We performed a comparison between Meraki MX 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 most valuable feature is that we didn't have any problems with Meraki MX."
"Ease of management is the best thing about the solution."
"They have very good technical support and I have relied heavily on them."
"It prevents us from being hacked and delivers information about who and where the attack came from."
"In a week, we can make new policy and view what all our users did."
"Dual WAN connections are greatly simplified and point-to-point VPNs automatically connect regardless of what WAN connection is active."
"Traffic Shaping: The device lets you decide how you want to use your internet services. Due to the fact that Meraki can accept dual WAN, you can decide the way you balance the data traffic."
"Intrusion detection and prevention (IDS/IPS): The best feature. It can detect malware, even a virus, and warn you by email about the device that has it. When the Meraki detects that something is wrong, it automatically blocks the connection or the intrusion, delivering a graphic report with all the necessary content."
"It makes it a lot easier for us to maintain things. Prior to it, things were more difficult. This means less time on us. We can focus on other things. The recovery is more in man-hours for us than anything else."
"Configuration troubleshooting is eased by the use of the color-coded, live firewall log."
"Good basic firewall functions with advanced firewall scanning."
"I have no problem with the cost or licensing of this solution. This is a primary reason whay I wanted this solution. It does the same thing cheaper than other name brands."
"The intrusion prevention is great, and I like dual virus scanning on the network layer because we scan it through Avira and Sophos. Web filtering is also a fantastic option for clients who want to really lock down internet access."
"The initial setup was easy."
"Sophos SG UTM had all the basic functionality that you needed. It is user-friendly and easy to manage for any integrator."
"It meets our compliance needs in an elastic computer environment."
"The IPS, the Intrusion Prevention System, can be improved."
"The configuration options for firewall and IPS have limitations."
"Meraki MX firewalls are great for small to medium-sized businesses, but other solutions are better for enterprise-sized companies."
"We feel that Cisco provides smaller features, with fewer possibilities versus other solutions out there."
"It is very expensive."
"More detail needed for configuration of the VPN."
"Management can be improved in Meraki MX."
"Meraki MX can come across as an expensive solution."
"There is still room for improvement in wireless protection. I don't mean their WiFi device is bad, but there are still things to improve on, such as WiFi roaming."
"An area for improvement in Sophos UTM is load balancing because my company cannot use it currently. If Sophos could release a new configuration for the load balancing feature to work for my company, that would be great."
"The documentation during the AWS integration was a little fuzzy on getting it to work with how the whole public exposure versus private exposure, then routing some of the traffic."
"There's an issue that when we deploy UTM on fiber, it automatically upgrades to the latest version without giving an option to stay on the current one."
"The initial setup may be difficult for those not familiar with the product."
"The integration capabilities could be better."
"We had some problems with the configuration. They had provided a CloudFormation template, and we had to go several rounds to make it work."
"Support for IKEv2 is needed in this solution."
Meraki MX is ranked 2nd in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 59 reviews while Sophos UTM is ranked 3rd in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 110 reviews. Meraki MX is rated 8.2, while Sophos UTM is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Meraki MX writes "Cost-effective, simplified, easy to manage, and reliable with advanced security features and granular visibility". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sophos UTM writes "It's a highly stable platform with very few hardware issues". Meraki MX is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Cisco Secure Firewall, Sophos XG and Zscaler Internet Access, whereas Sophos UTM is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Fortinet FortiGate, Sophos XG, OPNsense and Juniper SRX Series Firewall. See our Meraki MX vs. Sophos UTM report.
See our list of best Unified Threat Management (UTM) 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.
To be honest, if you are still buying firewall appliances and UTM licenses you are already behind a very obvious requirement to move to Cloud security. Buying UTM does not solve the growing risk of mobility and cloud application delivery. It would be worthwhile reading Gartner's SASE paper on security transformation. Or research Zscaler, who has been delivering this model for 10 years.
If a user is in your network behind your UTM, what stops him from connecting to his mobile phone Hotspot and bypassing all UTM, DLP, etc. Security has to move from the network to the endpoint. Protection regardless of location, device or network. Anything less is a massive compromise and a false sense of actual security.
Sophos gives on-premise UTM functionalities that work like traditional UTMs (such as FortiGate, Firepower and the likes). Meraki MX devices are managed from the cloud and are subscription-based but also extremely easy to configure.
If you want a very easy to configure solution with a minimum IT staff and prefer OPEX over CAPEX, go with Meraki.
If you want on-premise control, and prefer CAPEX over OPEX, go with Sophos.
I haven't had any experience with Sophos, but in small business environments I've found the Meraki devices to be needlessly complex. As one who has worked quite a bit with enterprise Cisco devices, I can't say I'm surprised. In my opinion, complexity doesn't necessarily denote better functionality.
Most concerning to me, though, the Meraki devices also stop functioning entirely if you don't renew. their licenses, and it's some $500 per year *per device.* Any situation where a license not being reactivated can shut down your entire network is a huge concern, particularly at such high cost. We aren't talking Karen not being able to use Acrobat or something here... we're talking entire site outage. That is enough to make any technician worth their salt have a mild seizure.
When it comes to Security, I have very good experiences with Sophos, I can say the security solution is absolutely great in Sophos. Whereas I have never used Meraki, so I can't comment anything on it.
SD-WAN; no experience on any of the requested products, so better not to make any false comment/advice.