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 is an easy solution to deploy."
"This is a quality product with ok support, and it is better than the competition we've tried."
"The most valuable feature of Fortinet FortiGate is security. They are known for efficiency and are on the top of Gartner Quadrant reviews. Fortinet FortiGate has an easy-to-use platform with a good graphical interface. The configuration is simple and the solution provides an overall good layer of security."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the analytics."
"We can detect any attack of viruses or malware at the first point of contact."
"It's inexpensive compared to some of the other technology out there."
"Fortigate represents a really scalable way of delivering perimeter network security, some level of layer 7 security, WAF, and also a way to create a meshed ADVPN solution."
"The most valuable features are the enterprise modeling and the simple interface."
"The most valuable feature is the central management system through the Security Management Server. Apart from that, the graphical user interface helps us to do things easily."
"Check Point NGFW provides a bunch of different products or Blades, as they call it in Check Point. The firewall engine is what we use the most but we also use the IPS IDS and Anti-Bot features. The solution provides many features."
"I rate the tool's stability a ten out of ten."
"The pricing is okay."
"Check Point offers excellent security."
"With the new SmartTask offered in R80.40, we will be happy to configure some automatic control-functions."
"The support offers the best services I have experienced. It's better than any other IT vendor."
"It provides access to the Internet for corporate resources in a secure manner."
"IPS and advanced threat protection (ATP) are the most valuable features. I am able to segment my network traffic and block incoming connections. It is also easy to use."
"We are able to trace any user and pinpoint any vulnerability or any malicious software. We are able to synchronize between the local and active directories so we can catch users easily through their login names and IDs."
"The updates are helpful and add to the solution in a positive way."
"The installation is easy. There is a wizard that can be used for a single connection making it simple and if you have multiple connections you can configure it manually."
"A valuable feature involves the solution's manageability."
"The solution offers a good firewall endpoint and email encryption."
"Price-wise the solution offers acceptable rates. You can find cheaper solutions on the market but when you go cheaper you have fewer features. Today, based on iQuate market the price is very reasonable and affordable, and it's good if you get a good discount. Discounts can be offered by the vendor. If it's a competitive upgrade which means the customer is upgrading from another vendor, Sophos provides extra discount so they can win the deal. In general, it is a good price."
"The VPN feature is the most valuable. It has come in handy during this period when people are working from home. The filtering feature is also valuable because you can easily filter the sites that you don't want to visit. You can also set timely surfing quotas."
"Fortinet FortiGate can be integrated with different platforms. They have integrations in place, but I can't say they're 100%."
"Its price could be better."
"Fortinet Fortigate could benefit by simplifying some of their processes."
"Some features of Fortinet FortiGate are actually fee enabled that are inconvenient for deploying in production. Other issues relate to isolation with Cisco products and your server."
"Fortinet needs more memory to save the log files. We need it to save the logs on the hardware and not in the cloud. I know this feature is available in FortiCloud, but if we need this log locally, it is not available."
"In the balance between links feature normally you can just choose one option to balance. It would be better for the solution to have more than one option, preferably three."
"The non-error conserve mode has room for improvement."
"There are some tiny bugs that sometimes affect the operations. In the past revision of it, there was a bug. Because of the bug, we had to downgrade the version. It happened only with the last revision."
"The pricing could always be more competitive."
"With the increase of volume of traffic, the required resource/hardware to properly run goes up. Therefore, the hardware engineering to architecture flow has to be more efficient."
"In a VPN setup, we have Internet connection via Check Point. The connectivity is not turnkey like competing devices. We have not yet terminated our site-to-site VPN because things are fluctuating right now and Check Point needs to be upgraded. Also, their troubleshooting needs to be improved for this."
"When you want to open the gateway by double-clicking on the interface, sometimes it can cause silly problems such as freezing."
"It would be beneficial if Check Point included more licenses bundled with the base model, reducing the need for additional subscription charges for essential functionalities."
"It requires enhanced automation tools for regulatory compliance to ease the burden of compliance reporting and auditing."
"They could make the licensing a bit easier to deal with, especially for enterprise-level options."
"It could be easier to access the installation of the Hostfix for VSX solutions. The CLI commands help us understand how virtual firewalls behave in terms of processor, memory, and other aspects. More graphic visualizations of CPUSE commands would be a welcome improvement, and Check Point could expand scripts to run within the solution for multiple tasks."
"There's an IP address delivery for our VPN client and a limited range of IP addresses. So this is a problem in the latest firmware release, but rather than using homework scenarios, we need a lot of VPN clients."
"They can lower its price. It is very expensive. We are looking for a less expensive solution depending on our budget. They can also improve it in terms of firewall protection."
"On reports, they sometimes give a summary, but it lists different users as unknown. There are times that I really want to know which user or which IP is causing a problem."
"The solution could be improved if it offered more documentation or at least provided more information about the products themselves."
"Better instructions should be provided as part of the technical support so that we can understand the functionalities. This will help us to troubleshoot faster."
"The UTM itself needs improvement. When you're navigating it seems like it takes forever to load anything. The hardware is okay. It's just the software that could be more responsive."
"Its user interface is a little bit slow."
"The manuals or guides we are given are too simple. When we are implementing the product, it is difficult for us as we don't have more detailed information."
Check Point NGFW is ranked 5th in Firewalls with 276 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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