WatchGuard Firebox Reviews

We use WatchGuard Intrusion Prevention Service to secure our servers. It's usually deployed to protect the whole network and the service.

It works right out of the box. You just have to enable it and you can start working. I have worked with other firewalls as well. With other solutions, you have to do a lot of tweaking. WatchGuard is pretty simple to use and easy to pick up.

It's pretty simple. It's very user friendly. I don't really see a way to simplify it further.

I have been using this solution for more than four years.

It's definitely stable. Sometimes there are some issues, but they usually get fixed with the updates — it automatically updates.

In terms of scalability, the interface and everything remains the same. If you go for a very small device or even a very large device, the user fee and the user experience is the same. So, obviously, you should go for a large device. At any time, if you are willing to upgrade, if you want to scale up, then you can just buy a new device and deploy it. The best thing is that you can just migrate the same configuration from a small device to a larger employee's device.

Regarding technical support, they could use more engineers. There is less support from engineers and they give you less time. There is always room for improvement regarding the support.

The initial setup is very straightforward. It can be deployed within three to four hours.

The price of WatchGuard Intrusion Prevention Service is pretty reasonable compared to similar solutions. The pricing is pretty competitive.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of seven. If they made it more stable and improved customer support, I would give them a higher rating.

It is mostly for small to medium-sized businesses. Usually, large organizations have different requirements and they look for different kinds of products. 

Our company routinely deals with credit card numbers in transactions and we use WatchGuard to protect our clients' information. 

The most valuable feature is the protection that it offers.

The analytics are important because if there is an abnormality then it provides that information to us.

The ease of detecting where an issue is should be improved. It would be helpful if when an issue is detected, the system can send us an SMS message to our phones. This would allow us to immediately respond.

I have been working with WatchGuard since 2015, although we only implemented the Threat Detection and Response earlier this year.

Technical support is good. Our level one support in the country is near our office and when we have an issue they immediately respond.

We have had no issues with deployment because it can be pushed to the client.

The pricing is competitive.

When we implement a new product such as this, we start with a PoC. We ask our vendor to provide a demonstration and then we use it in our environment. This allows us to test each of our scenarios. My advice to others is to follow this approach whenever they want to use a product. Do the testing before they buy it.

Every product has it's weaknesses. Just because it benefits one company, doesn't mean that it benefits another. This is why testing is important.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Our primary use cases are for the firewall and for limited routing for small to medium-sized businesses. 

I had a client that was saturated with RDP, remote desktop attempts, while using a standard low, consumer-grade firewall. Putting in WatchGuard allowed me to drop a lot of that traffic and reduce a lot of load on their otherwise poorly performing Internet connection.

Reporting PCI and HIPAA compliance reporting, firmware updates, cloud-based firmware updates all make for visibility within the client site much easier. I can provide comprehensive reporting on user activity and user behavior which goes along with user productivity. It has excellent mobile SSL VPN capabilities that have allowed for very rapid deployment of remote workers during our current situation.

As a whole, it has a very low requirement for ongoing interaction. It's very self-sufficient. If properly patched, it has very high reliability. The total cost of ownership once deployed is very low.

It absolutely saves us time. All firewalls can be deployed with a very basic configuration in a reasonable amount of time. The uniform way in which WatchGuard can be managed allows for the deployment of much more comprehensive configurations more quickly. When it comes to troubleshooting and identifying any kind of communication issue, they use a hierarchal policy layout. It allows you to manipulate the order of precedence, simplifying troubleshooting by tenfold. Compared to a competitor, I spend less than 10% of the amount of time on WatchGuard that a similar task would take on a Meraki, a FortiGate, or a SonicWall.

The most valuable features are: 

• The unified threat management bundle
• Advanced threat detection and response
• APT Blocker
• Zero-day threat detection.

With most Internet traffic being encrypted, it is much more difficult for firewalls to detect threats. Some of the advanced features, such as the APT Blocker and the advanced threat protection, use advanced logistics to look for behavioral, nonpattern related threats. And the threat detection and response has the capability of working with the endpoints to do a correlated threat detection.

