We performed a comparison between Check Point NGFW and Sophos UTM based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Unified Threat Management (UTM) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The simplicity of the configuration and the stability of the product are most valuable. The VPN concentrator is very useful."
"FortiGate's web and URL filtering are unlike any other firewall I've used. The functionality of URL filtering in those solutions is problematic because everything is encrypted, and firewalls can't break that encryption protocol. Fortinet has an SSL proxy, so the encryption is done before the packet ever leaves the FortiGate. The URL filter is definitely one of the most helpful features."
"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."
"We've found the solution to be pretty stable."
"I like Fortinet's cloud management. It allows me to manage all my devices in different branches for three cloud accounts. Even though I use on-prem devices, I can manage everything on the cloud."
"The reporting you receive out of this appliance is excellent. You will not need an external management system."
"The FortiGate controls the user's activities and maximizes my bandwidth use overall."
"It's very easy to configure."
"There are also additional features, compared to a Layer 4 or Layer 3 firewall, such as AV signatures and devices, which are very helpful for securing the company's network."
"Check Point has a really cool GUI."
"Its most significant strength lies in its superior threat detection engines."
"The Smart Dashboard and other user interfaces are very easy to use and can be handled without any significant IT skills."
"Check Point's most useful feature is threat prevention and extraction. It was tough to manage seven firewalls and a perimeter solution for IPS, anti-malware, anti-bot, and sandboxing."
"The ease of configuring VPNs can be very useful especially for companies with lots of remote locations."
"When applying application control, we can ensure user access to the internet in accordance with company policy and easy implementation if some users need exception access."
"The initial setup is easy."
"It is not an easy task to protect your web servers from the big bad internet. The Web Server Protection in this solution does it elegantly and, if configured correctly, even hides the server's base system from prying eyes."
"This is a very stable product."
"Technical support is very responsive."
"The solution is scalable."
"Sophos UTM's best feature is SIM in the cloud, which combines the gateway solution and endpoint solution to send telemetry data to the cloud and provides full contact visibility regarding security."
"We find all of the features valuable because together they fit the needs of our customers."
"It is a stable product... I rate the solution's technical support a nine out of ten...The initial setup is quite easy because they have all the information on their website."
"The solution is stable."
"Its customer service could be better."
"The user interface could be improved."
"The monitor and the visibility, in this proxy, is very weak."
"They need faster serviceability and more security features."
"The cloud management and automation capability could be improved."
"There are just some services that aren't available. For example, the Ethernet or point-to-point protocols. They could add these services to their product offering - especially services for ISPs."
"The UTM filtering needs improvement."
"Quality control on their firmware versions needs improvement. When they introduce new firmware, there tend to be bugs."
"Technical support could be improved."
"It depends whether the problem is known to Check Point. If they are aware there is a problem, quite often it will then depend on which tech you finally land on if it's easier or harder to get to the root cause. The last issue was in India so that was pretty bad. It's easier if you get directly through to Tel Aviv or Ottawa, but you can't choose. Once they know what the issue is, it's pretty good. It pretty much depends on the engineer that you get. There are pretty good engineers and there are many engineers who are at just the starter level at Check Point who are not really into the stuff. Sometimes it's hard, sometimes it's easy, depending on the problem and the tech engineer you get."
"There are issues with stability while upgrading devices with hotfixes."
"The VPN part was actually one of the most complex parts for us. It was not easy for us to switch from Cisco, because of one particular part of the integration: connecting the Check Point device to an Entrust server. Entrust is a solution that provides two-factor authentication. We got around it by using another server, a solution called RADIUS."
"It could be easier to access the installation of the Hostfix for VSX solutions. The CLI commands help us understand how virtual firewalls behave in terms of processor, memory, and other aspects. More graphic visualizations of CPUSE commands would be a welcome improvement, and Check Point could expand scripts to run within the solution for multiple tasks."
"It would be nice if there is a mobile-friendly console for our techs."
"There is a strong demand for security services that can be effortlessly integrated which would ensure that security measures can seamlessly adapt to the cloud infrastructure."
"In our particular case, we have different web applications developed by the same organization, however, that requires a specialized protection element such as a WAF. Having this service or feature within the same solution would be very valuable."
"Updates come out agonizingly slowly, a trickle."
"Anti-phishing functionality should be improved."
"The solution needs better integration with captive portals and XGs."
"Finding information about Sophos’ sizing guidelines can actually be difficult. Also, Sophos does not make it clear what they mean by “users” when you are sizing a firewall, which then leads to undersized implementations."
"I am going to flat out say technical support is terrible. Being a Platinum level customer, I am not happy with the support."
"We'd like to see them offer their services on mobile devices like tablets. I'm not sure if that's an option or not."
"Sophos should be more user-friendly, have more dashboards, and an easier implementation."
"The reporting could be a lot better."
Check Point NGFW doesn't meet the minimum requirements to be ranked in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 277 reviews while Sophos UTM is ranked 1st in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 110 reviews. Check Point NGFW is rated 8.8, while Sophos UTM is rated 8.4. 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 UTM writes "It's a highly stable platform with very few hardware issues". Check Point NGFW is most compared with Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Sophos XG, Cisco Secure Firewall, Netgate pfSense and Azure Firewall, whereas Sophos UTM is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Sophos XG, OPNsense, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls and Cisco Secure Firewall. See our Check Point NGFW vs. Sophos UTM report.
See our list of best Unified Threat Management (UTM) vendors and best Firewalls vendors.
We monitor all Unified Threat Management (UTM) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
