We performed a comparison between Check Point NGFW and Sophos XG based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Features: Check Point NGFW is praised for its extensive security features, centralized management, and virtualization capabilities. It is highly regarded in terms of comprehensive protection and adaptability. Sophos XG is known for its usability, user-friendly interface, and straightforward installation process. Both options provide robust threat defense and the ability to expand as needed.
Check Point NGFW, needs to improve various aspects, including integration with other infrastructures, hardware upgrades, cost and pricing, stability and security, UI, complexity issues, redundancy options, and memory management. Sophos XG needs improvements in antivirus features, graphical interface and performance, bandwidth management and VPN capabilities, reporting and user management, support and response time, and specific issues and feature requests.
Service and Support: Some customers have found Check Point NGFW's customer service to be helpful and responsive, while others believe there is room for improvement. Sophos XG's support has received both positive and negative feedback. Some customers have found it to be good and helpful, while others have been dissatisfied with unhelpful and unresponsive support.
Ease of Deployment: The initial setup for Check Point NGFW can range in difficulty, with some users finding it simple while others find it more challenging. Knowledge and experience may be required for certain configurations and migrations. The initial setup for Sophos XG is generally seen as uncomplicated and straightforward, although some users may struggle if they are unfamiliar with the product.
Pricing: Check Point NGFW is known for its high setup cost, particularly when compared to other products. Users find it challenging to add new licensing to existing devices, especially for larger enterprise-level devices. Sophos XG provides flexible pricing options based on the required functionality, offering reasonable and competitive pricing, particularly for educational institutions.
ROI: Check Point NGFW stands out for its cost savings, simplicity, and effective security enforcement. Sophos XG offers a high ROI by reducing support expenses and enhancing security practices.
Comparison Results: Sophos XG is the favored product when compared to Check Point NGFW. Users find the initial setup of Sophos XG to be simple. They appreciate the functionality and user interface of Sophos XG, as well as its extensive protection against threats. The pricing for Sophos XG is considered fair and the technical support is satisfactory.
"Our project needs to link two sides through the internet. One of these was in Cairo and the other in another city. We used FortiGate as the integrating solution between the two locations, i.e. the Fortinet 30E & 100E."
"Fortinet FortiGate is a security device. It can optimize security on the networks of a company. It actually protects the company from attacks from outside. With FortiGate, you can categorize the users. You can create a group of users that can access all of the websites for their work. You can limit other users' access."
"Reliability is the best feature. We faced some issues when we were setting it up, but the service, portal, and administration are good."
"The stability and scalability of this solution are satisfactory. Its SD-WAN, VPN, and URL filtering features are very useful."
"The features that I have found most valuable are that it is good to use, and most importantly, the pricing. The customer especially likes the discount when they trade up or something like that."
"Their proxy-based inspection is responsive and secure."
"The reporting and monitoring are very good."
"We use the filtering feature the most. It has filtering and inbuilt securities. We can create customized rules to define which users can access a particular type of site. We can create policies inside the firewall."
"We are delighted with the powerful management console and diagnostic tools."
"There is modern protection against current threats."
"The Smart Dashboard and other user interfaces are very easy to use and can be handled without any significant IT skills."
"The packet inspection capabilities are great."
"The most valuable features for us are identity awareness, IDS and IPS, and application control."
"The biggest thing is the central management. It is quite good and allows us to manage the different firewalls from it. We can implement and configure many firewalls and push our policies to them as well."
"The failover from one device to the other has been seamless and we find that we do not lose ongoing SIP calls or Teams chats."
"The central management console has helped with segregation, where planned interventions with management consoles do not have any impact on production or critical business traffic."
"The initial setup was straightforward."
"The product is very easy to explore. It has a very good layout."
"The most valuable features of Sophos XG are user-friendliness and it is highly secure."
"I recommend the solution due to its ease of use and pricing."
"I have found configuring the ports to be easier in Sophos XG compared to the other devices."