For most people, they don't think about one workstation having a denied access, but when multiple workstations throughout a network have requests that are denied in a short period of time, one of the only ways you can detect that something nefarious is going on is through a correlated threat detection. And WatchGuard has that capability that integrates at the endpoint level and the firewall together, giving it a much better picture of what's going on in the network.

It is the single easiest firewall to troubleshoot I have ever worked with. It deploys very rapidly in the event that a catastrophic failure requires the box to be replaced. The replacement box can be put in place in a matter of minutes. Every single Firebox, regardless of its size and capability, can run the exact same management OS. Unlike some of the competitors where you have dissimilar behavior and features in the management interface, WatchGuard's uniform across the board from its smallest appliance to its very largest, making it very, very simple to troubleshoot, recover, or transition a customer to a larger appliance.

It absolutely provides us with layered security. It has one of the most robust unified threat bundles available with Gateway AntiVirus, APT Blocker. It does DNS control. It does webpage reputation enabled defense. It effectively screens out a lot of the threats before the user ever has an attempt to get to them.

Externally it does a very good job of identifying the most common threat vectors, as well as different transported links, attachments, and things of that nature because of the endpoint integration. It helps protect from internal and external threats, along with payload type, and zero-day threats.

The cloud visibility feature has improved our ability to detect and react to threats or other issues in our network. It has improved firmware upgrades and maintenance reporting as well as investigating and detecting problems or potential threats.

It has reduced my labor cost to monthly manage a firewall by 60%.

The data loss protection works well, but it could be easier to configure. The complexity of data loss protection makes it a more difficult feature to fully leverage. Better integration with third-party, two-factor authentication would be advantageous.

I have been using WatchGuard Firebox for fifteen years. 

We mostly use the T series: T30s, T70s, some M3, and 400 series.

It is the most stable firewall I work with. The incidence of failure is very low, maybe once every two years.

It's very scalable. Because it has the unified configuration interface and the unified tools, or the common tools that are used from the smallest to the lowest, a ton of time and configuration, and thereby money, is saved during an upgrade, for example. The time to take an upgrade to a new appliance is a fraction of the time it would be with a competitor because of the direct portability of the configuration from the prior firewall.

We have one engineer and one part-time technician to maintain approximately 75 WatchGuards for limited, physical installations and onsite. It is very reasonable for one or two engineers to manage 200 to 300 WatchGuards. It's very reasonable.

We have just a single location in which we do use the T70 box and WatchGuard is in place at 95% of our clientele. We do not replace viable commercial-grade solutions until such time that they are ending their licensing or whatever. We do not replace FortiGates or SonicWalls while they're still viable. However, when the opportunity to replace one arises, it is our first suggestion to the client.

I do not or have not had to use technical support very often, but I find it to be excellent. They're very responsive and very knowledgeable. I get engineers from a similar time zone. They're very skilled engineers and very invested in end-user satisfaction. Even though they are 100% channel-driven, they take end-users satisfaction very seriously.

The complexity of configuring a Sonic Wall, for example, is much, much greater than that of a WatchGuard. Identical tasks can be completed in a WatchGuard in a fraction of the time as a SonicWall. When comparing similar models, the performance of Meraki is far inferior to the WatchGuard. Its capabilities are inferior to WatchGuard. It's a simple cloud interface. Meraki's simple cloud interface is probably more appropriate for a less experienced engineer. FortiGate lacks some advanced features that WatchGuard has, but my predominant issue with FortiGate is that when all the unified threat management utilities are enabled, performance on FortiGate is inferior. Although it has capabilities, when fully enabled it does not perform as well as WatchGuard.

The initial setup is very straightforward. I'm able to deploy a standard template after activating the device. The activation is very simple and takes just a few minutes. Then a base configuration can be applied once the firmware has been updated and a box can be prepared for initial deployment within 7 to 10 minutes after it boots. 

It took 45 minutes to set up.

In terms of the implementation strategy, I have an implementation baseline of minimum acceptable settings and then it is adjusted based on client needs.

We deploy it to distributed locations in one of two ways. The device can be drop-shipped to the user or the endpoint and a cloud configuration deployment can be pushed to the box. My preferred method is to receive the box, perform a firmware update and a base configuration, and then ship the box.

