We performed a comparison between Sophos UTM and WatchGuard Firebox 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."It has improved our security capabilities."
"The ability to set up remote systems is the most valuable feature."
"Overall, the pricing of the solution is very good. The product offers good value."
"It blocks the vulnerabilities that can negatively impact us."
"The most useful functionality of Fortinet FortiGate is the user interface, multiple engines, and their cloud with the latest integrations. Additionally, the Security Fabric tool is very good."
"The application control features, such as Facebook blocking and Spotify blocking, are the most valuable."
"The initial installation is very straightforward."
"There are great templates, so you don't have to customize them if you don't want to. You do have the option to custom create some folders and some reports, however, with what is there, you don't really need to go through extra effort, as they already give you a lot of predefined views of reports and so forth."
"We use Sophos UTM as our main firewall with all its features included. Mainly, it controls all of our network perimeter security: firewall, IDS/IPS, and web application firewall (including VoIP)."
"Sophos UTM is the simplest of these products to setup."
"The solution is stable."
"It now controls all the security aspects of our web servers with Sophos UTM WAF."
"The cost of the solution is very reasonable."
"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."
"Sophos is a unified solution. We have anti-virus protection, firewall rules, knotting, and DACC all in one box."
"The initial configuration is straightforward thanks to the web GUI. In 30 minutes, you can have a running firewall with UTM protection enabled."
"Because we bought two firewalls... we need a central place to manage the policies and deploy them to both devices. It's good that it provides a system management console that is able to manipulate and manage policies in one place and deploy them to different locations."
"This product offers great protection using the default settings."
"The solution has a useful traffic monitor."
"It protects me against malicious websites, as well as malicious downloads, as a perimeter anti-virus. I've also seen it blocking a lot of pings and different probes."
"All of the features have been valuable. There's nothing on my M270 that I'm not using. If you have remote access, you can see how many users are coming from the outside world to be connected to the systems, through the virus systems that we have behind the firewall, in order to gain access to their files and do their work. We can also see how long they stay online and whether these connections are closed forcefully or for any other reasons, such as a glitch or some kind of misbehavior, to see if internet traffic is optimized and if that particular traffic is under company policies, concerning which websites were visited."
"Management and visibility are the most valuable features."
"Intrusion Prevention is my primary focus so that's what I find most useful. The why is straightforward: It's to prevent intrusion."
"The solution has many security features. We have an intrusion provision system and filtering and block filtering."
"The search tool needs improvement. It's very difficult to search for policies right now."
"I would like to have logs, monitoring, and reporting for a month without extra fees."
"We sometimes have issues with FortiGate's routing table in the latest firmware update. We had to downgrade the device because our customers complained about bugs."
"Fortinet FortiGate could improve by having more capabilities for troubleshooting VPN connections. For example, I do get some feedback about the current status, but I could use some history and logging of important events. The information is logged in our Syslog server, but I could use that information from the device. If they could provide a GUI to have some more insight on what's going with my VPN would be useful."
"Scalability is one of the disadvantages. When it comes to scalability, you have to actually change the box. If you want to upgrade it, you need to actually change the existing box and probably you take the system off to other sites."
"The logging details need to be improved."
"If I had any criticism that I would give FortiGate, it would be that they need to stop changing their logging format. Every time we do a firmware upgrade, it is a massive issue on the SIM. Parsers have to be rebuilt. Even the FortiGate guys came in and said that they don't play well in the sandbox."
"We would like to see better pricing."
"Monitoring and reporting are areas that need improvement."
"The initial setup may be difficult for those not familiar with the product."
"We would like to have unique viewable IDs for rules and in the packet filter logfile, for easier debugging of old log files."
"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."
"Last year, Sophos had some major internal management changes that negatively impacted their support."
"The documentation during the AWS integration was a little fuzzy on getting it to work with how the whole public exposure versus private exposure, then routing some of the traffic."
"The lack of import/export functions for network and service options drives me mad."
"The integration capabilities could be better."
"I'm not really impressed with the reporting side of it. It may be something I just haven't figured out very well, but it's hard to filter down on reporting of the actual valuable information that you would want. There is a lot of information out there so you have to have some kind of tool capture it and then filter through. So far, I haven't found the reporting side of the WatchGuard to be that user-friendly."
"In WatchGuard Firebox, the antivirus and malware detection systems are areas with shortcomings that require improvement since they are the most important elements of a cybersecurity tool."
"The next release should have better software and configuration systems that can also be used on Linux."
"Sometimes I would like to copy a rule set from one box to another box in a direct way. This is a feature that is not present at the moment in WatchGuard."
"Websense is an application that monitors and filters internet traffic. Websense was derived from WatchGuard. But when you go to WatchGuard to actually implement that particular feature, you have to use some type of additional feature and you have to pay for it, unfortunately. I think it should be free or free in the WatchGuard box itself, as an option. It would be nice if they didn't charge us for that."
"The solution can improve by adding a feature to tag a MAC address of a computer system in the policy and more IP configuration settings."
"The reporting is a little on the weak side. I would like to see a better reporting set and easier drill-down options."
"Cloud-based central administration of all devices from one point would be nice"
Sophos UTM is ranked 1st in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 110 reviews while WatchGuard Firebox is ranked 3rd in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 79 reviews. Sophos UTM is rated 8.4, while WatchGuard Firebox is rated 8.4. 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 WatchGuard Firebox writes "Offers a streamlined deployment, intuitive interface and robust security features". Sophos UTM is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Sophos XG, OPNsense, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls and Untangle NG Firewall, whereas WatchGuard Firebox is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Sophos XG, OPNsense, SonicWall TZ and Sophos XGS. See our Sophos UTM vs. WatchGuard Firebox report.
See our list of best Unified Threat Management (UTM) vendors and best Firewalls vendors.
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