We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Firewall and Sophos UTM based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Firewalls solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."Fortinet offers the latest versions to cater to the needs of enterprises."
"We were looking for the VPN feature and controlling the inflow and outflow of all the traffic within the site and across the sites. We are also using it for the VPN and VLANs."
"The ease of setting the solution up is a valuable aspect for us."
"FortiGate is on the cheaper end, and it offers good value."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiGate are remote access, web filtering, and IPS."
"It is quite easy to handle."
"The license management is very valuable. You can get a new license each year, or you can enroll every two to four years. You can get the logs, and you will get the information on the risk in your network and the entire organization. With this information, you can take action on your actives, computers, or devices. You can bring your own device as an SSE."
"The SD-WAN function is very developed. It has SD-WAN functionality with security features in one device. We can manage from one single console SD-WAN and the security policy."
"It is extremely stable I would say — at least after you deploy it."
"The most valuable feature is that it's secure."
"You can also put everything into a nice, neat, little package, as far as configuration goes. I was formerly a command-line guy with the ASA, and I was a little nervous about dealing with a GUI interface versus a command line, but after I did my first deployment, I got a lot more comfortable with doing it GUI based."
"If configured, Firepower provides us with application visibility and control."
"Right now, Cisco ASA NGFW has given us a lot of improvement. We are planning to move to a new facility and will be a much larger organization."
"We moved from a legacy firewall to the ASA with FirePOWER, increasing our Internet Edge defense dramatically."
"I like the IPS feature, it is the most valuable."
"It is much better than most of the other firewalls that I have worked with."
"It's a stable solution."
"It is not an easy task to protect your web servers from the big bad internet. The Web Server Protection in this solution does it elegantly and, if configured correctly, even hides the server's base system from prying eyes."
"Sophos SG UTM had all the basic functionality that you needed. It is user-friendly and easy to manage for any integrator."
"It meets our compliance needs in an elastic computer environment."
"The implementation with the AWS environment was good."
"It has helped by identifying threats within the company. If there are computers or servers that are compromised, then we are able to identify them right away in the system."
"The most valuable feature is the IPS. It also protects us from malware."
"It has made our organization more secure, because we are using a VPN. We are not accessing services directly. It allows us to segregate some of the traffic for individuals which may be more of a developer role rather than an operational role needing access to developer resources, but not necessarily production operational resources."
"Fortinet FortiGate could improve if it had a cloud-managed solution."
"Lacks sufficient security options."
"I think they need to improve more in order to be a competitor with the leaders of the field."
"The renewal price and the availability could be improved."
"The room for improvement is about the global delivery time period. Usually I need to wait for almost one month to deliver it overseas. So if you can shorten the deliver time it'd be great."
"I would like reporting to be improved and should offer a lot more tools to monitor the products."
"The solution lacks sufficient filtering."
"The solution could have licensing fees reduced in the future."
"We have to rely on Cisco ASDM to access the firewall interface. This needs improvement. Because we have a web-based interface, and it is a lot more user-friendly."
"In terms of what could be improved, I would say the UTM part should be more integrated for one price, because if you buy ASA from Cisco, you need to buy another contract service from Cisco as a filter for the dictionary of attacks. In Fortinet, you buy a firewall and you have it all."
"The performance should be improved."
"Maybe the dashboard could be a bit better."
"Setting it up is not as intuitive as other more modern NGFWs."
"Intrusion prevention, we currently need to apply deep bracket inspection manually to use web filtering."
"Firewalls, in general, were not really designed for normal IT personnel, but for firewall and network experts. Therefore, they missed a lot of options and did not provide any good reporting or improvement options."
"I have used Fortinet, Palo Alto, and Check Point previously and I prefer the process of everything working together."
"When we call support, we get put on hold for a long time."
"Sophos UTM's firewall is a bit weak, and some of its features lack depth compared to other products like F5."
"It would be nice if it had basic features, such as DLP (Data Loss Prevention)."
"We'd like to see them offer their services on mobile devices like tablets. I'm not sure if that's an option or not."
"It does have built-in policies, which enable you to disable USB devices, etc. It would be nice if they had more policies because there are not that many of them."
"The reporting could improve by providing information on where, or from which device attacks are coming from. We are already given the country where the attack is coming from but more information would be beneficial."
"I would like to see the SD-WAN feature improved."
"The management suite is easy and the agent is easy to develop."
Cisco Secure Firewall is ranked 4th in Firewalls with 404 reviews while Sophos UTM is ranked 1st in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 110 reviews. Cisco Secure Firewall is rated 8.2, while Sophos UTM is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Cisco Secure Firewall writes "Highlights and helps us catch Zero-day vulnerabilities traveling across our network". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sophos UTM writes "It's a highly stable platform with very few hardware issues". Cisco Secure Firewall is most compared with Palo Alto Networks WildFire, Netgate pfSense, Meraki MX, Sophos XG and SonicWall NSa, whereas Sophos UTM is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Sophos XG, OPNsense, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls and Untangle NG Firewall. See our Cisco Secure Firewall vs. Sophos UTM report.
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