pfSense vs. SonicWall NSA Series

pfSense

pfSense

72 Reviews and Ratings

SonicWall NSA Series

SonicWall NSA Series

43 Reviews and Ratings

Overview
Product	Rating	Most Used By	Product Summary	Starting Price
pfSense	Score 9.9 out of 10	N/A	pfSense is a firewall and load management product available through the open source pfSense Community Edition, as well as a the licensed edition, pfSense Plus (formerly known as pfSense Enterprise). The solution provides combined firewall, VPN, and router functionality, and can be deployed through the cloud (AWS or Azure), or on-premises with a Netgate appliance. It as scalable capacities, with functionality for SMBs. As a firewall, pfSense offers Stateful packet inspection, concurrent…	$179 per appliance
SonicWall NSA Series	Score 8.5 out of 10	N/A	The SonicWall NSA Series is the company's mid-range next generation firewall (NGFW).	N/A

Pricing

pfSense

SonicWall NSA Series

Editions & Modules

SG-1100: $179
per appliance
SG-2100: $229
per appliance
SG-3100: $399
per appliance
SG-5100: $699
per appliance
XG-7100-DT: $899
per appliance
XG-7100-1U: $999
per appliance
XG-1537: $1,949
per appliance
XG-1541: $2,649
per appliance

No answers on this topic

Offerings

Pricing Offerings
pfSense	SonicWall NSA Series
Free Trial
No	No
Free/Freemium Version
No	No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No	No

