We performed a comparison between Palo Alto Networks VM-Series and Sophos XG 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 user-friendly and easy to operate."
"The most valuable feature is the ease of configuration."
"You can purchase switches and you don't need to do anything with them. You just put in the firewall and the switches get all the policies and rules that you already have in the firewall. With Fortinet, you just connect the FortiSwitch to the Fortinet and that's it."
"Virtual Domains (VDOMs) are a feature that we found valuable."
"Good performance, stability, and virtual domain ability."
"A strong point of FortiGate is the graphical interface is complete and easy to use."
"The stability of the solution is excellent, as it is with other Fortinet products."
"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 most valuable feature is that you can control your traffic flowing out and coming it, allowing you to apply malware and threat protection, as well as vulnerability checks."
"Embedding it into my application development lifecycle prevents data loss and business disruption, allowing the adoption to operate at the speed of my AWS Cloud."
"The VM series has an advantage over the physical version because we are able to change the sources that the machine has, such as the amount of available RAM."
"It is an easy-to-scale product."
"With the improved visibility we now have, the traffic is being properly monitored, which means that we are better able to manage it. These are improvements that we saw very quickly."
"In the newer version, there are 3850s, all of them are scalable. They fit better into the medium or small businesses."
"The most valuable features are the User ID, URL filtering, and application filtering."
"The most valuable features are security and support."
"The VPN is easy and has good logging, monitoring and notifications."
"Valuable features include: the ease of setting up the VPN connection; the fact they have the cloud management option, so I can manage the firewall on a cloud platform from anywhere I am; the user interface is very user-friendly, so it's very easy for the administrator to make any policy changes."
"This solution does everything and anything a firewall can do."
"Overall the solution works well."
"The initial setup was straightforward."
"The stability has been excellent."
"Great interface and in-built help is very intuitive."
"It is feature-rich, I like the server authentication, and the reports are good."
"The updates Fortinet provides are sometimes unstable."
"Fortinet FortiGate should improve the VPN tokens."
"Web security solutions can be improved."
"Fortinet FortiGate is a firewall solution and once it's deployed, you can rest assured that your system is secure."
"FortiLink is the interface on the firewall that allows you to extend switch management across all of your switches in the network. The problem with it is that you can't use multiple interfaces unless you set them up in a lag. Only then you can run them. So, it forces you to use a core type of switch to propagate that management out to the rest of the switches, and then it is running the case at 200. It leaves you with 18 ports on the firewall because it is also a layer-three router that could also be used as a switch, but as soon as you do that, you can't really use them. They could do a little bit more clean up in the way the stacking interface works. Some use cases and the documentation on the FortiLink checking interface are a little outdated. I can find stuff on version 5 or more, but it is hard to find information on some of the newer firmware. The biggest thing I would like to see is some improvement in the switch management feature. I would like to be able to relegate some of the ports, which are on the firewall itself, to act as a switch to take advantage of those ports. Some of these firewalls have clarity ports on them. If I can use those, it would mean that I need to buy two less switches, which saves time. I get why they don't, but I would still like to see it because it would save a little bit of space in the server rack."
"The price of FortiGate should be reduced because there are some other leading products that are cheaper."
"One area for improvement is the performance on the bandwidth demands for smaller devices, as well as better web filtering."
"Fortinet needs to overhaul its documentation."
"It'll help if Palo Alto Networks provided better documentation."
"We don't know how it will scale once we start putting more load on it."
"Recently, they introduced their Prisma Cloud solution. Compared to the previous technologies, like Panorama, which is used for centralized firewall management, or even the individual firewalls, it's a bit challenging to integrate the traditional firewall policies into Prisma Cloud."
"The product could be better in terms of performance than one of its competitors."
"There are some delays that I have observed when my company communicates with Palo Alto's support engineers."
"At the beginning of the implementation, we had some difficulties with the scripts, but Palo Alto Networks support together with a local partner finally fixed it."
"With Palo Alto Networks VM-Series, it is hard for me to manage its network configuration part."
"In the next release, I would like to see better integration of multi-factor authentication vendors."
"The VPN features can be improved. Due to covid-19, we have a lot of employees that work from home and we need better VPN capabilities."
"The SD-WAN could be improved."
"Sophos needs improvements made to the console, such as host entry or defining rules directly from it."
"The interface can bit a bit more user-friendly."
"Sophos XG could improve the policies, they are a bit confusing when creating them. There are many options that make it confusing and it could be simplified."
"Its price should be improved. It should be cheaper."
"It is a very basic and entry-level firewall. It doesn't give very granular control over the traffic. It should have more granular control over the traffic. This feature should be there similar to Palo Alto and Cisco. It should have such advanced features."
"Since Sophos took over Cyberoam, the online technical library and support library have become super messy. To get a piece of information is becoming a nightmare. They need to reorganize the online technical support and technical library."
Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is ranked 10th in Firewalls with 53 reviews while Sophos XG is ranked 6th in Firewalls with 192 reviews. Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is rated 8.6, while Sophos XG is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Palo Alto Networks VM-Series writes "Many features are optimized for troubleshooting real-time scenarios, saving a lot of time". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sophos XG writes "Easy to use and deploy with an improved pricing structure in place". Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is most compared with Azure Firewall, Fortinet FortiGate-VM, Cisco Secure Firewall, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls and Juniper SRX Series Firewall, whereas Sophos XG is most compared with Netgate pfSense, OPNsense, Sophos XGS, SonicWall TZ and Sophos UTM. See our Palo Alto Networks VM-Series vs. Sophos XG report.
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