We performed a comparison between Palo Alto Networks VM-Series 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."The CLI and GUI do a good job of putting a lot at your fingertips."
"The multi-tenancy feature is most valuable. It integrates very well with FortiManager and FortiAnalyzer."
"It's quite comfortable to handle the FortiGate firewall."
"Our security improved from being able to put in rules and close off unwanted traffic."
"We have been able to offer several services to customers in a single box."
"Initial setup is straightforward. There weren't too many issues with setting it up. It takes one hour or so."
"I like Fortinet's cloud management. It allows me to manage all my devices in different branches for three cloud accounts. Even though I use on-prem devices, I can manage everything on the cloud."
"Mainly the FortiGate reporting system is very good. It guides us through all the expectations of security. Fortinet provides us all that we need for security. Also, Fortinet FortiGate is a next-generation firewall. It is much more advanced than others."
"It has a good performance which helps you with the stability of your virtual environment."
"The Palo Alto VM-Series is nice because I can move the firewalls easily."
"The most valuable features are security and support."
"The technical support for the solution is very good."
"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 solution enables organizations to enforce policies."
"AWS has improved our agility to apply firewall rules. It has reduced the amount of time that it takes to apply firewall rules because everything is based in the cloud."
"The tool's cloud version makes application migration easy."
"Monitoring and reporting are areas that need improvement."
"The most valuable feature is ransomware protection."
"The most valuable features of this solution are the firewall application and application control."
"It helped to connect our satellite offices to the main Amazon infrastructure in a circular way."
"Advanced protection (Sophos Sandstorm) - Protects against crypto viruses in real-time."
"It is not an easy task to protect your web servers from the big bad internet. The Web Server Protection in this solution does it elegantly and, if configured correctly, even hides the server's base system from prying eyes."
"Sophos UTM has improved the porting section. It has improved security by seeing the gaps. For example, when you discover that an entry has been using a certain application, with Sophos UTM acting as a Layer 7 firewall, you can block the application, not the port."
"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."
"There are some complex administration tasks in their administration portal. That needs to be improved."
"The ease of use could be improved."
"FortiGate should have a better way of detecting and managing the system memory because otherwise if the memory is too low, a system restart is required."
"Fortinet needs to overhaul its documentation."
"Sometimes you do need to know some CLI commands, so it's a bit harder for technicians or new people that don't know it."
"It is stable, but its stability can be improved."
"Fortinet FortiGate can improve by integrating the web application firewall and the DDoS protection part of the solution. Having a WAF feature, web application firewall, and proxy together would be a good benefit."
"It's my understanding that more of the current generation features could be brought in. There could be more integration with EDRs, for example."
"The solution needs to improve its visibility. It's not straightforward to use. Understanding the policies, authorizations, and initializing features requires careful review. The product needs to offer proper training."
"I would like to have automatic daily reporting, such as how many users have connected via SSL VPN."
"We don't know how it will scale once we start putting more load on it."
"The product's AIOps process needs improvement."
"The reporting part of the product is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"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."
"The product could be better in terms of performance than one of its competitors."
"We feel that the setup was complex. So, we asked the tech team about the setup process. They explained how to deploy it in the right way, which made it very simple."
"Flexibility in pricing could be improved. It's more rigid in its pricing compared to its competitor: Kaspersky."
"The documentation during the AWS integration was a little fuzzy on getting it to work with how the whole public exposure versus private exposure, then routing some of the traffic."
"An area for improvement in Sophos UTM is load balancing because my company cannot use it currently. If Sophos could release a new configuration for the load balancing feature to work for my company, that would be great."
"The UI can be cumbersome and, sometimes, features are not where you think they should be."
"I would like some features that are available in other brands. For example, I sometimes a person is using too much bandwidth, and it isn't easy to find this information in Sophos. Also, we have to switch connections manually when we are using a VPN and lose the MPLS connection. It isn't automatic."
"I think that additional metrics features are needed to be able to monitor other areas or to monitor as much as you can, at a fine-grain resolution."
"The technical support team’s response time could be improved."
"There is absolutely no support when using AWS. If you buy the on-premise Sophos solution, you get support."
Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is ranked 10th in Firewalls with 53 reviews while Sophos UTM is ranked 3rd in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 110 reviews. Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is rated 8.6, while Sophos UTM is rated 8.4. 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 UTM writes "It's a highly stable platform with very few hardware issues". Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is most compared with Azure Firewall, Fortinet FortiGate-VM, Cisco Secure Firewall, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls and Check Point NGFW, whereas Sophos UTM is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Sophos XG, OPNsense and Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls. See our Palo Alto Networks VM-Series vs. Sophos UTM report.
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