We performed a comparison between Azure Firewall and Sophos UTM 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."I'm pretty happy with its reliability. It is also very scalable."
"FortiGate is on the cheaper end, and it offers good value."
"The most valuable features are the enterprise modeling and the simple interface."
"The stability of the solution is excellent, as it is with other Fortinet products."
"The interface is very good."
"Good performance, stability, and virtual domain ability."
"The solution is highly scalable because they have devices that can handle a large amount of traffic."
"The threat prevention is the solution's most valuable aspect."
"In terms of the reporting, it's beautiful. It integrates with Azure monitoring and with Azure policies. That piece is a big help. You can set governing policies and you can use the application firewall, as well as the Azure Firewall, to enforce those policies."
"It's auto-scalable, which is a great feature."
"It provided ease of maintenance. If a new firewall was needed, we only had to run the pipelines for this. So, the maintenance was very easy."
"The SIEM that Azure Firewall provides us is very robust."
"The initial setup is straightforward; Azure Firewall does not have a complex implementation process. It is very simple; you just need to enable the service within Azure. It does not require any maintenance because it is managed by Microsoft, that is, it is a fully managed service."
"It is easy for me to protect certain ports or even the IP addresses, as well as do whitelisting, blacklisting, and the FQDN when we want virtual machines connected and to protect certain websites."
"One of the notable advantages of Azure Firewall is its user-friendly interface, which closely resembles or shares similarities with other Azure components."
"Azure's cost-effectiveness is its major advantage."
"Sophos integrates seamlessly, and we don't even feel it is running in the background."
"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."
"UTM 9 brings along IPSec as well as iPhone and iPad support. This seems small but it’s useful."
"Sophos UTM is the simplest of these products to setup."
"Stability-wise, I rate this solution a ten out of ten...Scalability-wise, I rate this solution a ten out of ten."
"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."
"It allows our developers to be able to securely log into servers to deploy and manage software."
"Sophos UTM's most valuable features are profiling and its simple configuration."
"Its reporting capabilities can be improved. It should have some out-of-the-box reporting capabilities and some degree of customization. The basic reporting that it currently has is not sufficient to create more usable reports. It needs some sort of out-of-the-box reporting. They try to make customers purchase FortiAnalyzer for this kind of reporting, which is an additional cost. Other firewall vendors, such as SonicWall and Sophos, provide this sort of reporting without any additional cost."
"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."
"It needs more available central management."
"The visibility of the network can be better. The GUI can be improved for better visibility of the network flow. Other solutions have better GUI in terms of network visibility."
"Compared to some other products, the DLP is not at par for the moment."
"The support costs and licensing are sometimes so expensive."
"Usually, we sell the bundle with the UTM or threat management piece with IPS, IDS. Other providers, such as Palo Alto, are ahead in terms of safe functionality. So, for me, delivering truly safe service is probably something that still needs to be improved."
"The support is the main thing that needs to be improved."
"They can improve the pricing of Azure Firewall."
"Azure Firewall should have a free trial version for new users so that they can evaluate it before deploying it."
"This solution is not mature when it comes to handling perimeter traffic like internet browsing."
"The solution should incorporate features similar to competitors like split tunneling."
"We find it's different implementing it region-to-region. It might help if it was universal across all regions."
"The reporting, logging, and monitoring features, as well as the flexibility of the policies, need to be improved."
"Azure Firewall definitely needs a broader feature base. It should be able to go all the way up to layer 7 when looking at applications and things like that."
"For large organizations, a third-party firewall would be an added advantage, because it would have more advanced features, things that are not in Azure Firewall."
"The solution is not scalable."
"Sophos should be more user-friendly, have more dashboards, and an easier implementation."
"The solution's technical support for India needs to be improved."
"Flexibility in pricing could be improved. It's more rigid in its pricing compared to its competitor: Kaspersky."
"I would like them to move from the Classic Load Balancer to the Network Load Balancer. This would make it easier to do certain things with Amazon. They are able to do some enhancements with Network Load Balancer that they are unable to do with Classic Load Balancer."
"The technical support only communicates via email. I would prefer to communicate directly with someone."
"The management suite is easy and the agent is easy to develop."
"Last year, Sophos had some major internal management changes that negatively impacted their support."
Azure Firewall is ranked 21st in Firewalls with 33 reviews while Sophos UTM is ranked 1st in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 110 reviews. Azure Firewall is rated 7.2, while Sophos UTM is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Azure Firewall writes "Easy to use and configure but could be more robust". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sophos UTM writes "It's a highly stable platform with very few hardware issues". Azure Firewall is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate-VM, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Palo Alto Networks VM-Series and Check Point NGFW, whereas Sophos UTM is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Sophos XG, OPNsense, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls and Cisco Secure Firewall. See our Azure Firewall vs. Sophos UTM report.
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