I would recommend working with a partner for an expert-level deployment. It greatly reduces the time to deploy it. An experienced engineer can then deploy the product very rapidly and can often provide instruction on how best to maintain the product. But otherwise, the deployment is very straightforward.

They are very low maintenance, they have a very high rate of my end-user satisfaction. I'm able to provide excellent levels of service to my end-users and my customers. I would say that they have a very high value and a good return on the investment.

Generally speaking, I find the three years of live and total security to be the best option. By going with their total security, you do get the endpoint protection component of the threat detection and response. Typically the trade-in options, depending on your prior firewall, are options that they should request or pursue when dealing with their provider. Those programs are usually available, but they're not always offered by a provider unless you ask.

I would rate WatchGuard Firebox a ten out of ten. 

The solution is very powerful.

It is the most effective on non-encrypted traffic and it is able to determine some threats through deep packet inspection. 

There is a basic deep packet inspection within the antivirus that is able to be run against proxy filtering and certain policies. It's pretty standard in the industry. 

The solution isn't what I would consider feature-rich.

Due to the fact that the high volume of traffic that is currently encrypted, I find that the antivirus is less effective every year. That's not just WatchGuard, however. It's the biggest area in need of improvement right now is as a whole in the industry. It has the same weaknesses other firewalls have, and that's its inability to dissect encrypted traffic. It is capable of doing it, however, it requires some specialty configuration that often interferes with Azure, Amazon cloud services, or things of that nature.

It would be useful if we could be able to get a report as to why the solution is doing one action but stopping another. You can configure it as part of the firewall to decrypt that traffic, effectively making it a middle man, however, in doing so, you often disrupt Microsoft Office 365 and Amazon Web Services. The capability is there. It is just not considered a recommended best practice.

While the ability to determine threats in non-encrypted traffic is a good part of a solution, it is not an adequate standalone. It does not have an endpoint component.

The feature I'm most interested in is additional endpoint protection, however, they recently purchased Panda. That would go in line with the EDR product. As a managed service provider, I'm always looking to simplify and clean my stack, so I can provide my customers with the best possible service with the least complexity. It's nice to know that they're actively working towards that already. 

Also, I should note that most of the features I want are currently already in beta.

I have 18 years of experience with the WatchGuard brand, and 13 years directly with their threat detection and response products. I've put in more than 30 pieces of WatchGuard hardware, firewalls, access points, etc., in the last 60 days.

I've been using WatchGuard's Gateway AntiVirus specifically for 15 years now.

The solution has remained very stable. It has never resulted in a service-related ticket being required or anything along those lines. Users can rely on it as it doesn't crash and there aren't bugs or glitches that affect its functionality.

The solution is very scalable as part of a whole solution. One of the best features is that it's capable of having file exceptions based on the MD5 hash.

As a consultant, I have many of the systems out in production and they are in environments ranging from five to 10 users, up to several hundred.

The technical support has been amazing. We're very satisfied with their level of support.

The initial setup was very, very easy. It was not complex at all.

Discussing licensing is tricky. It is not available as a standalone purchase. It is part of a whole, so I can't divide out the costs in an effective way.

We're a service provider and have been for a number of years. I'm a consultant.

The solution is part of the firewall and the UTM. It's never really handled as a separate entity, though it is licensed. It's part of their unified threat bundle.

I've used almost all of the current GUI interfaces. The antivirus has changed the backend engine a couple of times over the years. The current revision, I believe, is Bitdefender driven, but I'm not exactly 100% sure.

I'd advise other organizations, when setting up the solution, to configure all proxies and policies prior to doing the subscription service setup. 

If the policies are pre-configured and your proxies are set up prior to activating the security antivirus or the Gateway AntiVirus, 90% of the configuration is done for you. You only find yourself manually doing it if you are building rules after the fact.

As an antivirus and standalone product, I would rate the solution seven out of ten. The main reason is, as a gateway appliance, it does not have the capability to perform the same function as an endpoint antivirus. It is not a substitute for endpoint antivirus.

It's our firewall for the internet.

