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.
"This solution has helped our organization by having strong functions and a reliable firewall."
"The reporting you receive out of this appliance is excellent. You will not need an external management system."
"The notable features that I have found most valuable are that it includes the antivirus, and also IPS, and even SD-WAN."
"Fortinet FortiGate is a security device. It can optimize security on the networks of a company. It actually protects the company from attacks from outside. With FortiGate, you can categorize the users. You can create a group of users that can access all of the websites for their work. You can limit other users' access."
"The solution is very user-friendly."
"The ease of setting the solution up is a valuable aspect for us."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiGate are the ease of use and the UI. It has always provided me with what I needed. I have no need for additional costs that other solutions have, such as Sophos."
"The interface is very good."
"The technical services always replied in a very fast and effective way."
"The Threat Management feature makes it very easy to detect the vulnerabilities and other factors. We can make new policy according to it. Policy creation is very simple in Check Point. Because the logs are very good in Check Point Firewall, this reduces our work with the reports that we are getting from the Threat Management. It is very convenient for us to use the reports to make new policies for security and other things."
"We never had an outage of the appliances or the consoles. Stability is very strong. I never had a problem related to stability."
"It is easy to deploy or upgrade. There is no need to do this manually with commands. This solution can be set up online."
"SmartCenter and SmartLog are the best platforms to manage firewall rules. SandBlast Zero-Day is very useful when encountering any security leaks."
"The packet inspections have been a strong point. Our identity collectors have also been helpful. In many ways, Check Point has been a step up from our SonicWalls that we had in-house before that. There's a lot of additional flexibility that we didn't have before."
"In the four years I have worked on the five firewalls we have not had any downtime caused by stability issues."
"The product is very user-friendly."
"I like their firewall and the intrusion detection feature"
"Orchestration of the firewall is the most valuable feature. It is a fast and agile solution. It is good with protection. It is also very easy to deploy and manage, and its user interface is easy to use."
"The solution is easy to set up and configure."
"We get good usage out of the features. It has enabled us to gain popularity. It has great features."
"I like the dashboard, the interface, the management console, and the remote login."
"The initial setup is very straightforward and the solution is extremely user-friendly."
"So far, I'm happy that they have recently added a firewall role, so I feel a little more comfortable with the security. The threat management is good."
"The antivirus features are valuable."
"They sometimes hide some features and if you want to enable them, you have to go in the CLI, enable the feature and configure it through the CLI. Customers, typically, like everything to be done by the GUI."
"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."
"The platform's interface could improve."
"The solution needs to improve its integration with cybersecurity."
"In the next release, I would like to see the interface simplified to be more user-friendly."
"Monitoring and reporting could be better."
"We would like to see an upgrade to the VPN feature, we are using the VPN from outside of our office and there is a limitation to 10 connections, more connections would be suitable."
"The solution is very expensive."
"We find the GUI to be wrong and the CLI doesn't always show all of the connections."
"The equipment is complex, so you need guidance from specialized people or those who constantly work with Check Point. Better forums and information manuals could be provided so that users from different institutions can have more access to the information."
"Check Point's support, at all levels, needs a complete overhaul."
"Check Point is not a cheap solution and it's always painful to see exactly how much we need to spend on this."
"The one thing I have been continually asking for is a more robust certification process including self-paced study material similar to Cisco's Security certification track."
"Something worth mentioning is the need for Spanish support and better representation for teams in the Latin American area."
"It would be nice to add more features to the WatchTower app to be able to perform certain administrative functions without the need for local access."
"It would be nice if there is a mobile-friendly console for our techs."
"The main problem with Sophos XG today is that it doesn't have a feature where you actually know the quality of an international link, which would allow us to we know if the link is operational or not. We need more information. It's losing packets on the network. It's high latency. So, we need more information to know if the link is really bad or really good, and today, we will only know if it's working and this just isn't enough."
"I wish to see an antivirus feature added to the solution."
"The solution could improve by having better security."
"The reporting could be improved in this solution by adding more details."
"Could have a more simplified functionality for users."
"Network security is in need of improvement."
"I would like to have better SSL decryption and HTTP decryption. There should be filtering of SSL and HTTP traffic. Sophos XG consumes a lot of endpoint resources. It consumes a lot of RAM and CPU resources, and they should look into this."
"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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