SonicWall NSa Reviews

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. 

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.

SonicWall prevents and restricts access to websites for employees as well as anyone who comes into the office.

Most firewalls have active/active high-availability mode. If I'm paying for two firewalls, why shouldn't AI utilize both? It would be better if SonicWall came with n active/active feature instead of active/standby.

I've been working with SonicWall NSa for more than five years.

SonicWall NSa is simple to scale. You can easily add more firewalls to the cluster.

SonicWall's sales support is much better than other vendors'. 

Deploying SonicWall NSa is straightforward. A new user can easily configure the firewall. You can usually complete the deployment within a day. Setting up the prerequisites takes about two hours and then it takes some time to deploy the policies. That varies depending on what the customer wants. 

Maintenance is primarily configuration-related stuff, and our customers have their own engineers, but we give them advice. One engineer can maintain the solution.

You don't need to pay an annual fee, but any cost matters to the customer. Let's say SonicWall is giving me a firewall at a certain price, while a FortiGate firewall costs the same but offers added features like free SSL and active/active. Then customers might think it's better to buy a FortiGate.

Competitors provide SSL encryption licenses for free, whereas SonicWall only provides two licenses by default, but you have to pay for the rest of the licenses.
However, when most customers go beyond 20 or so users with SSL licenses, they usually go with a dedicated appliance, so a firewall should provide at least 20 to 25 SSL licenses for free.

I rate SonicWall NSa eight out of 10.

SonicWall suits our business, also cost-wise, and commercial-wise. It is in a feasible range for our organization.

We like the features, but the main thing is from a commercial and cost perspective it is very good.

The interface is user-friendly.

Vendor support needs improvement. The frequency of time and support should be increased.

From a vendor perspective, we were expecting more support.

When we experience a technical issue, it should be rectified immediately. We are facing a delay with response and resolution.

I have been using SonicWall NSA for approximately eight years.

SonicWall is stable.

This is a scalable solution.

We have approximately 2,000 users.

We are facing some issues with compatibility. We have moved to the latest version.

 Previously, we were using another version and the 5000 model of NSA.

It is fine. It is user-friendly.

It took a month and a half to deploy

We have a dedicated team here. They handle all of our deployment and troubleshooting.

We have a team of six to seven administrators to deploy and maintain this solution.

SonicWall is not an expensive solution.

I would recommend this version of SonicWall to others who are interested in implementing this solution. This latest version is quite fine.

I would rate SonicWall NSA an eight out of ten.

In the main office we have set up a SonicWall TZ device, and then from the branches, we have set up a lower branch model, the SonicWall, and then created site-to-site VPN. We then deployed the VoIP between those branches to the main office. We also deployed the firewall and the URL filtering between sites and the main office. So, we just enabled and created the different DMZ zones from the devices.

We have utilized all the features. The most valuable are the:

• URL filtering by category,
• DMZ zoning
• Load balancing
• The site-to-site VPN.
  

Because this is an old device, the throughput needs to improve. Right now, the only problem is that since it eight years devices had to keep up with the latest technology. Most of the devices are now linked to the plants. That is one thing that can be improved. 

We also need to increase the throughput because the other devices are slower. The throughput will become slow. Since we're using VoIP, it tends to affect the voice quality. Even if you're using a quality service, it tends to decrease.

We're going to replace them. Since this is already eight years old, so we're going to replace the hardware but with a different brand.

We have been using this solution for ten years. 

It's deployed from the main office to the site office. So, we're using site-to-site VPN between project sites since we are a construction company.

There is no problem with the stability. Since the very start, I have not experienced any problem yet until recently during the quarantine, but the problem is now resolved. Since the requirement is to have a voice quality, we're using a platform like MS Team, Zoom, and it does not perform well when using those applications.

We have around 100 to 200-people using it. Most of them are users. It's on around 10 projects or 10 branches.

We only require one staff member for the deployment and maintenance. 

I have never called support. I only called when we first purchased it, if I had a question. I have not found any difficulties when contacting them, or just because I contacted only lower support. Then since it is a user-friendly solution, I didn't experience any problems with the device.

We used Fortinet and Juniper NetScreen, but we already replaced them.

After seven years or five years, the performance degraded. Then we sourced from our local suppliers and got a recommendation from them and er also checked IT Central Station to compare each product. 

It's not hard to configure, it's user-friendly. It's very user-friendly. It's just the performance that's an issue because it has already aged out. It is already old.

The quality and security support should be improved in the next release.

I would rate SonicWall NSA an eight out of ten. 

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. 

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.

We primarily use the solution for security. It's used as a firewall.

The solution is very stable.

It's an excellent product for an SMB.

The filtering is excellent.

The solution is quite stable.

We found the initial setup to be straightforward.

You can scale the solution to a certain extent.

The product likely isn't a good fit for a large organization.

They need to elaborate on their business from a technical point of view. 

I've been working with the solution for about four or more years at this point. It's been a while. 

The product scales quite well. There are no bugs. It's not glitchy. It doesn't crash or freeze. I find it to be reliable. 

You can scale the solution. We haven't used it beyond 1,000 to 1,500 users. Beyond that, I'm not sure what it can handle. I haven't really tried to scale it too much.

I've also used Palo Alto. I used it at my previous organization.

We found the initial setup to be very straightforward. It's not overly complex or difficult. A company should have any problem with the process.

We're a customer and an end-user. We don't have a business relationship with SonicWall.

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten. While we've been mostly happy with it, it's more for SMBs as opposed to larger organizations.

I'd recommend the product to small organizations for sure.