WatchGuard Firebox support and lifecycle: when you actually need to move

End of Sale is not End of Life, and the gap is years

This is the distinction that matters most on this page, because the two get conflated constantly and the conflation sells hardware that does not need replacing yet.

End of Sale means the model has left WatchGuard's price list. You cannot buy a new one. Nothing about the unit on your wall changes that day.

End of Life is when support actually ends, and WatchGuard states this generally falls up to five years after End of Sale, with technical and limited software support continuing until then for customers holding an active Support subscription. The M590 and M690 left the price list in June 2026 with End of Life in 2031. That is a five-year runway, not an emergency.

We would rather say that plainly than manufacture urgency. If you are running a recently discontinued Firebox with active support, the honest advice is usually to plan the refresh into a normal budget cycle rather than treat it as a fire.

When End of Sale genuinely does matter

Three situations, and they are all about buying rather than running.

You are standardising an estate. If you run the same model across several sites and want to keep it that way, a model leaving the price list sets a deadline for the last additions. After that you are either running a mixed estate or bringing the whole refresh forward.

You are adding a site or a failover pair. High-availability pairs generally want matched units. If the model has gone, that constrains the design and is worth knowing before the project rather than during procurement.

Your support subscription has lapsed. WatchGuard's continued support through to End of Life is tied to holding an active Support subscription. Without one, the runway described above does not apply to you in the same way, and that is the case where a discontinued model does become urgent.

The replacements, and whether they are a straight swap

WatchGuard has named direct successors for the recently discontinued models: the M590 is replaced by the M495, the M690 by the M595 or M695, and the M290 by the M295.

In most cases configuration carries across and the change is a planned swap rather than a redesign. Where it is not straightforward is where the original sizing no longer matches the site: throughput requirements move as businesses adopt more cloud services and more encrypted traffic, and a like-for-like replacement can quietly perpetuate a bottleneck that was already there.

That is the part worth a conversation rather than a purchase order. Sizing on current traffic rather than on what the previous unit happened to be is the difference between a refresh that helps and one that changes the model number.

If you are comparing WatchGuard and SonicWall

We support both, sell both, and have no structural reason to prefer either, which is an unusual position among people writing about this.

The genuinely useful comparison is not feature lists, which converge, but how the two behave around lifecycle. SonicWall's recent End of Support dates have been arriving quickly and unevenly across a single generation, which has caught out businesses that assumed a generation-wide date. WatchGuard's published policy of End of Life up to five years after End of Sale, tied to an active support subscription, is more predictable to plan against.

That predictability is worth something when you are budgeting a multi-site estate, and worth very little if you are buying a single firewall for one office. Which is roughly how we would advise on it.