We performed a comparison between Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls and Sophos XGS 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's very easy to configure."
"The IPsec tunnels are very easily created, and quite interoperable with devices from other vendors."
"Anti-Spam web content filterinG."
"I like that they have given me a solution at a fair price."
"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."
"It's very good and very stable for businesses. It works very well."
"It's very fast and easy to configure."
"We purchased Fortinet because of the pricing, its functionality, because it met our requirements, and the total cost of ownership over five years was quite reasonable. In the market, Fortinet is rated quite well."
"Its flexibility is the most valuable."
"The structure is much faster and more sophisticated than Cisco."
"The ease of use and the ease of configuration of our policies are the most valuable features."
"Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls have a Single Pass Parallel Processing (SP3) Architecture, which has a different kind of code doing the work. It increases the packet processing rate. Whereas, without the SP3 Architecture, you are waiting for each job to complete, even if you have 100 jobs assigned."
"The most valuable features are the power of the threat prevention and the WildFire service. Its strength comes from the huge number of sensors all over the world. The firewalls have a rich library of signatures."
"The user ID, Wildfire, UI, and management configuration are all great features."
"It's very important that Palo Alto NG Firewalls embed machine learning into the core of the firewall to provide inline, real-time attack prevention. That increases our security posture... The firewall is able to capture it and flag it and it is easy to mitigate as soon as we see something like that happening, to secure the environment more, in real time."
"Palo Alto NGFW’s unified platform has helped our customers eliminate security holes. With a unified platform, customers can deploy the NG Firewall both in the data center edge, inside the data center, and in the product/public cloud environments. They have the same user interfaces and platform, so they can be maintained by a single unified platform called Panorama. Customers can use Palo Alto Network NG Firewalls in all the places where they need to protect their environments. This helps to decrease security holes."
"Sophos XGS' best features are simplicity and its built-in reporting tool."
"The most valuable features of Sophos XGS for me are XGS IPS, SD-WAN, VPN setup, email protection, and integration with endpoint security."
"The centralized security is very good."
"Sophos XGS's most valuable feature is content filtering."
"The VPN is the best feature."
"The initial setup is very user-friendly because they have graphical user interface options and command line interface options. I would give the initial setup a rating of five out of five."
"It is very stable. I have not heard of any issue where clients would have to replace hardware. It's been really stable for a long while."
"Easy to set up firewall product, that's also easy to manage and scale."
"Quality control on their firmware versions needs improvement. When they introduce new firmware, there tend to be bugs."
"The pricing could be a bit better, especially when you consider how they have the most basic offering priced."
"It is very expensive, and their support is not very good. I hope that their technical support will be better in the future."
"There are SD-WAN network monitoring, SD-WAN features, Industrial Databases, Internet of Things, Detection, etc., however, we do have not licenses for those features. We thought that if you bought a product, you should have all of the features it offers. Why should you need to make so many extra purchases to enable features? They should have one price for the entire offering."
"I use the FortiGate 60D model and realized the 300Mbps bandwidth limitation. Because it is a product that offers many services, I think it could have greater bandwidth capacity."
"To the best of my knowledge, Fortinet does not have a CASB solution and Fortinet does not have a Zero trust solution."
"Fortinet FortiGate could improve by adding FortiAnalyzer to its solution, we should not have to use another solution. FortiAnalyzer can provide more detailed information."
"The support costs and licensing are sometimes so expensive."
"The cost has room for improvement."
"The biggest thing that needs to be improved with them is their training. I took a training class for the 8.0 build, then I took it again for the 9.0 and 10 builds. They add new features every time that they do a new major release, but the training doesn't keep up. It is the same basic training that probably was with the 3.0 build, and they just change the screenshots. I would love to see them do some more work since they have all these bells and whistles, but we don't know how to use those features on a large scale."
"I would like to see better integration with IoT technologies."
"The solution could be more cost-effective."
"They can improve the handling and management of User-ID. They should also improve its price. Their technical support can also be improved."
"There are some advanced features that we aren't able to use, which include active IP authentication and app ID. We are facing challenges with implementing those two features."
"The user interface is a bit clumsy and not very user-friendly."
"We have not taken Palo Alto's firewall management solution because it's too expensive and we don't feel it delivers significant value."
"In Sophos, the user portal is not user-friendly."
"The reporting could be better."
"The application is a little slow; it takes five to ten seconds to respond to every click when configuring. If we need to do significant configuration, it can take a lot of time. This might be because we have a low-end machine, and it could be faster with a high-end one."
"Sophos XGS could improve the price."
"Sophos XGS could be improved by adding a built-in hyper-converged solution."
"Sophos' technical support has degraded in the last couple of years. They seem to need to ask a lot of questions, even with simple problems, and take a long time to provide solutions."
"The solution could improve inspection processes and troubleshooting for VPNs because this area is very weak."
"It has recently started to suddenly block and crash."
More Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls Pricing and Cost Advice →
Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is ranked 5th in Firewalls with 164 reviews while Sophos XGS is ranked 18th in Firewalls with 62 reviews. Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is rated 8.6, while Sophos XGS is rated 7.8. The top reviewer of Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls writes "We get reports back from WildFire on a minute-by-minute basis". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sophos XGS writes "Easy to use, simple to learn, and offers great reporting". Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is most compared with Check Point NGFW, Azure Firewall, Meraki MX, Sophos XG and Sangfor NGAF, whereas Sophos XGS is most compared with Sophos XG, OPNsense, Netgate pfSense, WatchGuard Firebox and Meraki MX. See our Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls vs. Sophos XGS report.
See our list of best Firewalls vendors.
We monitor all Firewalls 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.