We performed a comparison between Netgate pfSense 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."It blocks the vulnerabilities that can negatively impact us."
"Provides good firewall security and has great VPN features."
"The most valuable feature is the web filter."
"Overall security features and performance routing is good."
"A strong point of FortiGate is that the graphical interface is complete and easy to use, especially if we think there is a list of operations that we are able to perform inside."
"Its stability is the most valuable."
"Fortigate is very scalable to serve our customers' needs. We have scaled already from fifty to more than a hundred instances of Fortinet FortiGate. Around 20 staff are required for deployment and maintenance, mostly engineers."
"The Intrusion Prevention System and the web filtering are both working well."
"The VPN is my favorite feature."
"What I like about pfSense is that it works well and runs on an inexpensive appliance."
"It has a good web cache. I used to use a DHCP server and DNS server. For my company, I use pfSense as a load balancing application."
"What I found most valuable is the cost of the platform, the flexibility of the platform, and the fact that the ongoing fees are not there as they are with the competitor. Some people may think you're taking a risk with using Opensource. I think it just provides the end user, specifically for us small, medium business providers of services, the flexibility we need at the right cost to provide them a higher end, almost enterprise type service."
"It is a very good solution for enterprises that need a VPN for their employees. It is the best way to provide a remote work facility to employees at a very low cost. Other solutions that I have had in the past were very expensive. Enterprises don't always have that kind of money to invest."
"I have found pfSense to be stable."
"The ability to create a VPN allows me to monitor branch offices from a central location."
"Firewall system for small, medium, and large data networks. It allows you to provide security to your environment: DMZ networks, LAN, WAN, etc."
"The most valuable feature is that it is easy to administer."
"The initial setup is easy."
"Efficient and effective - it's easy to separate rules."
"Configuration could not be made any easier."
"They are all good, but most-used are Network Protection and Web Filtering."
"It works well without any maintenance. So far, it has worked pretty well regardless of the traffic."
"The UTM features are reasonably strong and the patterns are updated on a regular basis"
"With over 150 firewalls in our portal, management and monitoring have never been easier."
"The solution's framework needs to be frequently updated in order to have a stable solution."
"The setup is pretty complex and not easy to implement."
"Fortinet FortiGate could improve by having more storage in the hardware for log data."
"There are some complex administration tasks in their administration portal. That needs to be improved."
"Fortinet FortiGate could improve by having a frequent ask questions(FAQ) area for people to receive quick answers to popular questions. Additionally, it would be beneficial to have an SMS notification feature. For example, if you cannot access your email you could receive an SMS message."
"It could use better throughput on some of the smaller boxes for the branch offices."
"They have to just improve its performance when we enable all UTM features. When you enable all the features, the performance of FortiGate, as well as of Sophos and SonicWall, goes down."
"Technical support needs to be improved."
"I would like to see pfSense integrate WireGuard. Currently, pfSense uses OpenVPN, and there's nothing wrong with it, but WireGuard is a lot leaner and meaner."
"A way to clean squid cache from the GUI."
"I would like to see multiple DNS servers running on individual interfaces."
"The GUI could use improvements, though it is manageable."
"Reporting and real-time monitoring, since I'm used to Watchguard's reporting features, it would be nice to have an embedded solution for reporting."
"I would like to see different graphs available in the reporting."
"Netgate pfSense needs to improve the configuration for a VPN."
"It needs better parsing of logs. At the moment, you have to use an external server for this if you want a deeper analysis."
"We need to speed up the support."
"The solution could be improved by adding cloud soundboxing."
"Sophos UTM's internet security could be better."
"I would like them to move from the Classic Load Balancer to the Network Load Balancer. This would make it easier to do certain things with Amazon. They are able to do some enhancements with Network Load Balancer that they are unable to do with Classic Load Balancer."
"Support for IKEv2 is needed in this solution."
"Reporting: We have had to work manually in many of our reports."
"We would like to have unique viewable IDs for rules and in the packet filter logfile, for easier debugging of old log files."
"I would like to see Sophos UTM add support for all the new threat-detection technologies and the ability to respond to novel security threats that come along every day."
Netgate pfSense is ranked 1st in Firewalls with 128 reviews while Sophos UTM is ranked 1st in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 110 reviews. Netgate pfSense is rated 8.6, while Sophos UTM is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Netgate pfSense writes "User-friendly, easy to manage the firewall, rule-wise and interface-wise". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sophos UTM writes "It's a highly stable platform with very few hardware issues". Netgate pfSense is most compared with OPNsense, Sophos XG, KerioControl, Cisco Secure Firewall and WatchGuard Firebox, whereas Sophos UTM is most compared with Sophos XG, OPNsense, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Cisco Secure Firewall and Untangle NG Firewall. See our Netgate pfSense vs. Sophos UTM report.
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pfSense is opensource and has been the last 10 years in the top 10 best
firewall solutions in the world, it is free, stable, scalable, and easy to
administer ... and above all very safe, since it is one of the few systems
that could have been violated. It's free.
In fact, Karl, the 50-IP free version is for home use only, and not even then if it also protects business assets. You did a great job of explaining the difference, so I won't comment further.
To the original poster, it's cheaper to hire a Sophos consultant to create your original configuration. It costs twice as much to get a configuration "repaired" that wasn't correctly designed. A Sophos Solution Partner that has a Sophos Certified Architect with plenty of experience and good referrals is probably your best bet.
With Sophos is easy to configure and you have the support from the frabicant, with pfSense you have to learn from the community and learning curve is a little hard, last occasion with pfSense it don't have support for vpn dynamic, with Sophos they have RED equipment that is an extension from the core, only you need the serial number from the remote equipment and you have the vpn , both are great equipment and software, depend of the budget, pfSense is free and they have support if you pay the license very cheap
pfSense is just a basic firewall with VPN and Captive Portal functionality but does its job great. Only needs minimum resources to function. Price is right (FREE)
Sophos UTM is much more, hence the UTM. It does firewall, advance threat protection, VPN, Secure web gateway, email protection (AV, Spam, Encryption, and DLP), endpoint protection, Mobile Device control, Web Application Firewall, User Portal, built in reporting, and central management. It does require more resources but you get a lot more out of it. Two options depending on the size of your office, commercial version or the Free version that you can build on your own hardware. The free version is restricted to 50 IP addresses. (www.sophos.com)
I have used both and both have their place but using Sophos in my environment just because it offers a lot more functionality, nice dashboard, reports, and easy to use through the GUI.
One other big difference is that pfSense is FreeBSD based while Sophos UTM is linux based. It is also worth having a lool on cacheguard which is a proxy oriented product and also Linux based.
I´m afraid I am not able to help in this matter. We´ve decided to for FortiGate as services, based on our relationship with our IT security provider and the FortiGate reviews available on the net.
We used to use pfSence for one particular open network but let the full control on de FortiGate. During the investigation and analysis period we thought of Sophos but felt more comfortable going for FortiGate pretty much based on price and our relationship with our IT security provider. Hence my experience wouldn´t help in this case.
My best advice would is to refer to the article available on:
www.itcentralstation.com