"Sophos offers great disk encryption, anti protection, and the interface is very user-friendly."
"So far, I'm happy that they have recently added a firewall role, so I feel a little more comfortable with the security. The threat management is good."
"The antivirus features are valuable."
"The updates Fortinet provides are sometimes unstable."
"If they had better integration with security products, such as Cisco ISE or Rapid Threat Containment, then it would be an improvement."
"Compared to some other products, the DLP is not at par for the moment."
"It should be more stable. There should be full integration within Fortinet products themselves as well as with other third-party products. Especially when you're not dealing with SIEM and the correlation of the security box, we want Fortinet to be able to share that information with as many other products as it can."
"FortiOS is not simple."
"Fortinet could improve the windows opener or the virtual IP solutions for opening windows. The virtual IP settings need improvement as firewalls are trending in new development directions."
"There is one big configuration file with no separations for the unique VDOMs. Maybe they could separate individual VDOM configuration files with the root VDOM configuration file referencing the individual VDOM config files."
"The pricing could be reduced or include the first year warranty."
"The virtual environment is not stable at all. We have some customers who are using the virtual environment feature, and sometimes it crashes. We have many tickets open and the response is not as good as expected. We have to wait months for a resolution."
"There is a strong demand for security services that can be effortlessly integrated which would ensure that security measures can seamlessly adapt to the cloud infrastructure."
"I would rate the technical support as a seven out of 10. Sometimes, it's difficult to get them to understand what the issue is. Sometimes, the issue is not resolved, then we solve it by ourselves with Check Point's documentation, which can be useful. When you open a case with Check Point, they can be a little slow. Sometimes, they don't solve things."
"The interface can be more user-friendly in terms of design and the location of critical and commonly used icons."
"I would like for them to develop the ability to manage a cloud firewall with the same console. That would be very helpful."
"We looked very closely at ArcSight's solution because it's a multi-vendor solution. With ArcSight we could have Check Point, we could have RSA, we could have any brand and integrate several brands, from a security point of view. With Check Point, you cannot do so, you can integrate with Check Point products."
"The virtual infrastructure of the central management requires a huge amount of resources to work properly and manage all the logs without problems."
"Check Point doesn't warn us when rules are about to expire. It was also inconvenient that we had to change hardware when we upgraded. It would be nice if they made the new version compatible with current hardware or if it only required a minor upgrade."
"The program is rather expensive."
"The reaction time of the GUI is terrible when compared to other manufacturers."
"The only issue that Sophos XG now needs to improve is the product's reporting capability."
"The initial setup is not straightforward."
"They made some changes to the firmware update sometime last year, which moved some of the policies from where they were before. Some of the policies, such as NAS policies, were separated, which made it a bit hard for people to trace the policies they had configured."
"The UTM itself needs improvement. When you're navigating it seems like it takes forever to load anything. The hardware is okay. It's just the software that could be more responsive."
"Areas for improvement would be the access points and the on-premise version, which is very bad."
"SD-WAN would benefit from further improvement, particularly in terms of incorporating optimization techniques that are not typically found in traditional firewalls. Nowadays, WAN optimization features are being integrated into many firewalls, and implementing similar capabilities in SD-WAN would enhance its performance and functionality."
Check Point NGFW is ranked 5th in Firewalls with 275 reviews while Sophos XG is ranked 7th in Firewalls with 192 reviews. Check Point NGFW is rated 8.8, while Sophos XG is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Check Point NGFW writes "Good antivirus protection and URL filtering with very good user identification capabilities". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sophos XG writes "Easy to use and deploy with an improved pricing structure in place". Check Point NGFW is most compared with Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Cisco Secure Firewall, Netgate pfSense, Azure Firewall and OPNsense, whereas Sophos XG is most compared with Netgate pfSense, OPNsense, Sophos XGS, SonicWall TZ and Cisco Secure Firewall. See our Check Point NGFW vs. Sophos XG report.
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