We performed a comparison between Palo Alto Networks VM-Series 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."Allows for firewall rules to be programmed and named in a way that makes it “readable”"
"We are using the FortiGate 100D series. VPN, firewall, anti-malware, OTM, and intrusion prevention are useful features."
"Fortigate's most valuable feature is that it doesn't need a push policy when writing rules."
"The VPN is the most valuable feature."
"The reporting and monitoring are very good."
"It is easy to manage, and it doesn't need much knowledge from the team. It is a stable device, and there are many features that are included out of the box."
"Using this product makes the VPN seamless and almost invisible to me in the sense that I don't have to think about it."
"Reliability is the best feature. We faced some issues when we were setting it up, but the service, portal, and administration are good."
"In terms of security breaches, the product aids in categorizing and monitoring traffic, allowing for the identification of potentially malicisous or incorrectly formatted applications."
"The most valuable feature is the CLI."
"The most valuable features are the User ID, URL filtering, and application filtering."
"You already can scale it if you put it in Auto Scaling groups. If you put it in a load balancer, it should already be able to scale."
"The product provides more visibility into our traffic."
"Centralized management is valuable because it allows us to configure settings in one location and apply them across all three locations."
"The VM-Series scalability is fast and easy to implement, improving our security posture as our Azure network grows."
"Using Palo Alto Networks Panorama, we were able to deploy a single point of management and visualization of the firewall infrastructure in cloud, on-premise and integrated with Azure to automate scale up. Its security features, i.e. anti-malware, threat prevention, URL Filtering, VPN, and antivirus are the most valuable. The ID-User integrated with AD and 2FA features are also very useful to provide secure access to servers and some users in the company. "
"The most valuable feature is web filtering."
"The solution is scalable."
"Sophos offers great disk encryption, anti protection, and the interface is very user-friendly."
"The most valuable feature I have found to be the reporting function."
"Good security and a good interface."
"The most valuable features are the central management, the user VPN, and communications."
"The stability of Sophos XG is very good. However, there have been some issues with other weaker models because they are limited in hardware in resources."
"Over the past two years, during the COVID pandemic, the VPN has helped us a lot."
"Some of the web policy reports could be improved."
"FortiLink is the interface on the firewall that allows you to extend switch management across all of your switches in the network. The problem with it is that you can't use multiple interfaces unless you set them up in a lag. Only then you can run them. So, it forces you to use a core type of switch to propagate that management out to the rest of the switches, and then it is running the case at 200. It leaves you with 18 ports on the firewall because it is also a layer-three router that could also be used as a switch, but as soon as you do that, you can't really use them. They could do a little bit more clean up in the way the stacking interface works. Some use cases and the documentation on the FortiLink checking interface are a little outdated. I can find stuff on version 5 or more, but it is hard to find information on some of the newer firmware. The biggest thing I would like to see is some improvement in the switch management feature. I would like to be able to relegate some of the ports, which are on the firewall itself, to act as a switch to take advantage of those ports. Some of these firewalls have clarity ports on them. If I can use those, it would mean that I need to buy two less switches, which saves time. I get why they don't, but I would still like to see it because it would save a little bit of space in the server rack."
"The user interface could be improved."
"They've become quite expensive."
"They can do more tests before they release new versions because I would like to be more assured. We had some experiences where they release something new and great, but some of the old features are disabled or they don't work well, which impacts the product satisfaction. The manufacturer should be able to prove that everything works or not only that it might work. This is applicable to most of the other services, software, and hardware companies. They all should work on this. We cannot trust every new release, such as a beta release, on the first day. We wait for some comments on the forums and from other companies that we know. We always wait a few weeks before we use the updated version. They should also extend the VPN client application, especially for Linux versions. Currently, it has an application for Linux devices, but it doesn't work the way we want to connect to the VPN. They use only the old connection, not the new one. They have VPN client applications for Windows and Mac, but they can add more useful features to better manage the devices and monitor the current health of each device. Such features would be helpful for our company."
"There can be more security in hybrid implementations. When a customer has a hybrid environment where some parts are in the cloud, we need a consistent security solution for such scenarios."
"In the next release, I would like to see the interface simplified to be more user-friendly."
"We would like to see better pricing."
"All areas need improvement: manufacturing, education, financial, etc."
"Palo Alto Networks VM-Series needs to improve its order process."
"In the next release, I would like to see better integration of multi-factor authentication vendors."
"Palo Alto is that it is really bad when it comes to technical support."
"Palo Alto should update their documentation to make it more readable and provide easier-to-follow instructions through videos."
"I would like to have automatic daily reporting, such as how many users have connected via SSL VPN."
"The utilization monitoring and GUI have room for improvement."
"On the cloud side, they need to come up with more HA solutions to support the multi-region."
"The training manual provided to users lacks proper guidance on configuration procedures."
"It would be helpful if the solution offered some tutorial videos to help new users learn the system quickly."
"The program is rather expensive."
"Lacking network access control, user profiling and analytics dashboards."
"In the Firewall, the Intrusion Prevention System can be improved."
"There's an IP address delivery for our VPN client and a limited range of IP addresses. So this is a problem in the latest firmware release, but rather than using homework scenarios, we need a lot of VPN clients."
"Let's say I set up a rule to block users from accessing YouTube or Facebook. The rule will only block the HTTP traffic, which is non-secure traffic... The problem comes when you are trying to block, or allow, similar traffic that uses HTTPS. You have to create a certificate and import it into the users' web browsers, whatever they are using... The problem occurs when you're dealing with roaming users who use laptops and have to move between different sites that have different types of policies applied to them. You have to import all sorts of certificates from each site into their browser. Doing so will most probably conflict with something else that is totally irrelevant and cause a problem."
"The support engineers of the product are not very tech-savvy, making it an area where improvements are required."
Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is ranked 10th in Firewalls with 53 reviews while Sophos XG is ranked 7th in Firewalls with 192 reviews. Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is rated 8.6, while Sophos XG is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Palo Alto Networks VM-Series writes "Many features are optimized for troubleshooting real-time scenarios, saving a lot of time". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sophos XG writes "Easy to use and deploy with an improved pricing structure in place". Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is most compared with Azure Firewall, Fortinet FortiGate-VM, Cisco Secure Firewall, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls and Juniper SRX Series Firewall, whereas Sophos XG is most compared with Netgate pfSense, OPNsense, Sophos XGS, SonicWall TZ and Sophos UTM. See our Palo Alto Networks VM-Series vs. Sophos XG report.
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