| Feature | SonicWall 170 | Cisco PIX 501 | Symantec Firewall/VPN 100 |
| Price | $410 | $495 | $499 |
| Stateful application-layer inspection | No | No | No |
| Application protocol validation | Yes (limited) | Yes (limited) | Yes (limited) |
| Stateful packet inspection | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Transparent Windows authentication | No | No | No |
| Logging of all Web and Winsock applications and usernames | No | No | No |
| Application-layer inspection through SSL tunnels | No | No | No |
| Exchange support | No | No | No |
| Application-layer inspection of VPN client and gateway traffic | No | No | No |
| Intrusion detection and prevention | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Remote-access VPN server and VPN gateway | Yes | Yes | No |
| VPN client included | No | No | No |
| 10/100 LAN ports | 5 | 4 | 4 |
| WAN ports | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| Load balancing | No | No | No |
| Number of users | 10 | 10 | 15-25 |
| Failover | Analog dialup with | No | Analog dialup with external |
| external modem | | modem |
| ISP failover and band- | No | No | No |
| width aggregation |
| Configuration | Web interface | Command line and Web interface | Web interface |
| Processor | SonicWall Security Processor | AMD SC520 | ARM7 |
| Web caching and proxy | No | No | No |