Sonic Wall vs Untangle

[tangledtech]

I am not going anywhere - Untangle is my first and only choice but I want to know what are the differences, more specifically with the pricing but I would love an over all rough comparison if anyone can provide that.

I have a potential new business customer who received a quote from a very large company and I am going to beat that quote but that company was going to use Sonic wall and I can't understand how the quoted $890 annual fee for Sonic Wall Total Secure Advanced is going to work out in their case... I don't know if Sonic wall goes by 'seats' or if that is an unlimited usage, etc.

Anyone have any info to share on how it works?

[sky-knight]

Sonicwall is vastly less expensive per node, but also affords much less visibility.

The Sonicwall is better for the MSP, because you have to be trained to administrate it. Untangle is better for the business owner, because he gets reports he can actually read along with a UI designed this side of the millennium mark to make changes with little or no support.

There was a time, in the past when Untangle was actually cheaper than Sonicwall per user, I miss those days. Today? Functionally Untangle cannot beat sonicwall, unless you can get the client to bite on the TCO argument. Untangle is cheaper in the long run, but the savings lie in the hours to support the solution. Depending on the MSP agreement this might not mean savings for the customer at all, and therefore be worthless.

Sonicwall also gets much more expensive than Untangle in the class of hardware capable of gigabit filtration, so bandwidth is a concern here too.

[BlackBone]

untangle is on 1st priority

[MechanicalThinker]

Sonicwall has lost its edge under Dell, imho.

I'd say that from the old school security appliance vendors Checkpoint and Fortigate are the best.

And I must admit that I have started to quite like the new v18 Sophos XG Firewall too. In many respects even more than Untangle. Lately I have felt a nagging feeling about all the Untangle shortcomings versus the competition.

[cdmarshall]

Sonicwall has lost its edge under Dell, imho.

I'd say that from the old school security appliance vendors Checkpoint and Fortigate are the best.

And I must admit that I have started to quite like the new v18 Sophos XG Firewall too. In many respects even more than Untangle. Lately I have felt a nagging feeling about all the Untangle shortcomings versus the competition.

Dell hasn't owned sonic wall in 5 years its been an independent company

[tjk]

Sonicwall has lost its edge under Dell, imho.

I'd say that from the old school security appliance vendors Checkpoint and Fortigate are the best.

And I must admit that I have started to quite like the new v18 Sophos XG Firewall too. In many respects even more than Untangle. Lately I have felt a nagging feeling about all the Untangle shortcomings versus the competition.

Been a big fan of Astaro and now Sophos for awhile, until they killed off Astaro. The XG pricing just doesn't make sense to us as an MSP, and they keep changing it every few months. We run on our own hardware and the move to cores is silly imo.

[MechanicalThinker]

Dell hasn't owned sonic wall in 5 years its been an independent company

I think you're right, I totally forgot that they were spun off again at some point.

[MechanicalThinker]

Been a big fan of Astaro and now Sophos for awhile, until they killed off Astaro. The XG pricing just doesn't make sense to us as an MSP, and they keep changing it every few months. We run on our own hardware and the move to cores is silly imo.

v18 seems to be finally version where all their acquisitions and Sophos UTM have been properly integrated into one coherent product. They have also done much better job than Untangle with integrating open source parts into a good and user friendly interface while also allowing you to run on custom Intel hardware.

The core based licensing does kind of make sense as it allows the pricing to scale with the organization size. Of course, it will make it more expensive for larger use cases, and that kinda sucks indeed.