We performed a comparison between Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls 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."The pricing is great and very reasonable."
"I like how we can achieve total integration."
"The ease of setting the solution up is a valuable aspect for us."
"Its performance in fulfilling our requirements has been satisfactory."
"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."
"Fortinet has a very good solution for Secure SD-WAN. One very good feature is that they have robust and simple FortiOS through which they provide all solutions. That's their strength. There's not much complexity involved with the Secure SD-WAN solution of Fortinet as compared to Cisco's solution, which has a lot of flexibility but complexity also comes with that flexibility."
"I have found Fortinet FortiGate to be scalable."
"I like Fortinet FortiGate's antispam filter, SPN, and clustering features."
"You just need a web browser to manage it, unlike Cisco, which requires another management system."
"The most valuable features include the different security zones and the ability to identify applications not only by port numbers but by the applications themselves... And with the single-pass architecture, it provides a good trade-off between security and network performance. It provides good security and good network throughput."
"It is pretty important to have embedded machine learning in the core of the firewall to provide inline, real-time attack prevention, because all these different attacks and threats are constantly evolving. So, you want to have something beyond just hard pass rules. You want it to learn as it is going along. Its machine learning seems pretty good. It seems like it is catching quite a few things."
"It is very scalable."
"The initial setup process is quite easy."
"The sandboxing is valuable and they are frequently updating their signature database. We get new updates every five minutes. That makes it easy to detect new and unknown attacks."
"Application layer firewalling has been the most valuable feature because it gives thousands of application IDs that we can use to control traffic into and out of our environment. The second most important feature has been the GlobalProtect VPN feature."
"I like all the threat alerts and WildFire. I also like scanning because everything that comes into our network via customers is scanned. We're an electric company, so every one of the bills is scanned and emailed in and out of our network."
"It gives us the ability to manage our firewalls from the cloud and deploy a unified configuration onto them. Other competitors like Meraki have that ability, but they fail to optimize it in the way that Sophos has."
"The most valuable feature of Sophos UTM is reporting, it is flexible. I can monitor the end user's devices, even when they are not on my network. It has good drill-down capabilities."
"Monitoring and reporting are areas that need improvement."
"The scalability is good."
"I like the web filtering options."
"Sophos UTM has improved the porting section. It has improved security by seeing the gaps. For example, when you discover that an entry has been using a certain application, with Sophos UTM acting as a Layer 7 firewall, you can block the application, not the port."
"Efficient and effective - it's easy to separate rules."
"With over 150 firewalls in our portal, management and monitoring have never been easier."
"I would like to see improvements in the support from Fortinet. Here in the Philippines, whenever we have problems with a Fortinet product, we mostly ask for support from distributors and resellers and not directly from Fortinet."
"Fortinet FortiGate could improve by adding enhancements to FortiMail, FortiSOAR, and FortiDeceptor."
"I would suggest that Fortinet add sandboxing to their solution."
"The pricing could be reduced or include the first year warranty."
"The product does need better support in the cloud environment. It's not exactly cloud-native right now."
"It would be nice if backups could more easily migrate between different models."
"The solution could be more secure and stable."
"Some of the filtering is not robust, you can escape it with a VPN. Some of the users bypass some of the filters. It catches some but it also misses some, that area could be improved. It's functioning reasonably but there's room for improvement in that area."
"I would like them to bring in some features that would encourage traffic shaping or bandwidth routing, like other UTM firewalls, because the solution should be capable of limiting the bandwidth for rules."
"I would like to see some Machine Learning because I have observed new types of attacks that are able to bypass existing security rules."
"The scalability compared to other products is not good. You need to change the box whenever you want your number of connection sessions to increase."
"Its reporting can definitely be improved. I would like to have better graphical dashboards and more widgets for more clarity in the reporting area. In a third-generation firewall, you can generate some dashboards. It provides the information that we need, but from the C-level or a higher-level perspective, it is kind of rough and incomplete. Its data loss prevention (DLP) feature is not good enough. Currently, this feature is very basic and not suitable for enterprises. It would be nice if they can include a better DLP feature like Fortinet. We would like to have a local depot of Palo Alto in Latin America. Competitors such as Cisco and Check Point have a local depot here. If there is an issue with their hardware, you can go to the depot, and in about four hours, you can get a replacement device, but that's not the case with Palo Alto Networks because we need to import from Miami. It takes about two to three weeks."
"The reports it provides are not helpful."
"The user interface is a bit clumsy and not very user-friendly."
"Need improvement with their logs, especially the command line interface."
"There are some advanced features that we aren't able to use, which include active IP authentication and app ID. We are facing challenges with implementing those two features."
"Sophos should improve its ability to check something like bandwidth consumption for users or something more real-time."
"Sophos UTM could improve the way the configuration has to be done. I have to do the configuration through the command line interface but if it could be done through the graphical user interface it would be much better."
"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."
"I would like this solution to support ICAP. Also, they no longer support on-premises management, and are forcing clients to use centralized management via the cloud, which I don't agree with."
"We need to speed up the support."
"There is still room for improvement in wireless protection. I don't mean their WiFi device is bad, but there are still things to improve on, such as WiFi roaming."
"The management suite is easy and the agent is easy to develop."
"Doesn't provide antivirus for individual computers."
More Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls Pricing and Cost Advice →
Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is ranked 6th in Firewalls with 162 reviews while Sophos UTM is ranked 1st in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 110 reviews. Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is rated 8.6, while Sophos UTM is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls writes "We get reports back from WildFire on a minute-by-minute basis". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sophos UTM writes "It's a highly stable platform with very few hardware issues". Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is most compared with Check Point NGFW, Azure Firewall, Meraki MX, Sophos XG and Juniper SRX Series Firewall, whereas Sophos UTM is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Sophos XG, OPNsense, Cisco Secure Firewall and Untangle NG Firewall. See our Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls vs. Sophos UTM report.
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