We performed a comparison between Check Point NGFW and Sophos XG based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Features: Check Point NGFW is praised for its extensive security features, centralized management, and virtualization capabilities. It is highly regarded in terms of comprehensive protection and adaptability. Sophos XG is known for its usability, user-friendly interface, and straightforward installation process. Both options provide robust threat defense and the ability to expand as needed.
Check Point NGFW, needs to improve various aspects, including integration with other infrastructures, hardware upgrades, cost and pricing, stability and security, UI, complexity issues, redundancy options, and memory management. Sophos XG needs improvements in antivirus features, graphical interface and performance, bandwidth management and VPN capabilities, reporting and user management, support and response time, and specific issues and feature requests.
Service and Support: Some customers have found Check Point NGFW's customer service to be helpful and responsive, while others believe there is room for improvement. Sophos XG's support has received both positive and negative feedback. Some customers have found it to be good and helpful, while others have been dissatisfied with unhelpful and unresponsive support.
Ease of Deployment: The initial setup for Check Point NGFW can range in difficulty, with some users finding it simple while others find it more challenging. Knowledge and experience may be required for certain configurations and migrations. The initial setup for Sophos XG is generally seen as uncomplicated and straightforward, although some users may struggle if they are unfamiliar with the product.
Pricing: Check Point NGFW is known for its high setup cost, particularly when compared to other products. Users find it challenging to add new licensing to existing devices, especially for larger enterprise-level devices. Sophos XG provides flexible pricing options based on the required functionality, offering reasonable and competitive pricing, particularly for educational institutions.
ROI: Check Point NGFW stands out for its cost savings, simplicity, and effective security enforcement. Sophos XG offers a high ROI by reducing support expenses and enhancing security practices.
Comparison Results: Sophos XG is the favored product when compared to Check Point NGFW. Users find the initial setup of Sophos XG to be simple. They appreciate the functionality and user interface of Sophos XG, as well as its extensive protection against threats. The pricing for Sophos XG is considered fair and the technical support is satisfactory.
"It's quite comfortable to handle the FortiGate firewall."
"The pricing is excellent. It's much less expensive than Cisco."
"We have found it to be very reliable and that's why our teams and various users in our company use it as our main firewall every day."
"The most valuable features are SD-WAN, application control, IPS control, and FortiSandbox."
"Using this product makes the VPN seamless and almost invisible to me in the sense that I don't have to think about it."
"Provides good firewall security and has great VPN features."
"FortiGate is very simple to manage and easy to use."
"The CLI and GUI do a good job of putting a lot at your fingertips."
"mart Console simplifies the management of current policies and objects, making it effortless to track an object's usage or identify unused objects, thus ensuring a tidy configuration."
"The most valuable feature is the central management system through the Security Management Server. Apart from that, the graphical user interface helps us to do things easily."
"I love the redesigned interface starting with R80 as well as the ability for multiple engineers to work on the policy simultaneously."
"The most valuable feature of Check Point NGFW is the unparalleled distribution of the network traffic. The central management station they have allows you to manage everything from one place."
"By far, it's the best security solution one can adopt for their organization."
"Policy configuration has been consistent over the years, so there is not much of a learning curve as upgrades are released."
"The Identity-Based Inspection Control gives us the ability to leverage the organization’s Microsoft AD, LDAP, RADIUS, and Cisco pxGrid."
"Remote access with a secure workspace provides a clear separation between the client and corporate network."
"Sophos offers great disk encryption, anti protection, and the interface is very user-friendly."
"The solution has all the security features you would need for any type of environment."
"The updates are helpful and add to the solution in a positive way."
"This kind of strategic technology makes it much easier to remove malware and address vulnerabilities quickly."
"Web filtering is easy enough to deploy, manage, or make exceptions to."
"This solution is very user-friendly and even a non-professional can configure the policies."
"What I like about his program, is that it is easy to use and easy to manage."
"The VPN features and its capabilities are great."
"Fortinet needs to overhaul its documentation."
"MTBF: Hardware failure is more common when compared to SonicWall or Cisco ASA."
"Fortinet FortiGate can improve by integrating the web application firewall and the DDoS protection part of the solution. Having a WAF feature, web application firewall, and proxy together would be a good benefit."
"Palo Alto has a feature called WildFire Analysis that is unavailable in FortiGate. WildFire is better than a sandbox because it can address zero-day threats and vulnerabilities. It can immediately identify zero-day threats from the cloud."
"The solution could be more evenly structured."
"There are problems with the custom reporting of the unique traffic. The data is there, but it is too difficult for us to extract."
"Improvement is needed in the Web Filter quotas to restrict users with allocated quotas."
"Fortinet should focus on enhancing the capabilities of FortiGate by consolidating its various products, such as FortiGate Cloud, FortiManager, and FortiAnalyzer."
"You need to merge all the old consoles into one new one and make the interface more convenient for the novice administrator."
"The price of this product could be improved."
"This solution requires management software that is sold separately; it's actually a different appliance altogether."
"There's a significant area for improvement when it comes to pricing."
"The tool is somewhat more expensive than its competitors."
"It would be nice to have comprehensive documentation and training resources that can help users and administrators to better understand and utilize the full range of Check Point's capabilities."
"I hope for product simplification. It would be better to use one security console, instead of many of them (for licensing and monitoring). The solution is hard for newcomers and takes much time to deep in. Also, I want a historical graph for throughput and system resources usage. Maybe it will be great to make easy step-by-step installation and configuration cookbooks as Fortinet did, and integrate the documentation within the solution."
"Log queries are slow and take time to load."
"When it comes to improvements that the vendor can make, we see that the cloud integration for managing all the firewalls is essentially a replacement of the on-prem version we had and is not sufficiently mature."
"The solution could improve by making the graphical interface better and increasing the performance."
"Its user interface is a little bit slow."
"The weakest point is the technical support because they are difficult to get into contact with."
"Lacks improved throughput performance in a box."
"The number of ports, especially on the entry-level appliances, should be increased."
"Sophos XG does not have the ability to disconnect a user."
"Some of the firewall rules are complicated for us to understand, they should be simplified."
Check Point NGFW is ranked 5th in Firewalls with 277 reviews while Sophos XG is ranked 7th in Firewalls with 192 reviews. Check Point NGFW is rated 8.8, while Sophos XG is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Check Point NGFW writes "Good antivirus protection and URL filtering with very good user identification capabilities". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sophos XG writes "Easy to use and deploy with an improved pricing structure in place". Check Point NGFW is most compared with Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Cisco Secure Firewall, Netgate pfSense, Azure Firewall and OPNsense, whereas Sophos XG is most compared with Netgate pfSense, OPNsense, Sophos XGS, SonicWall TZ and Cisco Secure Firewall. See our Check Point NGFW vs. Sophos XG report.
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