Entry-level Setup Fee

No setup fee

No setup fee

Additional Details

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More Pricing Information

Community Pulse
	pfSense	SonicWall NSA Series
Considered Both Products	pfSense Pablo Mojica Systems Administrator Chose pfSense PFSense is not a fully featured and supported enterprise-grade solution; however, it does offer a lot of similar functionality at a fraction of the cost for more minor requirements. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose pfSense Fortigate offers an extensive set of features including the Unified Threat Management and a lot of FortiGuard services . pfSense is extremely modular, probably because of its open source "flavour"m but relies on community support. Fortinet ROI depends on the reduced … Incentivized Helpful? AB Ansley Barnes Lead Network Engineer Chose pfSense PfSense beats all other solutions at its price point, hands-down. You can get more features with far less performance, or same performance for much higher cost. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose pfSense pfSense does almost all what the other brands do and the CE Edition is free even if complete. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose pfSense Meraki has a unified management login for all devices, which is nice. It also has decent content filtering, both areas where pfSense is weaker. Where pfSense far ouclasses Meraki is in the ease of use and the other width of features. These include features such as better VPN … Incentivized Helpful? Mario Matinelli Director Chose pfSense Overall, pfSense is the most complete solution in terms of features included even though it currently lack of a centralised management interface.The Ubiquiti firewall offering is often appealing being well integrated within the Ubiquiti dashboard and it is often a solution of … Incentivized Helpful? Pretty Varughese IT Executive Chose pfSense We were using Sophos XG Firewall in our environment before but we need a product that is customizable & provides low cost high security features. pfSense provided us high security features with customizable options as it's kernel is based on freeBSD. Incentivized Helpful? Chirag Deol Chief Marketing Officer Chose pfSense We were using Sophos XG firewall in our environment but when it comes to cost it's more expensive with limited features. After using [pfSense] we are getting more security features at less cost. After pfSense provides a bundle of security features such as anti-spamming, … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose pfSense pfSense offers more options and scales very easily. Incentivized Helpful? James Freeman IT Consultant Chose pfSense pfSense is just a more flexible, lower-cost solution—it can be installed (if you wish) on just about any x86 hardware or even virtual machines - the community edition is free and so enables rapid prototyping and low-cost prototyping and lab build out—something that isn't … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose pfSense pfSense is a lot cheaper and has higher firewall throughput per dollar than "enterprise" network appliances. It's also significantly easier to configure and learn. It may not have some of the "enterprise" features or the support level that someone like Cisco has, but for small … Incentivized Helpful? Christian Shaheen Owner Chose pfSense pfSense itself is free and can be installed on just about any hardware so from a hardware cost perspective it can beat out anybody. In terms of features it's above many pro-sumer/small business solutions like Ubiquiti. It can't really stand against high-end gear like Cisco but … Incentivized Helpful? Allan Leung IT & T Manager Chose pfSense First of all, I don't need to be a Cisco professional to manage VPN, load balance, multiple WAN/LAN, Firewall and etc. pfSense has an easy-to-use web interface and I can do everything and add packaged add-on services. Moreover, for Small & Medium Enterprise, IT budget is … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose pfSense Pfsense seemed to always be cheaper and just as good as its competitors. Incentivized Helpful? Jay Moore CIO Chose pfSense I have not seen a single thing that these other products do that pfSense does not. In fact, the performance/throughput of pfSense is better in my opinion. Incentivized Helpful? Aaron Smith Information Technology Manager Chose pfSense While you can get the performance out of other products, pfSense offers the unique ability to put other services on the same device. Products such as Untagle's NG Firewall and SonicWall's TZ series offer cost effective options for firewall and VPN services, having incoming load … Incentivized Helpful? germary zambrano jefe del departamento de informatica Chose pfSense pfSense is a new and innovative platform that has learned from the errors of older systems, which helps it cover the needs that aren't covered by Smoothwall. Incentivized Helpful? Jim Rubenstein Chief Technology Officer Chose pfSense Before pfSense we were using consumer and small business rated network appliances from Linksys, Cisco, Buffalo and Netgear. We were replacing them on average of every 6-12 months because they'd fail or would offer poor wifi availability. Switching to pfSense allowed us to use … Incentivized Helpful? Victor Arana IT Manager Chose pfSense It's an open source solution can support from 50 to 700 user without sweating and with the half of the standard bundle investment that will take to deploy a Fortigate UTM, or a Cisco ASA, also a Sophos UTM that are quite remarkable units but to pFSense saves you money and will … Incentivized Helpful? Paolo Daniele Senior Network Engineer Chose pfSense Real competition was between Pfsense and OpnSense that integrates first the bootstrap Twitter framework. But with OpSense there are configurations that create some problems with a specific client (we've experienced that by creating an IPSec tunnel both with OpSense and … Incentivized Helpful? Rikia Kosaka Senior Systems Engineer Chose pfSense I've used a number of routers like Cisco, Sonicwall, Juniper, Home based routers, etc. pfSense is like most routers but with the benefit of load balancing and multi-wan. Well many support multi-wan but load balancing is usually a separate device like an BIGiP F5 or Cisco CSS. Incentivized Helpful? Jim Nitterauer Senior Systems Administrator Chose pfSense Neither of the Cisco devices are designed to compete. pfSense does tons more. Incentivized Helpful? Richard Kiernan CTO and co founder Chose pfSense pfSense was chosen due to its excellent community support and forums Incentivized Helpful? LG Luiz Eduardo Garcia System Administrator Chose pfSense Both products listed above, are very great solutions, but payed ones. If you are looking for open source firewall solution, pfSense is the one. Based on FreeBSD, it has strong security features and is very easy to deploy, configure and manage. pfSense also plays network simple … Incentivized Helpful? JR Jerry Riggin President Chose pfSense Cisco is too complex to configure unless you are a security guru. Seme with Fortinet Incentivized Helpful?	SonicWall NSA Series Verified User Anonymous Chose SonicWall NSA Series Palo Alto appears to have a better product portfolio that allows you to have everything integrated and therefore, have a single pane of glass. However, Palo Alto is much more expensive than SonicWall NSA Series, so it was hard for us to justify the higher price. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose SonicWall NSA Series The SonicWall NSA is a lot more fluid and much less clunky than a Watchguard firewall. The Watchguard is ok for a small business-- you can buy them at retail outlets. But as you can see above, this model of Watchguard Firebox has been discontinued. The NSA classes are a … Incentivized Helpful? GJ Geoff Johnson Network System Administrator 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 … Incentivized Helpful? KM Kenny McGarrity IT Infrastructure Manager Chose SonicWall NSA Series SonicWall NSA series interface is way better than either Watchguard or Checkpoint. Even though people want to dismiss SonicWall NSA, they have the advanced features of its competitors, but with the easy interface. With all things being equal, I consider Palo Alto Networks to be … Incentivized Helpful? Mike Narumiya President, Principal Chose SonicWall NSA Series Looked at a variety of offerings from Cisco. For larger organizations, a good route to go. For smaller that need just a little bit more than residential equipment, or even to have the some solid performance and configurations (smaller businesses) Sonicwall is a great way to … Incentivized Helpful?

