Still, the research firm says SonicWall’s cloud security is less mature than its leading competitors, and it’s been slow in providing differentiating new features. The company also enhanced its NSA firewalls by more than doubling the number of SPI connections (up to 4 million) and quadrupling the number of DPI-SSL connections.Īnalysts’ take: Gartner says SonicWall is a good shortlist candidate for value-conscious enterprises seeking more throughput at a reasonable price – customers frequently mention the product’s ability to meet budget and performance requirements, and give good scores for ease of management. Recent developments: SonicWall recently announced the addition of more than 50 new features to its SonicOS, including advanced networking and connectivity capabilities to optimize system availability. The company’s NGFWs are available as hardware and as virtual appliances. Overview: SonicWall Network Security Appliance (NSA) next-generation firewalls leverage the company’s multi-engine Capture Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) and Real-Time Deep Memory Inspection (RTDMI) technology to detect and block threats, and the patented Reassembly-Free Deep Packet Inspection (RFDPI) engine to examine every byte of every packet. NSS Labs gave the two solutions almost identical security effectiveness ratings – 98.8 percent for SonicWall and 98.7 percent for Palo Alto. NSS Labs’ recent testing rated SonicWall’s total cost of ownership per protected Mbps at $4, one of the most cost-effective NGFWs, with Palo Alto following close behind at $7, itself an impressive number for a solution offering market-leading performance. Palo Alto is a better fit when features and performance are more heavily weighted than price.

SonicWall is a particularly good fit for cost-conscious purchasers, though its cloud security is less mature than that of its top competitors, and the company can be slow in introducing feature enhancements and new functionality. The Bottom Lineīoth solutions have received top marks from users and analysts.

What follows is a look at each product’s key features, as well as some important strengths and weaknesses. While each network firewall solution has much to offer any enterprise customer, there are critical differences between the two. Next-generation firewalls (NGFWs) from SonicWall and Palo Alto Networks both made eSecurity Planet’s list of top NGFW vendors.

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