The most valuable feature is the NAT-ing, the IP addresses. What the firewall does is that it NATs through the IP addresses for different servers. We can direct the traffic where it needs to go. We can control the traffic.

It's fairly easy to use. I don't think we have any trouble with it.

We've also never had any trouble with the throughput or performance. We've just recently upgraded the internet and we're getting our router upgraded. Once we get that in place, we'll see how the Firebox responds. To date, we've never had any problems.

It also provides us with layered security.

I would like to see more tutorials on setting up the Firebox.

I've been Using WatchGuard for well over 10 years.

The stability has been fine. We've had no issues with its stability.

We haven't scaled it.

There are about 40 users, anywhere from plant production to purchasing to the president, and accounting. They all go through the firebox to get to the internet of course. It's used by all management in the organization, for sure.

We don't have any plans to increase usage of the solution.

There is just one person who handles the deployment and maintenance of the solution. He's a programmer.

We didn't have a previous solution. It's always been a Firebox.

I don't believe we had any trouble with the initial setup. 

My gut feeling is that we have seen ROI. It keeps us secure and it allows us to get out to the internet. As opposed to having no protection, it has provided ROI.

I've had no problems with the licensing.

It works for us.

In terms of simplifying any aspects of my job, there's nothing I can specifically say because I've used WatchGuard for so long that I don't have anything to compare it against.

It's our external firewall and VPN solution.

• It allows us to access the outside world.
• It keeps us safe from external threats coming in.
• It allows us to have remote access.

The fact that it just works is one of the most valuable features.

It's fairly intuitive when trying to figure out how to try to get things configured the way you need them. It either works or it doesn't, which means if you have a failure you have a chance to get things fixed.

In addition, I have not noticed any throughput issues at all. The device we have will actually operate at faster technologies than we have available to us.

Management of the solution is great and it also provides us with layered security. It has onboard virus scanning features that allow it to scan before something gets to the host. It will also stop a person from going to a site that is known to be bad.

There is room for improvement on the education side, regarding what does what, rather than just throwing it at a person and assuming they know everything about it. A lot of times, you have to call WatchGuard support to get the solution that will work, rather than their just having it published so that you can fix the problem on your own.

We've been with WatchGuard now for about six years. We've got their XTM firewall.

Their support is awesome. I get a solution to my problem within 24 hours, and if they don't have a solution within 24 hours, they usually have a higher-tier tech working with me until the problem is solved.

The setup was fairly straight forward. We were actually dealing with a failure situation when we received the product. So we had WatchGuard support on the lines from the get-go, helping us get started so that we could get the information. It's something that we would not have been able to do had they not helped.

The main firewall was deployed within a day. The satellites were deployed within a week.

We have two home offices that they're distributed to. Typically, I get the device in, I provision it with the workflows and the exceptions they need, and then they plug it.

I can't say whether Firebox has saved me time. It's a firewall and it does its job. So whether it be WatchGuard, SonicWall, or anybody else, if it does its job and I don't have to look at it, I'm happy. I haven't really looked at a lot of the reporting features. I mainly go in there, figure out where people are having troubles, and fix their problems. 

We were primarily using WatchGuard to control applications that were trying to access offsite network locations.

I am no longer using this solution because it was in my previous job.

This is a feature-rich product.

The most valuable feature is the category control.

This is an easy product to manage.

There should be more reports available on different subjects. There is a set of predefined Dimension reports but there needs to be more available on aspects like security and Wi-Fi.

I have been working with WatchGuard for more than eight years.

It is a stable solution.

We only had a single site, albeit a large one. Scalability was not something that I had to test beyond the one location, but it was good for our environment.

I was in contact with the WatchGuard technical support three or four times. I was satisfied with them and their responses. We had a WatchGuard Gold Support package.

I have also used Sophos Application Control and from my experience, WatchGuard is the better solution. With Sophos, it is not as easy to block categories, and creating firewall rules is much more difficult. 

The initial setup was generally straightforward. We had a little bit of difficulty with our second installation, which was virtualized. It took us two or three days to move from our on-premises deployment to the cloud. It was easy because we already had all of our rules in place. This included testing and not just the implementation.

