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SonicWall vs WatchGuard
February 08, 2025 | Author: Michael Stromann
10★
Defend SMBs, enterprises and governments from advanced cyber attacks with SonicWall's award-winning firewalls and cyber security solutions.
8★
WatchGuard Firebox Cloud provides the same award-winning UTM security available in our Firebox appliances to protect servers running in public cloud environments.
If you were to take two highly paranoid, overly caffeinated security systems and lock them in a room together, they would probably agree on a few things before attempting to outfirewall each other. Both SonicWall and WatchGuard believe that the internet is a wild, untamed beast full of malware, hackers and people who still think "123456" is a secure password. They offer firewalls, VPNs and threat protection, all wrapped in layers of impenetrable digital bureaucracy. Whether you are a small business, a medium-sized enterprise or just a very security-conscious cat owner, both have solutions that will keep the bad stuff out while letting your emails and cat videos through. They also believe in the joy of centralized management, because who doesn’t love controlling an army of firewalls from a single screen?
SonicWall has been around since 1991, back when the internet was still trying to figure out what it was and people were excited about 56k modems. Born in the USA, it quickly became a favorite for educational institutions and retail businesses that wanted to keep their networks safe without hiring a wizard. It takes deep packet inspection very seriously—so seriously, in fact, that it can decrypt SSL traffic just to make sure it’s not up to anything sneaky. Over the years, SonicWall dabbled in corporate drama, getting acquired by Dell in 2012 before breaking free again in 2016, possibly after realizing that being independent made it feel more like a cyberpunk vigilante.
WatchGuard, on the other hand, came into existence in 1996, just in time for the dot-com boom and the realization that not everything on the internet was a friendly GeoCities page. Also an American creation, it decided that mid-sized enterprises and managed service providers (MSPs) were the folks worth protecting. It loves making security simple, which is why its Firebox appliances are designed to be deployed faster than you can say “network breach.” WatchGuard also has a thing for DNS-level phishing protection, built-in SD-WAN (which sounds technical but mostly means "faster and more efficient traffic") and multi-factor authentication, because typing in a second password is a small price to pay for keeping cybercriminals in a state of constant frustration.
See also: Top 10 Firewall software
SonicWall has been around since 1991, back when the internet was still trying to figure out what it was and people were excited about 56k modems. Born in the USA, it quickly became a favorite for educational institutions and retail businesses that wanted to keep their networks safe without hiring a wizard. It takes deep packet inspection very seriously—so seriously, in fact, that it can decrypt SSL traffic just to make sure it’s not up to anything sneaky. Over the years, SonicWall dabbled in corporate drama, getting acquired by Dell in 2012 before breaking free again in 2016, possibly after realizing that being independent made it feel more like a cyberpunk vigilante.
WatchGuard, on the other hand, came into existence in 1996, just in time for the dot-com boom and the realization that not everything on the internet was a friendly GeoCities page. Also an American creation, it decided that mid-sized enterprises and managed service providers (MSPs) were the folks worth protecting. It loves making security simple, which is why its Firebox appliances are designed to be deployed faster than you can say “network breach.” WatchGuard also has a thing for DNS-level phishing protection, built-in SD-WAN (which sounds technical but mostly means "faster and more efficient traffic") and multi-factor authentication, because typing in a second password is a small price to pay for keeping cybercriminals in a state of constant frustration.
See also: Top 10 Firewall software
