Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review Untangle is very strong in the "traditional" sense of security. That means an edge appliance that either works with an existing router or is the router itself (recommended). This approach has also been adapted well to cloud environments in order to protect virtual servers and VDI workstations. As mentioned earlier, many schools are using cloud-based filtering for their 1:1 solutions for their students. This is an area where Untangle is unable to serve. Some have used an instance of Untangle in the cloud with VPN to serve their remote needs, but it is not the same as solutions that are designed for cloud-based filtering of devices without VPN.
Read full review Pros 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. Read full review Web Filtering is strong, and can also do application fingerprinting to allow Facebook, but not Facebook games. Secondly, a separate partition called a "rack" can be set up to give one subnet or group of users different web filtering policies than another. For example, teachers would get more freedom to browse the web than students at a school. Built-in SD-WAN connectivity as part of your license. IPSEC tunnel creation is also amazingly easy. Will install on any x86 hardware created in the last 5-10 years. Ram and processor requirements per user are very low. Reporting is phenomenal, however you can get death by details very easily. Read full review Cons Ideal with smaller businesses. Would have to examine for more complex needs of larger businesses. Scalability might be an issue for super large organizations. Read full review The full suite can be expensive for business but will be powerful enough. The full suite for home or small office isn't that bad of a price but may be out of reach for most home users but remember the basics are FREE so anyone can get started with it. I would like to see it promoted for mid to large businesses as I think it can handle it. Read full review Likelihood to Renew Service renewal is in Feb 2021. We will be renewing!
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review I haven't used them much, but they did answer my question quickly.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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 NG Firewall was much more friendly in terms of layout and ease of use, the apps section is familiar to anyone and the config while in a sort of odd order is very clearly laid out. I also appreciate Untangle's endless educational videos and the support can't be beat. Overall it was more of a complete package
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review The positive is the savings in time the IT department has recouped by not having to continuously clean and maintain end point computers. Not to mention helping end user use their time more wisely by not wasting time on non-work related web activities. The only negative is complaints from end users about the restrictions. Read full review ScreenShots