We performed a comparison between SonicWall NSa 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 main reason why I purchased the particular unit was that it had good reviews and what other people were saying as far as its completeness and its leading capabilities in terms of endpoint security was very good."
"The UTM feature is quite good. FortiAP is easy to deploy because both Fortigate and FortiAP are under the same brand. Otherwise, you need to do more work on the configuration."
"Fortinet offers the latest versions to cater to the needs of enterprises."
"The IPsec tunnels are very easily created, and quite interoperable with devices from other vendors."
"Customers are more inclined towards FortiGate because of application control, web filtering, and anti-spam features. The support from the FortiGate team is good, and price-wise, it is affordable."
"Their proxy-based inspection is responsive and secure."
"The interface is very good."
"Overall, the pricing of the solution is very good. The product offers good value."
"Content filtering reduces the load on the available bandwidth and restricts employees from using distracting websites on the job, which leads to more productive hours."
"The product is simple to manage."
"The most valuable feature I've found is VPN and web protection, particularly with navigation assessment. We use the application control feature to create rules controlling specific application navigation."
"The solution has many useful features, such as content management, user management, user filtering, and domain controller connectivity mapping."
"Compared to Cisco, SonicWall NSa is much easier to configure."
"User friendly and intuitive."
"SonicWall's technical support is very good."
"The most valuable feature is the sandbox."
"Advanced protection (Sophos Sandstorm) - Protects against crypto viruses in real-time."
"Sophos integrates seamlessly, and we don't even feel it is running in the background."
"Sophos UTM has improved the porting section. It has improved security by seeing the gaps. For example, when you discover that an entry has been using a certain application, with Sophos UTM acting as a Layer 7 firewall, you can block the application, not the port."
"It works well without any maintenance. So far, it has worked pretty well regardless of the traffic."
"It has helped by identifying threats within the company. If there are computers or servers that are compromised, then we are able to identify them right away in the system."
"Configuration could not be made any easier."
"It is a very good product. The threat monitoring process is the most valuable feature."
"The solution's sandboxing, application center, and database engine are good."
"There are problems with the custom reporting of the unique traffic. The data is there, but it is too difficult for us to extract."
"I would like to see improvements with the antivirus and IPS as they are not working properly all the time."
"Fortinet FortiGate can improve the integration with Active Directory. Additionally, I would like to have a Cloud Controller, such as they do in the Cisco Meraki solution."
"It would be good if they had fewer updates."
"I could not configure sFlow from the FortiGate graphical user interface. I realized that the sFlow configuration is available only from the CLI, and discovered that sFlow is not supported on virtual interfaces, such as VDOM links, IPsec, or GRE."
"There could be more integration between the logging and analytical platforms to make it more seamless and integrated."
"There are some problems that support cannot give you a logical reason as to why it happened. For example, I had a case where I was dealing with a WhatsApp application that was giving issues. Technical support gave more than one reason it could be giving issues, but none of them solved the problem. Eventually I solved the problem, but it was far from the solutions that support had given."
"I don't like that anything more than very basic reporting is not included."
"I feel that the SSL VPN client software needs a lot of improvement."
"We also use the Sophos Firewall for web configuration, which we don't have in SonicWall. Only Sophos has those options. If SonicWall included that feature, that would be a benefit for us."
"SonicWall NSa doesn't have a proxy. It also needs a quota management feature in specific scenarios where you must limit user bandwidth for a particular day."
"The cost could be lower. There could also be more flexibility for smaller companies."
"In terms of improvement, features like App Control do not work properly"
"The pricing for this product in India is high and the fees should be reduced."
"I'd like to see integration with Microsoft 365 for authentication."
"The product has a lot of bugs, actually. We are facing some issues with this product. The DPI SSL feature which is there, it is not working properly."
"We didn’t find any issues but I know there have been some in the last few years."
"It is a pretty straightforward setup, but it should be some sort of documentation that takes you step-by-step to help set it up for your VPC."
"The technical support only communicates via email. I would prefer to communicate directly with someone."
"We would like to have unique viewable IDs for rules and in the packet filter logfile, for easier debugging of old log files."
"The solution needs better integration with captive portals and XGs."
"The solution could be improved by adding cloud soundboxing."
"Last year, Sophos had some major internal management changes that negatively impacted their support."
"Flexibility in pricing could be improved. It's more rigid in its pricing compared to its competitor: Kaspersky."
SonicWall NSa is ranked 19th in Firewalls with 80 reviews while Sophos UTM is ranked 1st in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 110 reviews. SonicWall NSa is rated 7.8, while Sophos UTM is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of SonicWall NSa writes "Great performance and security with reasonable pricing". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sophos UTM writes "It's a highly stable platform with very few hardware issues". SonicWall NSa is most compared with SonicWall TZ, Meraki MX, Sophos XG, Cisco Secure Firewall and Palo Alto Networks PA-Series, whereas Sophos UTM is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Sophos XG, OPNsense, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls and Cisco Secure Firewall. See our SonicWall NSa vs. Sophos UTM report.
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