SonicWall TZ Reviews

We use it for ATP, the main firewall, and VPN connections to some of our sites.

The VPN is quite useful for us, as well as the ATP. Overall, I would say it's a good solution for small enterprises.

We are currently using a 54.1 version, which, when compared to other solutions like FortiGate or Check Point, needs to improve in many aspects. Even the new SonicWall 7.85 is not safe compared to FortiGate. There is a huge difference.

It has been around four and a half years now. The firmware that we are using is version 6.5.

It's extremely stable, actually one of the best. I would rate it a seven out of ten. 

I would rate it a six out of ten for scalability but for medium to small enterprises. All are remote users. I would rate the solution a six out of ten because there is still room for improvement, and it's not advisable even if the organization has grown.

A lot of users use it. All our email sheets are using it, and users connect via VPN.

The setup was fairly easy once you understood how the device worked. However, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone else anymore.

The licensing options are quite good in terms of what you get. For a small to medium enterprise, it's a good option.

If you are looking at it from a financial level, it's a good option. But I think there are other options out there. If I had found this product already in my organization when I joined, I would not have gone with this product. I would have gone with an entry-level FortiGate or Check Point. It would have been much better or easier, but SonicWall TZ is not bad, either. However, my device has almost reached the end of its life after almost one and a half years, and it's easy to switch to a different product at the end of our licensing period, which is towards the end of this year. So that would have been good for me.

Overall, I would rate the solution a seven out of ten. 

My primary use case for SonicWall TZ is firewall protection. 

What I find the most valuable is that SonicWall TZ is relatively easy to manage once you know. The newer versions do sandboxing, which is nice.

It is a little difficult to use the DPI-SSL clients. I do not know if there is a way around that, but it is a little difficult to set them up and configure everything.

I am an IT consultant, so I have been using SonicWall TZ for about 20 years.

SonicWall TZ is a stable product. 

SonicWall TZ allows you to scale up by upgrading to a higher level. 

I have had plenty of interactions with SonicWall TZ's technical support. The quality of tech support can vary. Overall, it is not too bad. I have been using this product for two decades, so I have had a wide range of experiences with their tech support. 

Positive

How straightforward the initial setup is will depend on what you are turning on and what you are not turning on. If you just want to get a box up and running, it's relatively easy. If you want to start turning on all the features and configuring it, then it gets more complex. The complexity depends on how far you want to take it. If you want to just have a basic level of firewalling by the fault, then SonicWall TZ will work relatively easily out of the box. However, if you want to get the bang for the buck in terms of its feature set, you have to configure it a little bit.

How long deployment takes also depends on complexity. If you are just deploying on one site, it can take as little as a couple of hours. 

We deploy in-house. We are resellers. 

I have seen attacks that have been prevented by it, so I would say I have seen clients receive a return on investment. The older units do not work as well – you have to upgrade them – but they seem to be handling things pretty decently.

SonicWall TZ is probably consistent with regular market values. In terms of licensing, what generally happens is you get it with a one or two-year license and by that point, they usually have a newer model. They will usually let you upgrade to the newer model for the cost of the licensing.

SonicWall TZ are decent units. Every now and then, there's a glitch, but for the most part they are pretty stable.

SonicWall TZ think it's a good, solid, and stable product. Currently, its price is going up, but the prices are going up on everything. 

For protection, we follow the market standard. We configure the security policies, then the routing, starting routers, and then add policies, and configure the zones. Then we configure the application filtering, URL filtering, and all the security services which include Gateway Anti-Virus, IPS, then Botnet Filtering, and antispam.

The most common feature in the firewall, apart from that traditional firewall, would be the security services, like application control, URL filtering, Gateway Anti-Virus, and IPS protection. These are the essential features in the firewalls which I think, has to be enabled and properly used at every network infrastructure.

Though it is not as powerful and as good as the Palo Alto, Check Point, and Juniper firewalls, it is a small firewall and it is actually, highly acceptable for SMB customers where there is not much outflow of internet traffic and users are less in number. They can update or enhance the application signatures. They have that Capture ATP option, which is the sandboxing option there. Other than that, they can enhance the application signature, because, in SonicWall, the signatures of the application are not up-to-date. It is not a big database compared to Palo Alto, or Fortinet. It is slow and it takes time. 

If you have created zones it automatically creates the access policy for allowing traffic from one zone to another zone. Similarly, if you create a site-to-site tunnel or a remote tunnel, in that case, it will automatically stage the access policy. However, there are options to disable that auto-creation, but if you compare this with the other firewalls, other firewalls don't have that. This is basically one thing that SonicWall TZ can work on so that an unnecessary access policy doesn't get generated in the firewall. 

I have been working with SonicWall TZ for the past two and a half years.

It is stable. If there is less operation, it is stable. But if you have fifty to one hundred users, in that case, and if the operation increases, it is not stable. It will give a delay in some packet requests.

It is scalable. If the operation is less, it is scalable. But if the operation increases and the bandwidth consumption increases, it does not perform as per the expectations.

Technical support is very good. 

Positive

It is straightforward. It is out-of-the-box and anyone can configure it. The deployment takes less than one day. Basically, while they were deploying this TZ Series firewall, we didn't face any issues. But there are some old customers who had some issues with the IPs they had to set on from remote offices to the HO. In that case, we did that troubleshooting. Other than that, we didn't face any issues.