When we first implemented WatchGuard, we had the help of a solution provider. 

For what we needed, WatchGuard was fine and generally covered our needs. It is easy to maintain and it is a product that I recommend. That said, there is always room for improvement.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We use it internally and we are an MSP for lots of other companies that use it as well. Our primary use case is to block applications. 

It does the job of what it says it does. We set it to what we want it to block and then it blocks it. 

They could expand the amount of applications that are on the list, but it's pretty intensive anyway, so it's pretty good.

I have been using this solution for five years. 

We don't get any issues or bugs with it. The stability is good. 

There are two IT guys who use it in our company. 

I have contacted their technical support and they were very, very good. 

The initial setup was reasonably simple. It took us a couple of hours to get it all set up and working with all of the firewalls set. Our own team did the setup. 

It comes in the main licensing costs from the WatchGuard if you buy the license. I don't know about the prices there.

WatchGuard does what it says it does. Definitely use it. If you want to block applications, then definitely use it. 

I would rate it an eight out of ten. There's going to be newer apps that are probably not going to be blocked straight away, but then they are in time, so it's not really an issue.

We just use it as a secondary WiFi device. We're a small office and we needed to set up a WiFi device for a few of our employees.

The way it saves me time is that there is no maintenance. Once we set it up, there's nothing else for us to do on a regular basis. It might be saving me about an hour a month.

• It has a good signal.
• We haven't had any security issues.
• The usability has been good. We haven't had any problems with it.
• The performance has been good. We haven't had any issues with the performance.

We have been using WatchGuard Firebox for about two years.

We haven't had any issues with it. We set it up and it's been running since we set it up.

We don't have any plans to increase usage. It just services our one office, with eight users.

We have not had to use their technical support.

We did not have a wireless solution before Firebox. The main reason we went with it was the security protocols. They were more robust on this device.

The setup was easy enough. It was more or less plug-and-play. There weren't a lot of settings that we had to run through. The setup wasn't that complicated. It took about two hours and there was just one person involved.

The addition of the WiFi saves us from usage of our data plan. We have had some cost savings there.

The pricing was in line with everyone else; maybe slightly higher. That's why it's not a 10 out of 10.

We're a hospital and we use it for developing our incoming and outgoing policies, and we also use it for VPN.

It helps keep unwanted traffic from coming in, or traffic from going out that we don't want to see out there. If we have unwanted traffic coming in, traffic that we don't need as a facility, then we would be opening ourselves up to security problems and vulnerabilities. It helps because malicious attacks coming in are things I don't have to worry about. So far the WatchGuard has done a good job at blocking all that.

In terms of simplifying my job, the simplest device is one that you can put in place and not have to worry about it. That's the WatchGuard. It's there, it's working. I don't have problems with it so it's "out of sight, out of mind."

It also saves me time, by doing what it's supposed to do. I don't have to mitigate problems that it allowed through. I couldn't tell you how much time it has saved me. It really would depend on what kind of problems I might experience.

The policy monitoring and allowing different traffic flows are the most useful features for us; regulating which traffic comes in and out.

In terms of the throughput and performance, we don't have a problem or any bottleneck there. We downgraded the size of our appliance because we're a small facility, and what we had before was actually too big. The one we are now going with seems to be doing a great job.

The management feature is pretty nice.

I'm not really impressed with the reporting side of it. It may be something I just haven't figured out very well, but it's hard to filter down on reporting of the actual valuable information that you would want. There is a lot of information out there so you have to have some kind of tool capture it and then filter through it. So far, I haven't found the reporting side of the WatchGuard to be that user-friendly. I would definitely like to see better reporting tools from WatchGuard. That would be a very high priority for me.

Also, setting up the site-to-site VPN is pretty easy with the WatchGuard, but the client VPN setup is not very friendly. If you have a client-to-device VPN that you need to set up for a mobile user there are different protocols that they will accept but none of them are a plug-and-play type of option.

The organization has had WatchGuard, different versions, for 12 years. I've used WatchGuard, myself, for about seven years. We got the Firebox approximately three years ago.

