We performed a comparison between Check Point CloudGuard Network Security 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 feature I like most is the SD-WAN. It allows you to manage more than one ISP at the same time. And there is a high-availability mode, so if one of your ISPs is down, you still have a backup."
"The solution is stable."
"The SD-WAN feature is the most valuable. This feature evolved from link load balancing. It has helped us in terms of our uptime and privatizing applications whenever we experience an outage. The SD-WAN feature has been a plus for us. Two-factor authentication has allowed us to add more users in terms of remote working. We have two-factor authentication for remote workers to authenticate them before they get on the network."
"It's great for capturing the traffic and troubleshooting it."
"I think that the UTM features are the most value, as it truly protects my infrastructure."
"The payment function for applications is good."
"Fortinet FortiGate is easy to use."
"Fortigate is very scalable to serve our customers' needs. We have scaled already from fifty to more than a hundred instances of Fortinet FortiGate. Around 20 staff are required for deployment and maintenance, mostly engineers."
"The tool's most valuable features for us are threat prevention, HTTPS inspection, and the Anti-Bot blade. Threat prevention helps to protect our assets from threats. HTTPS inspection ensures secure communication, and the Anti-Bot blade is particularly helpful in detecting C2 servers, enhancing our ability to identify malicious activities and protect our network."
"The most valuable features are the ease of administration with the cloud management extension and the cloud licensing model."
"The product gives analytic reports."
"This solution brings us closer to having a better security score, which helps us a lot in complying with information regulations based on security."
"It makes securing our cloud workload super easy, and we are able to push any sort of policy changes we need pretty quickly"
"The tool's most valuable features are the REST APIs that help to automate the deployment and maintenance process. It helps us to reduce time to 15-25 minutes compared to the manual process which used to take around two to three hours."
"We primarily secure our network using CloudGuard Network Security's next-generation firewall features, including anti-spam, IPS, and URL filtering. Our chosen package for the go-to-market strategy is NGTP. For customers seeking more features, we provide options to upgrade to the tool's advanced packages."
"The installation process doesn't take very long."
"UTM 9 brings along IPSec as well as iPhone and iPad support. This seems small but it’s useful."
"The most valuable features of the solution are application filtering and web filtering."
"The most valuable feature is the IPS. It also protects us from malware."
"Technical support is very responsive."
"The scalability is good."
"It improved bandwidth utilization and provided link load balancing features for internet and intranet lease lines."
"The most valuable features of Sophos UTM are the ease of use, it is very user-friendly. You can understand what they implement in the new firmware, and it's easy to manage the firewalls."
"It works well without any maintenance. So far, it has worked pretty well regardless of the traffic."
"The firewall engine is not so strong as of now, in my opinion... My second concern is that, while they have Zero-day vulnerability and anti-malware features, the threat engine needs to be strengthened, its efficiency can be increased."
"Fortinet FortiGate could improve by having a frequent ask questions(FAQ) area for people to receive quick answers to popular questions. Additionally, it would be beneficial to have an SMS notification feature. For example, if you cannot access your email you could receive an SMS message."
"There are some cloud-based features that could be much more flexible than they currently are."
"Its reporting and pricing need improvement."
"This product could be improved with Active directory integration and better handling in IPsec and GRE Tunnels."
"They sometimes hide some features and if you want to enable them, you have to go in the CLI, enable the feature and configure it through the CLI. Customers, typically, like everything to be done by the GUI."
"They should improve the interface to make it more user-friendly."
"The pricing could always be better."
"CloudGuard functions just like any other firewall. It functions very well. The only thing that could maybe be improved would be to integrate some tools that are not integrated with the SmartConsole, like the SmartView Monitor that we need to open on a different application to access."
"The convergence time between cluster members is still not perfect. It's far away from what we get in traditional appliances. If a company wants to move mission-critical applications for an environment to the cloud, it somehow has to accept that it could have downtime of up to 40 seconds, until cluster members switch virtual IP addresses between themselves and start accepting the traffic. That is a little bit too high in my opinion. It's not fully Check Point's fault, because it's a hybrid mechanism with AWS. The blame is 50/50."
"We have the product deployed on Azure China. One crucial concern is the version limitation; unfortunately, in Azure China, we are restricted to running version R80. Our architecture has a Load Balancer, VMSS CloudGuard, etc. The duplication in this setup prevents the application from seeing the original client IP. This poses a problem for certain applications that require the original IP for login purposes. Although we managed a workaround with a different architecture involving a WAF, it is not as straightforward as the standard Azure setup."
"Check Point CloudGuard Network Security should give productive reports as per business requirements. It needs to improve support since the time-limit extended beyond a day. It should include more seamless API integrations."
"It is a very expensive program and there are additional costs despite the standard licensing fees."
"CloudGuard Network Security could be improved in the area of upgrading in place."
"In case the device is inaccessible due to some issue such as CPU or memory, there is no separate port or hardware partition provided for troubleshooting purposes."
"Check Point Virtual Systems is a complete solution, but pricing can be better."
"I would like this solution to support ICAP. Also, they no longer support on-premises management, and are forcing clients to use centralized management via the cloud, which I don't agree with."
"Sophos UTM could be simplified, and they can improve on the many other features, like SD-WAN and load balancing. Sophos UTM is missing a few features that their competitors have. For example, if you have multiple branches you would like to connect, the load balancing features aren't available on multilink. If we create a VPM for multiple LAN links, we cannot load balance the traffic."
"Needs to improve the certificate management (ex. Let's Encrypt support)."
"This product could use some improvement with web filtering. It takes a lot of time and effort to set up and maintain."
"It's stable, but the reaction time of the GUI is terrible."
"The support could be better."
"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 five-factor authentication needs improvement."
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Check Point CloudGuard Network Security is ranked 5th in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 121 reviews while Sophos UTM is ranked 1st in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 110 reviews. Check Point CloudGuard Network Security is rated 8.6, while Sophos UTM is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Check Point CloudGuard Network Security writes "Highly reliable, great visibility, and centralized management". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sophos UTM writes "It's a highly stable platform with very few hardware issues". Check Point CloudGuard Network Security is most compared with Azure Firewall, VMware NSX, Akamai Guardicore Segmentation, Cisco Secure Firewall and Fortinet FortiGate-VM, whereas Sophos UTM is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Sophos XG, OPNsense, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls and Cisco Secure Firewall. See our Check Point CloudGuard Network Security vs. Sophos UTM report.
See our list of best Unified Threat Management (UTM) vendors and best Firewalls vendors.
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