We performed a comparison between Meraki MX and Sophos UTM based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Unified Threat Management (UTM) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."Both the scalability and the scalability are great with Meraki MX."
"The most valuable feature is that we didn't have any problems with Meraki MX."
"It is a robust SD-WAN solution."
"It has very good features; it's easy to use, configure, set up, and deploy."
"When you try to create an IP or when you have an alert about when a website is banned, these features are helpful."
"The product's initial setup phase is very easy."
"The most valuable feature of Meraki MX is I can manage the solution from anywhere remotely, I can throttle bandwidth, and create all rules. Additionally, it is secure for our customers."
"Real Auto VPN with load balancer without needing a public IP. It is simple and functional."
"It helps us with protection, with concurrent use of the VPN."
"The isolation of infected machines is a big feature. Also, the ability to detect external sources that change files on a file server is really big."
"The firewall itself is very strong and provides great security."
"It meets our compliance needs in an elastic computer environment."
"The solution is easy to handle and configure."
"The UTM features are reasonably strong and the patterns are updated on a regular basis"
"It does not take much effort or thinking to understand how it works."
"The product is extremely intuitive."
"The product doesn't support route summarization and BGP dynamic routing protocol."
"When it comes to cost, that's a pain point."
"Pricing is an area where the solution lacks since it is an expensive tool."
"The product could incorporate tools like ThousandEyes into the system so we can see things directly."
"Meraki has some hidden features and information that is only privy to their engineers. If that information became available to us, then it would improve our ease of management, and we would be able to make certain adjustments instead of having to go to them."
"MX can only be managed via a web interface, but I'm accustomed to using a CLI or a graphical interface. I would also like to see more reporting features. It doesn't provide enough information for me to know precisely about some clients."
"Expensive licensing and firewall stops immediately working if the license is not renewed at expiration date."
"Meraki tech support staff have a lot more visibility into your network than you do, which is frustrating at times. I understand the approach is to keep the dashboard easier to understand. This will frustrate more advanced users at times."
"I would like to see the SD-WAN feature improved."
"I think that additional metrics features are needed to be able to monitor other areas or to monitor as much as you can, at a fine-grain resolution."
"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."
"In short, the UI and UX are the areas of improvement in Sophos UTM and similar solutions compared to Palo Alto."
"Sophos customer support could use some improvement."
"The only time we face a problem or issues is when we place a ticket. We have found that response is very slow."
"The technical support team’s response time could be improved."
"It is a little too CPU resource intensive, so we would like to see improvements there."
Meraki MX is ranked 2nd in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 60 reviews while Sophos UTM is ranked 3rd in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 110 reviews. Meraki MX is rated 8.2, while Sophos UTM is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Meraki MX writes "Cost-effective, simplified, easy to manage, and reliable with advanced security features and granular visibility". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sophos UTM writes "It's a highly stable platform with very few hardware issues". Meraki MX is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Cisco Secure Firewall, Sophos XG and Zscaler Internet Access, whereas Sophos UTM is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Fortinet FortiGate, Sophos XG, OPNsense and Stormshield Network Security. See our Meraki MX vs. Sophos UTM report.
See our list of best Unified Threat Management (UTM) vendors.
We monitor all Unified Threat Management (UTM) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
To be honest, if you are still buying firewall appliances and UTM licenses you are already behind a very obvious requirement to move to Cloud security. Buying UTM does not solve the growing risk of mobility and cloud application delivery. It would be worthwhile reading Gartner's SASE paper on security transformation. Or research Zscaler, who has been delivering this model for 10 years.
If a user is in your network behind your UTM, what stops him from connecting to his mobile phone Hotspot and bypassing all UTM, DLP, etc. Security has to move from the network to the endpoint. Protection regardless of location, device or network. Anything less is a massive compromise and a false sense of actual security.
Sophos gives on-premise UTM functionalities that work like traditional UTMs (such as FortiGate, Firepower and the likes). Meraki MX devices are managed from the cloud and are subscription-based but also extremely easy to configure.
If you want a very easy to configure solution with a minimum IT staff and prefer OPEX over CAPEX, go with Meraki.
If you want on-premise control, and prefer CAPEX over OPEX, go with Sophos.
I haven't had any experience with Sophos, but in small business environments I've found the Meraki devices to be needlessly complex. As one who has worked quite a bit with enterprise Cisco devices, I can't say I'm surprised. In my opinion, complexity doesn't necessarily denote better functionality.
Most concerning to me, though, the Meraki devices also stop functioning entirely if you don't renew. their licenses, and it's some $500 per year *per device.* Any situation where a license not being reactivated can shut down your entire network is a huge concern, particularly at such high cost. We aren't talking Karen not being able to use Acrobat or something here... we're talking entire site outage. That is enough to make any technician worth their salt have a mild seizure.
When it comes to Security, I have very good experiences with Sophos, I can say the security solution is absolutely great in Sophos. Whereas I have never used Meraki, so I can't comment anything on it.
SD-WAN; no experience on any of the requested products, so better not to make any false comment/advice.