We performed a comparison between Check Point NGFW 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."There are lots of features and most of them are deployed for internet security. Users are protected if they accidentally go to some malicious sites."
"FortiGate improved our security. It's one of the best hardware firewalls."
"The virtual firewall feature is the most valuable. We have around 1,500 firewalls. We did not buy individual hardware, and the virtual firewalls made sense because we don't have to keep on buying the hardware. FortiGate is easier to use as compared to Checkpoint devices. It is user friendly and has a good UI. You don't need much expertise to work on this firewall. You don't need to worry much about DCLA, commands, and things like that."
"It's user-friendly and easy to operate."
"FortiGate firewalls are easy to manage through a user-friendly web interface. They also have advanced features like DDoS and DLP. However, I wouldn't recommend enabling all of these features on one device because it can cause performance issues."
"The ease of setting the solution up is a valuable aspect for us."
"The management console is pretty simple, so anyone who understands networking can initially deploy the solution."
"Consolidated our network environment at all locations, but mainly at our datacenter."
"Check Point's rule management helped us simplify access control. At one point, we had more than 1,000 access control policies, and it was challenging to manage them all. We cut it down to 300 policies using Check Point's management features, and we are still working on reducing this further to achieve the best way to manage policies. Its logging and monitoring enable us to trace and investigate suspicious traffic."
"It offers a range of models to enhance network security and it can be customized to secure endpoint client machines or user devices by deploying features like malware detection, antivirus, and mail security blades."
"The interface and the IPS intrusion prevention are the most valuable features of this solution."
"Management integration is holistic as centralized management has been core to the solution for decades."
"Check Point is very administrator-friendly and the SmartDashboard is easy to use."
"It offers services like navigation, control, and filtering, which ensure that all users stay connected to business applications."
"The initial setup was very straightforward. You can customize it and change it as you need."
"Now we can add application signature in the same rule base & don't have to create a different policy for that."
"It now controls all the security aspects of our web servers with Sophos UTM WAF."
"The initial setup has been fine."
"The UTM features are reasonably strong and the patterns are updated on a regular basis"
"The most valuable features of the solution are application filtering and web filtering."
"Configuration could not be made any easier."
"We use Sophos UTM as our main firewall with all its features included. Mainly, it controls all of our network perimeter security: firewall, IDS/IPS, and web application firewall (including VoIP)."
"The initial setup was easy."
"We've found the technical support to be helpful."
"Currently, FortiGate is providing SSL VPN. But they're missing some features that are available in Palo Alto's SSL VPN."
"Fortinet FortiGate could improve by adding FortiAnalyzer to its solution, we should not have to use another solution. FortiAnalyzer can provide more detailed information."
"In the next release, I would like to see the interface simplified to be more user-friendly."
"The support costs and licensing are sometimes so expensive."
"I would like Fortinet to add more automation to FortiGate."
"It could use more templates for third-party site-to-site VPN setups other than FortiGate and Cisco."
"The monitor and the visibility, in this proxy, is very weak."
"One issue that I have had is that sometimes I need to monitor the traffic, so I need to filter it according to the user and which user is using it the most. I experience a bottleneck most of the time, particularly at the peak time when the number of contracts and users are at maximum."
"The policy installation length is still too long. It was promised that the time would be severely reduced in newer versions, but it is still too long."
"Check Point could improve the time for delivering requested features from customers."
"I have had some issues in the past with the desktop client being slow to come up for logging in, and then slow to respond to screen changes, however, overall, it really hasn't been too bad."
"Check Point should add additional management choices."
"One area for improvement in Check Point NGFW is the support process."
"It can be expensive, especially for small businesses."
"The virtual environment is not stable at all. We have some customers who are using the virtual environment feature, and sometimes it crashes. We have many tickets open and the response is not as good as expected. We have to wait months for a resolution."
"For R80.10 and above, if you want to install a hotfix, then you can't install it through the GUI. I don't know why. In the earlier days, I was able to do the installation of hotfixes through the GUI. Now, Check Point said that you have to install hotfixes through the CLI. If that issue could be resolved, then it would be great because the GUI is more handy than the CLI."
"Sophos UTM sometimes falls short in high-availability environments. They used to launch firmware that didn't work very well in a high-availability environment."
"The integration capabilities could be better."
"The ease of use could be a bit better."
"I would like to see Sophos UTM add support for all the new threat-detection technologies and the ability to respond to novel security threats that come along every day."
"During initial configuration, I encountered a few issues."
"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."
"The technical support team’s response time could be improved."
"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."
Check Point NGFW doesn't meet the minimum requirements to be ranked in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 277 reviews while Sophos UTM is ranked 1st in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 110 reviews. Check Point NGFW is rated 8.8, while Sophos UTM is rated 8.4. 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 UTM writes "It's a highly stable platform with very few hardware issues". Check Point NGFW is most compared with Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Sophos XG, Cisco Secure Firewall, Netgate pfSense and Azure Firewall, 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 NGFW vs. Sophos UTM report.
See our list of best Unified Threat Management (UTM) vendors and best Firewalls vendors.
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