous experience with the solution so I was able to complete the setup easily.

The deployment steps were configuring the interfaces, load balancing, policies, access policies, creating groups, and providing the necessary access policies to each group. The deployment took around three days.

The implementation was completed in-house with some support from the SonicWall team.

I give the price an eight out of ten.

I give the solution an eight out of ten.

The maintenance is not difficult. I take care of the maintenance myself.

I recommend the solution to others.