It comes to a range between five hundred to seven hundred dollars. The Fortinet firewalls range from five hundred to one thousand dollars. 

I would rate SonicWall TZ a seven out of ten.

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.

The web security and IPsec VPN are both valuable aspects of the solution.

The NAT policies and port forwarding are great. 

We were initially actually using very basic features for my organization's requirements. It is a very simple model. There isn't much complexity to it.

It's been very easy to implement and deploy.

The solution is stable. 

Technical support is perfect.

We've found the pricing to be pretty good overall.

It would be nice if it was more user-friendly. The user interface is a bit difficult to navigate.

The technology in this particular version is very old. 

They have to improve their assistant client application.

In this particular SonicWall has a challenge with the SSL client. It provided NetExtender, a client application that is very challenging and is difficult to manage.

I've been working with the solution for about six years or so. 

I would say that it is 100% stable. Sometimes there's an issue, and we have to log a ticket, however, they will have it resolved. Rarely are there bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.

Sometimes support is delayed, and sometimes we get items resolved within hours. Overall, it is okay. Overall it is okay. They are very helpful and responsive most of the time and we are quite satisfied with their level of attention.

We previously used a solution called AnexGATE. However, we had issues with port following and needed to switch.

The initial setup is very straightforward. It's not overly complex. A company shouldn't have too much trouble implementing it. This is especially true if you have a bit of a technical person implementing it.

For the most part, the solution is very economical.

Although we have been using it for the last six or seven years, it is now expired and we want to upgrade it with either Fortinet or Sophos, and so, we are looking into those.

We are a customer and an end-user.

We are using the TZ300 model at this time. We haven't used the latest version of the solution just yet.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

It is a multi-setting tool. We have about 50 users at any point in time. So far, we haven't had any problems.

We use the content filter and the SSL VPN: 

• The content filter has increased our productivity, especially during working hours. We don't have users spending time on social media during working hours. This means productivity is good. 
• Then, when the guys are offsite, they are still able to work without taking any breaks due to the SSL VPN that we use.

We use the content filter quite a lot because it's an office setting. During working hours, we like to censor the sites users can visit so it increases productivity. Therefore, the content filter has been good for us.

We have been using the SSL VPN as well, because most of our people do travel. They go for rest and recuperation approximately every six weeks, and they are offsite for about 10 days. More often than not, they need to login, or get onto shared drives, to do some work.

SonicWall Analyzer needs a different license. It would be good if Analyzer would be part of the stock license, so even if a layperson is getting the device, he or she doesn't forgets about ordering the Analyzer because it's already there. 

This is what we realized that over the last few months. We tried to pull some analysis, and without the Analyzer, we couldn't. Now, we are in the process of buying the additional license. It would have been better embedded from the beginning.

It is very stable with no issues. The firewall has been up for the past 35 days non-stop. It's performed great. It has performed as it should perform.

Scalability is fine. Our needs do not vary regarding scalability. They are constant. We have about 50 users.

We used it on one occasion. It was quite straight forward. We have a 24/7 support service option. The people who provided support were very efficient.

The main company has been using SonicWall for awhile. When we setup our local office in Ghana, we decided to use what was being utilized in the main office for the local office.

The initial setup was very straightforward. The wizard was helpful. It took less than an hour and a half to set it up and have at least the basic functions apparent. The primary set-up took less than two hours, then we were up and running.

SonicWall has authorized distributors in our country. They have about two or three distributors in the country, so it makes it a bit easier. What we do is to request a quotation from these distributors, then we do a value for money analysis and see which one of them is giving us a competitive price.

Getting licenses in our country, Ghana, is not easy. Though, once we have them, adding them is quick (about a day).

Overall, the cost is great.

No, because we chose SonicWall because they are on our main company's vendor.

We did decide to go with SonicWall TZ instead of SonicWall NSA, because the SonicWall NSA is bigger and more costly.

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.

SonicWall is our primary internet firewall.

We like the unified threat management for defense-in-depth. We can terminate our site-to-site and remote access VPNs with it.

I would like SonicWall to act as a DNS server to host DNS zones. Our small business clients sometimes have a single DNS server on-premise. If that's the case, we're out of luck. It would be great if we could host DNS on the SonicWall, even as a secondary DNS.

We've been working with SonicWall products since 2007.

SonicWall has been pretty reliable.

I rate SonicWall six out of 10 for scalability. I'd like to have cloud management at no additional cost. Unfortunately, leveraging SonicWall's cloud management capabilities is cost-prohibitive, so we don't use it. They should have a reasonable subscription or offer it to us at no cost as an MSP. The size of our client companies varies quite a bit, but they have devices to scale for various sizes, so it's a non-issue. You buy the appropriate device. 

I rate SonicWall support six out of 10. The tech support could be better. There's definitely a language barrier when dealing with tech support out of India, so it's not ideal.

Neutral

I rate SonicWall nine out of 10 for ease of setup. The deployment time depends on the complexity of the environment. 

You need a network firewall, so it's not a question of ROI. You need air. You need electricity. You need the firewall.

You have to pay additional fees to leverage their cloud management capabilities. That's unaffordable and limits scalability. There are also optional packages and various levels of support or subscriptions.

I rate SonicWall TZ eight out of 10. We use it often. It's an excellent product that I would recommend.