We performed a comparison between Sophos UTM and Sophos XG 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."Overall security features and performance routing is good."
"There are lots of features and most of them are deployed for internet security. Users are protected if they accidentally go to some malicious sites."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiGate are the rules and quality of service."
"Fortinet offers the latest versions to cater to the needs of enterprises."
"I like how we can achieve total integration."
"It is a safe product."
"The solution is very easy to understand. It's not overly complex."
"The most valuable features of the solution are SD-WAN, filtering testing applications, web filtering, and the new VPN."
"It's a stable solution."
"What I like about Sophos UTM is that it improves my company's security. The solution is easy to set up, which I like, and it's very stable."
"The solution is scalable."
"What I like about the solution is the ease of use."
"Sophos UTM is the simplest of these products to setup."
"It does not take much effort or thinking to understand how it works."
"The most valuable features of Sophos UTM are the ease of use, it is very user-friendly. You can understand what they implement in the new firmware, and it's easy to manage the firewalls."
"Sophos has a single pane of glass which allows me to manage all my VPCs from a single instance, managing all my firewall from one place."
"Sophos XG is easy to use."
"I like their firewall and the intrusion detection feature"
"Orchestration of the firewall is the most valuable feature. It is a fast and agile solution. It is good with protection. It is also very easy to deploy and manage, and its user interface is easy to use."
"The SL VPNs are the most valuable feature. I have a lot of systems out of the head office that need to connect to the local networks, and they all connect wirelessly via the Sophos VPN client."
"It has a very friendly interface like the Cyberoam iNG units, it has customizable policies, it has proper templates that you can even modify, and you can customize the rules, down to each single user."
"The firewall functionality and unified threat management are the most useful features."
"It is a very stable solution."
"All of the features are amazing, especially Sandstorm, which prevents bad traffic or downloaded files from reaching our customers' and partners' networks."
"The license renewal process, annual renewal price, and the web application firewall features should be improved."
"There are some problems that support cannot give you a logical reason as to why it happened. For example, I had a case where I was dealing with a WhatsApp application that was giving issues. Technical support gave more than one reason it could be giving issues, but none of them solved the problem. Eventually I solved the problem, but it was far from the solutions that support had given."
"There are mainly two areas of improvement in Fortinet FortiGate— the licensing cost and the timing of upgrading licenses for boxes."
"I think there could be more QoS features"
"It claims it does DLP, but the degree and level of controls are very basic."
"I haven't had a single issue since using Fortinet."
"I would like to have logs, monitoring, and reporting for a month without extra fees."
"The solution could be more secure and stable."
"An area for improvement in Sophos UTM is load balancing because my company cannot use it currently. If Sophos could release a new configuration for the load balancing feature to work for my company, that would be great."
"The application control is really bad. It needs a lot of enhancements. The traffic shaping and bandwidth control, and application control need a lot of work."
"The technical support only communicates via email. I would prefer to communicate directly with someone."
"There were a lot of features and functionality in Sophos SG UTM but nothing was state of the art in terms of technology. You did not get the latest functions. It was very monolithic as it was based on an old Linux PuTTY system."
"Reporting: We have had to work manually in many of our reports."
"Doesn't provide antivirus for individual computers."
"The initial setup was straightforward. The full deployment takes approximately two days which could be simplified to reduce the time. The major part of the process is the configuration and the policy setup."
"During initial configuration, I encountered a few issues."
"Its user interface is a little bit slow."
"The current bandwidth consumption is no longer shown in the XG and XGS."
"The solution is tied to the US dollar. You need to pay whatever the equivalent is in your own currency, and, if the exchange is bad, it can really add to the cost."
"The first area that needs to be improved is customer support."
"Scalability it is a bit limited. We did a sizing exercise before the purchase. But that was just to fit our current needs. There was no room for having an option to upgrade the device. The only option that we have if we are grow in the near future, is to go for another model with higher specs, which is actually more expensive. In other words it doesn't have that modularity ."
"Sometimes when you roll out a new firmware, you find that the rules you already have in place are broken, so it's difficult to migrate to a new firmware. That's the only downside I've experienced in Sophos."
"The initial set up process can be a little tricky, especially when you are registering with Sophos using your registration number. Setup is not necessarily complex, but it's not trouble-free. You do have connectivity issues at the initial setup with registering the device on the Sophos platform to access the advanced features. It doesn't always go through the first time around. That may be an issue with the quality of our automation. I'm not sure exactly what it is."
