Fortinet FortiGate vs. SonicWall NSA Series

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
FortiGate
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
FortiNet FortiGate is a firewall option with high integrability. It offers a variety of deployment options and next-gen firewall capabilities, including integration with IaaS cloud platforms and public cloud environments.N/A
SonicWall NSA Series
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
The SonicWall NSA Series is the company's mid-range next generation firewall (NGFW).N/A
Pricing
Fortinet FortiGateSonicWall NSA Series
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
FortiGateSonicWall NSA Series
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsFortiGate pricing starts at $250 for home office use, up to $300,000 for large enterprise appliances. Must contact sales team for pricing.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Fortinet FortiGateSonicWall NSA Series
Considered Both Products
FortiGate
Chose Fortinet FortiGate
Fortinet FortiGate is above other products in the market.
Chose Fortinet FortiGate
Sonic wall as a firewall also gives us its main function as the Fortinet FortiGate. Sonic Wall is best suited when you want to use it to connect your cloud environment to your private on-premise network. But on reputation most vendors prefer or recommend Fortinet Fortigate if …
Chose Fortinet FortiGate
FortiGates are more professional and offer a robust command line.
SonicWall NSA Series
Chose SonicWall NSA Series
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 …
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Fortinet FortiGateSonicWall NSA Series
Firewall
Comparison of Firewall features of Product A and Product B
Fortinet FortiGate
9.3
38 Ratings
9% above category average
SonicWall NSA Series
7.1
4 Ratings
18% below category average
Identification Technologies9.736 Ratings5.04 Ratings
Visualization Tools8.736 Ratings8.04 Ratings
Content Inspection8.937 Ratings6.03 Ratings
Policy-based Controls9.638 Ratings8.04 Ratings
Active Directory and LDAP9.237 Ratings4.03 Ratings
Firewall Management Console9.638 Ratings9.04 Ratings
Reporting and Logging8.238 Ratings7.04 Ratings
VPN9.838 Ratings9.04 Ratings
High Availability9.733 Ratings7.04 Ratings
Stateful Inspection9.636 Ratings8.03 Ratings
Proxy Server8.927 Ratings00 Ratings
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Fortinet FortiGateSonicWall NSA Series
Small Businesses
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Score 9.2 out of 10
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Score 9.2 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
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Score 9.3 out of 10
Next-Generation Firewalls - PA Series
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Score 9.3 out of 10
Enterprises
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Score 9.3 out of 10
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Score 9.3 out of 10
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User Ratings
Fortinet FortiGateSonicWall NSA Series
Likelihood to Recommend
9.5
(65 ratings)
8.0
(4 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.9
(4 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
10.0
(6 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Availability
10.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.6
(26 ratings)
9.0
(2 ratings)
In-Person Training
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.0
(4 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Configurability
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
7.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
9.8
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Fortinet FortiGateSonicWall NSA Series
Likelihood to Recommend
Fortinet
For FortiGate Firewall, the basic functionality and requirement is met easily as Fortigate is among market leaders in NGFW. There are some extra points that inclined us to use Fortigate as our main Firewall. [Fortinet]Fortigate has a very well refined and functional SD-WAN solution when it comes to load balancing for normal Internet Traffic. SD-WAN - Load balancing of Internet traffic is a USP of Fortigate and makes it stand tall in the competition. Be it 3 or more Internet Links, multiple Subnets/segments of users to distribute and bandwidth load balancing for links and users. SLA based monitoring of Internet Links / MPLS links, makes it even better to choose the links on the basis of performance (Latency, packet loss, Jitter etc). SSL VPN configuration - The deep CLI-level debugging is also very helpful in troubleshooting. Type of tunnel can be easily configured - Full Tunnel or Split Tunnel for SSL. Though, I think Fortigate is one of the best options for small and mid-sized organizations, there are some areas for improvement. First, the CLI interface is very hard to adapt as the commands and directory hierarchy is very different for common syntax and standards.
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SonicWall
SonicWall NSA is best suited for small to mid-size companies or small to medium K-12 school districts. It's less appropriate for larger businesses and schools. This is due to their ease of use and well-rounded feature set but lacks in advanced configuration, performance, and reliability.
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Pros
Fortinet
  • It is the most reliable NGFW that we have ever been touch with it.
  • You can easily upgrade the firewall cluster firmware without user attention!!!
  • User IDentity based feature is fantastic and intrusion prevention just works with least false-positive possible.
  • Very reachfull and intuitive GUI, just love it
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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
Fortinet
  • When we switched to Fortinet Fortigate, it took some time getting used to and become familiar with the new interface. Being used to strictly command-line interfaces, a full GUI-based firewall was something brand new. Careful planning had to be done when creating rules to ensure we didn't miss anything. However, once we got used to the new GUI interface, going from one Fortinet product to another was simple, as Fortinet used the same interface for all of its devices.
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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
Fortinet
Fortinet's products have kept improving with new software releases and they continue to deliver great value. Their support is also very good. I believe that as a small enterprise, their products have given us competitive advantage delivering features and functionality that enable us to innovate and do things better. They also continue to be a leader in the markets they serve.
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SonicWall
No answers on this topic
Usability
Fortinet
The user interface shared among many simultaneous users is very easy to get around. With shared favorites among users, most tasks are easily bookmarked and can quickly be found and edited. Their strategy for web filter integration is easy to understand and manage as well. With some general direction, setup and maintenance were easy to do and easy to teach others in the organization to do as well.
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SonicWall
No answers on this topic
Reliability and Availability
Fortinet
We had didn't any hardware failures at our two main office locations and upgraded our units last year after using them for about 5-6 years
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SonicWall
No answers on this topic
Performance
Fortinet
Good performance and really good integration. We have integration with Microsoft AD.
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SonicWall
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Fortinet
We live in Turkey. Fortinet's Turkey office [dealt] constantly with us in our every problem or our experience. In addition, global support teams also supported every ticket we opened in every problem we encountered. They support innovative approaches and evaluate and offer solutions. In this context, they were very supportive of the problems we encountered in previous versions.
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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
Fortinet
I received it a couple years afters use it and it was just to confirm my knowledge about the tool.
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SonicWall
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
Fortinet
Make sure that you have the most current version of FortiOS. Make sure all Fortigates are on the same version
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SonicWall
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Fortinet
[Fortinet] FortiGate is not only cost effective but it gives the comprehensive security against the APT attacks and gives the complete traffic visibility and granular control. You can easily create the VDOMs (Virtual firewall) within a Fortigate firewall and customize the dashboard as per your requirement if you have multiple VDOMs within a single firewall.
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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.
Read full review
Scalability
Fortinet
My environments are pretty small (less than 100 users per location) so no issues here.
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SonicWall
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
Fortinet
  • Fortigates have an interesting bundle model for support and subscription services that make it an attractive option to deploy Firewall, IDS, Ant-virus, anti-SPAM in a single device. The cost of the bundle is pretty much what you pay for the device, not requiring huge expenditures on it's time to renew the hardware.
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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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