Cisco Secure Firewall vs. SonicWall NSA Series

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Cisco Secure Firewall
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
Cisco Secure Firewall (formerly Cisco Firepower NGFW) is a firewall product that integrates with other Cisco security offerings. It provides Advanced Malware protection, including sandboxing environments and DDoS mitigation. Cisco also offers a Next Generation Intrusion Prevention System, which provides security across cloud environments using techniques like internal network segmentation. The firewall can be managed locally, remotely, and via the cloud. The product is scalable to the scope of…N/A
SonicWall NSA Series
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
The SonicWall NSA Series is the company's mid-range next generation firewall (NGFW).N/A
Pricing
Cisco Secure FirewallSonicWall NSA Series
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Cisco Secure FirewallSonicWall NSA Series
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details——
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Cisco Secure FirewallSonicWall NSA Series
Considered Both Products
Cisco Secure Firewall
Chose Cisco Secure Firewall
The other products do well with simplifying some of the tasks such as rule creation where it would create rules based on a zone.
SonicWall NSA Series

No answer on this topic

Features
Cisco Secure FirewallSonicWall NSA Series
Firewall
Comparison of Firewall features of Product A and Product B
Cisco Secure Firewall
7.8
126 Ratings
10% below category average
SonicWall NSA Series
8.3
6 Ratings
4% below category average
Identification Technologies7.9110 Ratings7.46 Ratings
Visualization Tools7.0111 Ratings8.46 Ratings
Content Inspection7.8108 Ratings6.45 Ratings
Policy-based Controls8.4116 Ratings9.26 Ratings
Active Directory and LDAP8.099 Ratings7.65 Ratings
Firewall Management Console7.5115 Ratings9.46 Ratings
Reporting and Logging7.5117 Ratings8.26 Ratings
VPN7.9102 Ratings9.86 Ratings
High Availability8.3111 Ratings9.46 Ratings
Stateful Inspection8.3107 Ratings8.45 Ratings
Proxy Server6.956 Ratings7.01 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Cisco Secure FirewallSonicWall NSA Series
Small Businesses
pfSense
pfSense
Score 9.4 out of 10
pfSense
pfSense
Score 9.4 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
pfSense
pfSense
Score 9.4 out of 10
pfSense
pfSense
Score 9.4 out of 10
Enterprises
Palo Alto Networks Virtualized Next-Generation Firewalls - VM Series
Palo Alto Networks Virtualized Next-Generation Firewalls - VM Series
Score 9.5 out of 10
Palo Alto Networks Virtualized Next-Generation Firewalls - VM Series
Palo Alto Networks Virtualized Next-Generation Firewalls - VM Series
Score 9.5 out of 10
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User Ratings
Cisco Secure FirewallSonicWall NSA Series
Likelihood to Recommend
7.8
(136 ratings)
8.4
(6 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.3
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(2 ratings)
9.0
(2 ratings)
Availability
9.1
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
5.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
7.3
(78 ratings)
9.0
(2 ratings)
Implementation Rating
9.0
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
8.2
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
5.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Cisco Secure FirewallSonicWall NSA Series
Likelihood to Recommend
Cisco
Kind of going back to my previous point, segregating networks, it's super useful for that. It's easy to look through firewall logs and see what's going on in your network. Also like intrusion detection and prevention. So great security products for the network.
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SonicWall
This is a higher-end firewall, built for a medium to large business. It handles traffic and scanning and protection well but it would be a bit of a budget-buster and probably overkill for a small to (barely) medium sized business. SonicWall makes SoHo devices for those use cases and they would be more appropriate.
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Pros
Cisco
  • Gives detailed information on what user is utilizing the VPN such as Ip address and the origin of country for the Ip address.
  • The graphical user interface is detailed and organized, a good level of intuition.
  • It provides troubleshooting tools such as packet tracer, that allows individuals to see where the packets are being accepted or dropped.
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SonicWall
  • Relatively inexpensive compared to some of the higher-end products, like Palo Alto Networks.
  • Easy to set up, as the SonicWall NSA interface is consistent across all models.
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Cons
Cisco
  • I have one argument, failover scenario. It's not quite easy. Failover scenario of firewalls. It's sometimes not quite easy to know the issue. But if we open a tech case, a technical case to Cisco, Cisco will help us, it's a little bit con, but we are happy with this product.
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SonicWall
  • Ideal with smaller businesses. Would have to examine for more complex needs of larger businesses.
  • Scalability might be an issue for super large organizations.
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Likelihood to Renew
Cisco
