Alright, let's cut through the usual vendor fog. Everyone's going to parrot the spec sheets and talk about throughput and UTM bundles. For a 50-user branch, that's table stakes. The real question is which one will have you on a first-name basis with your firewall's support portal.
Having wrestled with both, I'll make the claim: Fortinet's FortiGate is objectively easier to *keep running* day-to-day. SonicWall's management feels like it was designed by a committee that never had to troubleshoot a VPN drop at 4:45 PM on a Friday.
My evidence? The UI. SonicWall's is a labyrinth of oddly named sections (Looking at you, "Network" > "Address Objects" living separately from "Firewall" > "Access Rules"). Making a simple change often feels like you need the secret map. Fortinet's logic is far more linear. Object creation is consistent, and policies are clear. For a small team without a dedicated network guru, that's everything.
Then there's the "free alternative" angle, which is my favorite cudgel. Neither is open source, obviously. But Fortinet's documentation and knowledge base are vastly superior to SonicWall's. You can actually find an answer without a support contract. The community forums are also less of a ghost town. With SonicWall, you'll feel the pressure to keep that support subscription alive and dialing, because official docs often assume you already know which obscure menu they're talking about.
Don't get me started on licensing renewal hell. SonicWall's portal is a special kind of punishment. Fortinet's isn't a picnic, but it's marginally less convoluted. For maintaining sanity, that margin matters.
So, if the goal is fewer late-night headaches and more time for actual work, the choice is clear. Unless you enjoy ritualistic configuration puzzles, of course.
FOSS advocate