"I am using the Azure Active Directory in my company and it was complicated to integrate this solution with Azure."
Sophos UTM is ranked 1st in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 110 reviews while Sophos XG is ranked 7th in Firewalls with 192 reviews. Sophos UTM is rated 8.4, while Sophos XG is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Sophos UTM writes "It's a highly stable platform with very few hardware issues". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sophos XG writes "Easy to use and deploy with an improved pricing structure in place". Sophos UTM is most compared with Netgate pfSense, OPNsense, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Cisco Secure Firewall and Untangle NG Firewall, whereas Sophos XG is most compared with Netgate pfSense, OPNsense, Sophos XGS, SonicWall TZ and Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls. See our Sophos UTM vs. Sophos XG report.
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The biggest difference between Sophos SG and Sophos XG is performance.
Now, there's even a newer Hardware Platform (same OS as Sophos XG, which is called SFOS) - the Sophos XGS which has different chipset architecture, to attend each security module, with its newest feature called XStream Technology.
Besides that, the GUI is very different. Nevertheless, it's worth trying the Sophos XG or XGS, since its GUI is getting overhauled for better performance and easier management, by each new release.
Sophos UTM is no longer being developed, according to our reseller. All the development effort is going into XG. So XG will be the only Sophos firewall going forward, UTM will eventually be end of life.
Hi,
The new appliances XGS have a dedicated streaming CPU (Xstream), in addition to the main CPU.
I have personally tested the differences between the XG and XGS similar appliances. The result is spectacular. 30% more perf minimum:
https://www.sophos.com/en-us/p...
The UTM-9 is soon end-life. Sophos security staff is now focused on SFOS 18, XG, XGS.
To respond to the question "the biggest difference", I think is the "Synchronized Security":
https://www.sophos.com/en-us/l...
The firewall is one of the full security solutions centralized in Sophos Central:
https://www.sophos.com/en-us/p...
At most of our customers, we implement a Sophos Endpoint locally on servers and workstations and firewall XGS. The synchronized security interact between firewall and endpoints. This can resolve the problem with the "lateral movement" of an infected computer. It can isolate a computer from the network when detected as infected:
https://news.sophos.com/en-us/...
It can be extended to secure cloud systems with Sophos ClouOptix:
https://www.sophos.com/en-us/p...
Tested with VM in AWS and Azure, work 5*!
Another big difference is the Webserver Application Firewall. All my customers with an internal webserver to be published in the net are protected with this "reverse proxy" (WAF). It really does the job of protecting IIS, Apache, etc. from externals attacks.
Another trick is the SSL VPN sites to sites. When a branch office is implemented with a front ISP router, sometimes the NAT traversal is not possible, for IPSEC VPN connections (UDP 500). With this SSL VPN, Simple NAT works and gives an SSL 128-bit AES encryption.
Finally, I have a lot of experience in implementing UTM and, now, XG(S). No way, the log is a big difference, easier to use as in Fortigates! It is similar to CheckPoint firewalls.
For my experience, no way: -> Sophos XG(S)
Here is an interesting link on differences between UTM and XG:
https://www.avanet.com/en/blog...
Regards,
A.Rastello
My understanding is that UTM is the software; SG is the hardware. You can buy Sophos UTM running on SG hardware and then later upgrade to the XG running on the same hardware.
I've been told by our Sophos reseller that Sophos are pushing the XG as next generation firewall, and developing it to at least as good as UTM. So XG will be the firewall of choice moving forward. UTM will not be developed further, according to him.
To my understanding, UTM and XG are from different legacy companies that
are now owned my Sophos. During my time researching anti-virus, UTM makes
more sense for our needs seeing as XG is primarily a firewall. From the
information I was able to find during the time of research, it seemed most
of the community felt XG had feature gaps from UTM.
UTM specifically SG series is a very mature and stable platform. It lacks some of the new features of XG; however has a very strong feature set. If you are looking for stability, ease of use and something well documented and understood than I suggest going this way. If however you are looking for a strong level of integration and have a greater than 3 year horizon then I suggest XG.
Wifi integration for example works better on the new platform.
There are several differences since there are 2 versions,
XG firewall has integrations with other products like intercept X and admin from Sophos central.
SG UTM has less integration since it's a separate product. It was formerly Astaro firewall, but the most advanced features have been only set to the XG.
There are appliance and software versions of both products. Depending on your need you might choose one or another. But basically, look at them as 2 different firewalls.