It works really well. We can do most anything we want or need to with it, and you don’t have to have a doctorate or multiple certs to necessarily figure it out. The thing that would probably have to happen to make us switch would be if we just got priced out - Cisco’s more powerful and higher bandwidth models cost a pretty penny.
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SonicWall
No answers on this topic
Usability
Cisco
Solution is highly effective, offers a lot of features with constant improvements and additions of new features over time. It's relatively easy to get familiar with the system, especially if transitioning from adaptive security appliances. If this is not the case, as for learnability there's a learning curve but once learned it is relatively easy to remember the details about the system even after a period of non-use
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SonicWall
There is room for improvement when it comes to learning the UI, but the UI is overall pretty good. It doesn't take long to learn if you are famaliar with firewalls.
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Reliability and Availability
Cisco
We have had really good success with Cisco Secure Firewall when it comes to availability. Even when we’ve had temporary issues with one appliance or the other, or with the Firewall Management Center, it has stayed up and defended our network diligently. We even had an issue where the licensing got disabled for multiple days, and it kept spinning like a top
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SonicWall
No answers on this topic
Performance
Cisco
no slowing down, vpn is working fast
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SonicWall
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Cisco
Firewall support is professional just like any other technology Cisco sells. From answering simple questions to bringing out outages affecting a large population of our workforce, Cisco support is always courteous, professional, and communicates with our team to keep our request on their radar. Some of the brightest people I've met are from Cisco support both in IQ and EQ which shows the talent Cisco is able to onboard to their team.
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SonicWall
Most of the time, calling SonicWall NSA Support, you get an expert who can help resolve your issues. RMAs are pretty easy once they determine there is an issue with the hardware. Support is available 24x7, which makes emergency calls easy. The only downside is the support engineers may have thick accents; however, their expertise more than makes up for any language barriers.
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In-Person Training
Cisco
very good
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SonicWall
No answers on this topic
Online Training
Cisco
was a good training but questions was answered not so good. Training was "Fundamentals of Cisco Firewall Threat Defense and Intrusion Prevention (SFWIPF)".
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SonicWall
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
Cisco
Our initial implementation was aided by Cisco's professional services and was excellent. The engineer was very knowledgeable and helped us work through issues while building out our new internet security edge Part of this involved tools to migrate the firewall configuration from old to new.
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SonicWall
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Cisco
Cisco Secure Firewall works better with the Cisco ecosystem when we can utilize it and feels beefy enough when we utilize it in the data center. The Fortinet we have found are great, small cost boxes for remote offices with a better UI then Cisco Secure Firewalls. The feature set included with the firewalls feels similar from a security point of view.
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SonicWall
We compared the FortiGate to Sonicwall and continued with Sonicwall as we were a mid-size school where the Sonicwall was performing adequately, and the learning curve was steep to switch platforms. The Sonicwall offered everything the FortiGate did, and was not as costly, both in the appliance and in licensing.
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Contract Terms and Pricing Model
Cisco
was not involved
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SonicWall
No answers on this topic
Scalability
Cisco
you can choose up to 50 devices i think thats enough for our organization
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SonicWall
No answers on this topic
Professional Services
Cisco
was not involved
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SonicWall
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
Cisco
  • I think it's all been positive, except for the fact, like I was mentioning before, when we had problems with the initial integration, we were trying to migrate over to the new FMC and from the 1500 to the 1600, we had some downtime during that time and we had to do some escalations within Cisco Tech. They were very helpful, but I think that was the biggest thing, and that's long since been resolved. So I don't really have any other thing, anything negative to say at this point. I think it's all positive.
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SonicWall
  • Was affordable, allowing for advanced routing and security.
  • Enabled us to build VPNs without purchasing additional services
  • Was simple enough to manage in house without external support.
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