Features

pfSense

SonicWall NSA Series

Firewall

Comparison of Firewall features of Product A and Product B
	pfSense 7.6 Ratings 13% below category average	SonicWall NSA Series 8.3 Ratings 4% below category average
Identification Technologies	5.00 Ratings	8.80 Ratings
Visualization Tools	7.00 Ratings	9.00 Ratings
Content Inspection	4.00 Ratings	5.00 Ratings
Policy-based Controls	10.00 Ratings	9.90 Ratings
Active Directory and LDAP	7.00 Ratings	6.90 Ratings
Firewall Management Console	9.50 Ratings	9.00 Ratings
Reporting and Logging	8.00 Ratings	8.90 Ratings
VPN	10.00 Ratings	10.00 Ratings
High Availability	10.00 Ratings	9.90 Ratings
Stateful Inspection	7.00 Ratings	7.00 Ratings
Proxy Server	6.10 Ratings	7.00 Ratings

Best Alternatives
	pfSense	SonicWall NSA Series
Small Businesses	Sophos UTM Score 8.1 out of 10	pfSense Score 9.9 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies	Quantum Firewalls and Security Gateways Score 9.6 out of 10	Quantum Firewalls and Security Gateways Score 9.6 out of 10
Enterprises	Palo Alto Networks Virtualized Next-Generation Firewalls - VM Series Score 10.0 out of 10	Palo Alto Networks Virtualized Next-Generation Firewalls - VM Series Score 10.0 out of 10
All Alternatives	View all alternatives	View all alternatives

User Ratings
	pfSense	SonicWall NSA Series
Likelihood to Recommend	9.6 (0 ratings)	9.0 (0 ratings)
Usability	10.0 (0 ratings)	10.0 (0 ratings)
Support Rating	- (0 ratings)	9.0 (0 ratings)

User Testimonials
	pfSense	SonicWall NSA Series
Likelihood to Recommend	pfSense is incredibly budget friendly and capable for organizations of all sizes. My specific scenario, working for a non-profit organization, requires budget consciences decisions without compromising security and function. pfSense has helped tremendously in accomplishing this. It specifically tackles advanced routing, static routing, remote access, intrusion prevention, in a single platform, mostly available for free. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	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. Incentivized GJ Geoff Johnson Network System Administrator Read full review
Pros	Easy to use. Good user interface design! Easy to understand and easy to set up. Lower hardware requirement. 3 years ago, we used an old PC to run it. Now, we have changed to a router device with Celeron CPU and 8GB RAM. It runs smoothly with a 1000G commercial broadband. Incentivized Allan Leung IT & T Manager Read full review	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. Incentivized KM Kenny McGarrity IT Infrastructure Manager Read full review
Cons	There is no API for making changes. This can be a hindrance in environments where auto-deploying something needs firewall rules or HAProxy configs updated. Since all settings are stored in an XML file and then configs are generated from that, even manually updating config files cannot be done. Beware that some network cards can have issues. pfSense is based on FreeBSD, so it's best to look on their compatibility list before deploying. Incentivized Aaron Smith Information Technology Manager Read full review	Ideal with smaller businesses. Would have to examine for more complex needs of larger businesses. Scalability might be an issue for super large organizations. Mike Narumiya President, Principal Read full review
Usability	pfSense can be a very elementary firewall but can also be as comples as you want, according your needs. I'd always reccomend a HA solution when used in a company and, for bigger companies, commercial license is recommended. It's also very adptable to everyone's needs. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	The usability takes a bit of training, like any firewall, but I've found that showing even Tier 1 helpdesk how to do basic things has been easy. We have entry-level IT technicians performing white-listing, IP entries, VPN access and LDAP functions, to name a few tasks. The menus in the GUI are pretty straight forward. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Support Rating	pfSense+ basic provides "As Available" email support. pfSense+ Pro offers 24 hr turn around email support. pfSense+ Enterprise offers 24/7 phone support. Incentivized Jerry Riggin President Read full review	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. Incentivized KM Kenny McGarrity IT Infrastructure Manager Read full review
Alternatives Considered	PFSense is not a fully featured and supported enterprise-grade solution; however, it does offer a lot of similar functionality at a fraction of the cost for more minor requirements. Pablo Mojica Systems Administrator Read full review	The SonicWall NSA is a lot more fluid and much less clunky than a Watchguard firewall. The Watchguard is ok for a small business-- you can buy them at retail outlets. But as you can see above, this model of Watchguard Firebox has been discontinued. The NSA classes are a more high-end and functional business-class firewall. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Return on Investment	pfSense has only had positive impacts on our company. We are not a huge company so not having to buy licenses to get all these features have been excellent. I was not around when our current sysadmin decided to use pfSense, but I am assuming from day one it was probably a 100% return on investment since it does everything we need it to and it was open source software. Incentivized Charles R. Coggins III Technical Support Specialist Read full review	It is a firewall appliance at an affordable price compared to other firewall vendors. It is reliable and thus, allows our business to operate without any hiccups. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
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