We performed a comparison between Azure 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."The most valuable feature of FortiGate is FortiView which provides proactive monitoring."
"It's great for capturing the traffic and troubleshooting it."
"The user interface is relatively easy. The devices are easy to deploy and figure out when you have experience with other security appliances."
"The usage in general is pretty good."
"Provides good firewall security and has great VPN features."
"It has improved our organization with control data."
"Consolidated our network environment at all locations, but mainly at our datacenter."
"It has improved our security capabilities."
"Azure Firewall's feature that I have found most valuable is its scalability."
"In terms of the reporting, it's beautiful. It integrates with Azure monitoring and with Azure policies. That piece is a big help. You can set governing policies and you can use the application firewall, as well as the Azure Firewall, to enforce those policies."
"The solution can autoscale."
"One of the notable advantages of Azure Firewall is its user-friendly interface, which closely resembles or shares similarities with other Azure components."
"The firewall policy control, URL content control, and antivirus are all the most valuable aspects. Threat prevention is as well quite good."
"It's helped us improve our security posture."
"Great security and connectivity."
"We use the solution for application and server deployment."
"I like the web filtering options."
"The most valuable feature is the IPS. It also protects us from malware."
"It is a very good product. The threat monitoring process is the most valuable feature."
"It makes it a lot easier for us to maintain things. Prior to it, things were more difficult. This means less time on us. We can focus on other things. The recovery is more in man-hours for us than anything else."
"Scaling out cannot be easier, as there are many migration paths."
"The most valuable feature of Sophos UTM is the efficiency and mail filtering module."
"It allows me to easily connect with more than forty-five remote sites and more than fifty remote users between IPsec and SSL VPN, applying the web filter and application filter to ensure a secure connection."
"Configuration could not be made any easier."
"Reporting is limited to providing an external appliance for improving the reporting capabilities of the FortiAnalyzer. It does not offer a central management and is also sold separably as an appliance."
"For the migration, everyone has a firewall in use and I am selling Fortinet. Typically, I am replacing another firewall. Previously, there was a tool available to convert configurations from one firewall, such as Palo Alto, to Fortinet, but this tool is no longer free. If it could be made free again, it would be very beneficial."
"Due to its higher cost, Fortinet FortiGate can lead to increased operational expenses."
"Fortinet FortiGate is a stable solution. However, my issue is the performance only. When I use all the profiles, this affects the performance. From the beginning, I should have had a better sizing of the box."
"Currently, FortiGate is providing SSL VPN. But they're missing some features that are available in Palo Alto's SSL VPN."
"Some features of Fortinet FortiGate are actually fee enabled that are inconvenient for deploying in production. Other issues relate to isolation with Cisco products and your server."
"There are some cloud-based features that could be much more flexible than they currently are."
"There are a lot of bugs I have found in the solution and it is difficult to upgrade. These areas need improvement."
"Right now, with Azure Firewall, we cannot have a normal inbound traffic flow. For inbound, Microsoft suggests using application gateways, so the options are very limited. I cannot use this firewall as an intermediate firewall because of the limitations, and I cannot point routing to another firewall. So if I want to use back-to-back firewall architecture in my environment, I cannot use Azure Firewall for that type of configuration either."
"Azure should be able to work better as a balancer also, instead of just being a firewall. It should have a wider mandate."
"Azure Firewall should have a free trial version for new users so that they can evaluate it before deploying it."
"Currently, it only supports IP addresses, so you have to be specific about the IPs that are in your environment."
"The interface could be improved, it's not very user friendly."
"It would be much easier if the on-premises, firewall rules, had some kind of export-import possibility in place, which is not the case right now."
"You have to have a defined IP range within your network to associate it with your network. The problem is you have to plan ahead of time if you expect to use the firewall in the future so that you don't have to reconfigure your subnets or that specific IP range. Other than that, I don't any issues. I use it for basic configuration for a single application, so I really don't try to leverage it for multiple applications where I might find some complexity or challenges."
"For large organizations, a third-party firewall would be an added advantage, because it would have more advanced features, things that are not in Azure Firewall."
"The five-factor authentication needs improvement."
"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 is a little too CPU resource intensive, so we would like to see improvements there."
"The logs are not clear, which means that you need an additional piece of software in order to read them clearly."
"It needs a better user interface. The one they have is not so good."
"I don't really have any notes for improvements."
"The memory and processing were problematic. The interface could be better."
"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."
Azure Firewall is ranked 22nd in Firewalls with 33 reviews while Sophos UTM is ranked 3rd in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 110 reviews. Azure Firewall is rated 7.2, while Sophos UTM is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Azure Firewall writes "Easy to use and configure but could be more robust". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sophos UTM writes "It's a highly stable platform with very few hardware issues". Azure Firewall is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate-VM, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Palo Alto Networks VM-Series and Check Point NGFW, whereas Sophos UTM is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Sophos XG, OPNsense, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls and Cisco Secure Firewall. See our Azure Firewall vs. Sophos UTM report.
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