We performed a comparison between Sophos UTM and WatchGuard Firebox 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 initial installation is very straightforward."
"The reporting you receive out of this appliance is excellent. You will not need an external management system."
"The security features that they have are quite good. On top of that, their licensing model is quite nice where they don't charge you anything for the SD-WAN functionality for the firewall."
"Their reliability and their policy of pre-shipping replacements when a unit has failed."
"It's a user-friendly firewall. Most of the tasks are very simple. It's simple to configure and troubleshoot this firewall."
"The initial setup of Fortinet FortiGate was straightforward."
"The most important features with FortiGate are the web filter and application controls. We can control our internet usage and use the web filter for application purposes."
"We have found it to be very reliable and that's why our teams and various users in our company use it as our main firewall every day."
"It allows me to easily connect with more than forty-five remote sites and more than fifty remote users between IPsec and SSL VPN, applying the web filter and application filter to ensure a secure connection."
"Sophos UTM is very user-friendly and has good integration with other solutions."
"The most valuable feature of Sophos UTM is the endpoint protection feature."
"Sophos UTM's best feature is synchronized security."
"It's easy to use."
"Installing Sophos UTM is straightforward. The deployment itself doesn't take long, but you have to spend some time planning and waiting for the hardware to be delivered."
"The intrusion prevention is great, and I like dual virus scanning on the network layer because we scan it through Avira and Sophos. Web filtering is also a fantastic option for clients who want to really lock down internet access."
"Stability-wise, I rate this solution a ten out of ten...Scalability-wise, I rate this solution a ten out of ten."
"The most valuable feature of WatchGuard Firebox is the VPN. It's easy to connect to the VPN."
"As a whole, it has a very low requirement for ongoing interaction. It's very self-sufficient. If properly patched, it has very high reliability. The total cost of ownership once deployed is very low."
"Two of the functionalities we use most are the traffic monitoring and the full panel dashboard. Those are two things that are very useful for us... In addition, it provides us with layered security. It allows us to determine what types of access, to which networks, we want to allow or deny."
"The Dimension control, the one-spot reporting and control, has been nice. It's been easy to go in and make sure people are doing what they're supposed to be doing and that only the right stuff is getting in."
"Because we bought two firewalls... we need a central place to manage the policies and deploy them to both devices. It's good that it provides a system management console that is able to manipulate and manage policies in one place and deploy them to different locations."
"[A] valuable feature would be the branch office. We have five offices throughout the United States, and it coordinates the connections of those offices."
"The solution has increased productivity with our outside salespeople being able to connect into their computers and use those remotely."
"HostWatch makes it so I can see, in real-time, activity in the event that there is something weird happening on the network. This simplifies my job."
"Currently, without the additional reporting module, we only have access to basic reporting."
"FortiOS is not simple."
"The setup is pretty complex and not easy to implement."
"Lacks sufficient security options."
"There are some complex administration tasks in their administration portal. That needs to be improved."
"Fortinet should focus on enhancing the capabilities of FortiGate by consolidating its various products, such as FortiGate Cloud, FortiManager, and FortiAnalyzer."
"It should be more stable. There should be full integration within Fortinet products themselves as well as with other third-party products. Especially when you're not dealing with SIEM and the correlation of the security box, we want Fortinet to be able to share that information with as many other products as it can."
"I would suggest that Fortinet add sandboxing to their solution."
"Doesn't provide antivirus for individual computers."
"The virus updates will always depend on new viruses that are discovered. Maybe they can send a notification or a reminder for update time."
"Anti-phishing functionality should be improved."
"There can be a delay when it comes to reaching out to technical support."
"They could reduce the price."
"Stay away from the wireless models, since you cannot put them in HA. They start to give you some weird issues once you start getting into multiple SSIDs and networks."
"Monitoring and reporting are areas that need improvement."
"The lack of import/export functions for network and service options drives me mad."
"Websense is an application that monitors and filters internet traffic. Websense was derived from WatchGuard. But when you go to WatchGuard to actually implement that particular feature, you have to use some type of additional feature and you have to pay for it, unfortunately. I think it should be free or free in the WatchGuard box itself, as an option. It would be nice if they didn't charge us for that."
"Make WatchGuard Firebox capable of integrating with third-party vendors like FireMon, Splunk, Tenable, etc."
"I would like to see more simplified management of the firewall... It's a complicated system to use."
"This solution needs the option to add an external hard drive."
"The solution is lacking a professional website, they should be updated more often."
"An area for improvement is that when we use a web administration link, there is no security."
"The VPN aspect of the WatchGuard Firebox is an area that could potentially benefit from improvement. We encountered difficulties while attempting to integrate Windows 11 laptops into the system, which resulted in unreliable connections. After some research, we discovered that this was primarily due to compatibility issues with Windows 11 and required a patch. However, it was still a challenge as it seemed that even when we tried to keep the laptops on Windows 10, they still exhibited the same issues as Windows 11 machines. Despite WatchGuard attributing the problem to Microsoft, we were eventually able to find a solution and all the machines are now functioning seamlessly."
"Cloud-based central administration of all devices from one point would be nice"
Sophos UTM is ranked 1st in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 110 reviews while WatchGuard Firebox is ranked 3rd in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 79 reviews. Sophos UTM is rated 8.4, while WatchGuard Firebox is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Sophos UTM writes "It's a highly stable platform with very few hardware issues". On the other hand, the top reviewer of WatchGuard Firebox writes "Offers a streamlined deployment, intuitive interface and robust security features". Sophos UTM is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Sophos XG, OPNsense, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls and Untangle NG Firewall, whereas WatchGuard Firebox is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Sophos XG, OPNsense, SonicWall TZ and Check Point NGFW. See our Sophos UTM vs. WatchGuard Firebox report.
See our list of best Unified Threat Management (UTM) vendors and best Firewalls vendors.
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