The stability is great. I've not had any problems. In three years, we've had to restart the device maybe twice. We've had to restart it more than to clear out any cache, because you don't want anything building up in cache memory. But we've only had two problems where we needed to restart the device. And it actually restarts really fast. It doesn't have much downtime at all.

It's used extensively. This is the only firewall we have in the facility, between the hospital, nursing home, and home health. It handles all the traffic that comes from all three campuses here. I don't see us expanding enough to worry about getting another device. This one seems to be doing exactly what it needs to do.

I've only had to use their technical support twice in quite a few years, so it would be hard for me to rate. But they were responsive when I did have a problem. I haven't had any problems with support at all.

I moved here in 2013 and the company was using the WatchGuard at that point.

With this newest device, the initial setup was pretty straightforward. We were able to copy the configuration from the old device. That's a good thing about it: the configuration file is able to transfer from an old device to a newer device and just continue going. It takes a long time to build up different traffic policies, and to make exceptions for different websites. If you had to do that every time you got a new device, that would be a problem. Luckily, with this, you're able to save your configuration file and transfer it to the new device.

The deployment of this new device took 30 minutes, at most. There are only three people in our IT department, but the deployment only required me to be involved. The other two guys are network technicians. All three of us can go in and modify policies or do whatever we need to do, but it generally doesn't take much maintenance.

I got on the phone with WatchGuard to make sure that everything would transfer over and they assured me that it would. And as far as the switching over to the new device goes, most of the planning required was just letting users know that the internet was going to go down for just a little while. We planned it for a period of slow usage here at the hospital where we could bring it all down, copy the config file, move it to the new device, put it in place, and swap the connections over. It came right up. We had to import the new key and got it activated. But other than that, everything worked.

ROI on this type of solution is a hard number to quantify. We've not had a problem so that in itself is a return on investment. If you don't have an issue how do you calculate what your return of investment would be? How do you quantify the peace of mind? But we've not had to spend a lot of time troubleshooting.

The pricing of WatchGuard is probably a little higher than the SonicWall, but it makes up for it in dependability. It's worth it to me, especially since it's not much higher. For just a little bit higher price you get the dependability of the firewall with the WatchGuard brand. 

And with this appliance you also get a certain number of VPN tunnels. With this one, it's something like 500, not that we would even use that many. Whereas with SonicWall, at the time we were using it, it came with 10 and then anything over that had to be purchased.

Money-wise, it's a one-and-done with the WatchGuard. With SonicWall, there were a few things that you had to pay extra for to get. 

The subscription services with the WatchGuard are pretty nice.

I used the SonicWall at another hospital in southwest Arkansas. 

WatchGuard has come quite a way, as far as the Fireware Web UI goes. The GUI application has become better, making it easier to navigate through setting up policies and setting up VPN tunnels, etc. SonicWall had been there quite a while longer than WatchGuard, in terms of being user-friendly. But I can't complain about the WatchGuard now. When I first moved here, it was very cumbersome to navigate through, but with the Web UI it's really improved.

They do have a client that you can connect to the WatchGuard if you want to use that client. It's still kind of clunky for navigating and I very seldom use it anymore. They call it the WatchGuard System Manager. It's not quite as friendly as the Web UI. It's usable, it's just not really friendly. But the Web UI is very well done.

My advice would be go for it. We've not had any problem with it. We've been very pleased, especially with the newer WatchGuard we've put in place. It's very responsive. It works great. It may have a little bit of a curve on learning it, but once you learn it, it's hard to say you'd want to go back to something else.

It took me a little bit to get used to WatchGuard. I was familiar with SonicWall before I moved into this role. But now that I've used it for almost seven years, I've gotten to know it pretty well and it works great. Once you get used to what I would call the idiosyncrasies of WatchGuard, as opposed to the SonicWall, it's pretty easy to configure. Using the WatchGuard web UI also makes it a lot easier to configure.

It provides us with somewhat layered security. It is the firewall between us and the outside world. With our subscription we do have the Gateway AV, so it does watch for things of that nature. We have certain policies in place that help with the layered part of it. But it's just one of many layers. We have other things in place to help, but it's definitely something I wouldn't want to do without.