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.
"Web filtering and two-factor authentication are great features."
"Offers good security and filtering."
"The interface is very user-friendly and I like it very much."
"The solution is very easy to understand. It's not overly complex."
"The most valuable feature is the VDOM, which allows the customer to have multiple firewalls in a single campus."
"We were looking for the VPN feature and controlling the inflow and outflow of all the traffic within the site and across the sites. We are also using it for the VPN and VLANs."
"The flexibility and ease of configuration are the most valuable features."
"It works very well. It has a lot of different functionalities. Its cost is also fine for our customers."
"We use Check Point to complete the network compliance rules."
"By far, it's the best security solution one can adopt for their organization."
"In a single bundle we have the all solutions we need - like application/URL filtering, and threat emulation/extraction."
"One of the solution's best features include a packet-filtering firewall that examines packets in isolation."
"One of the most valuable features is performance improvement, wherewith ClusterXL and CoreXL, you can improve performance."
"The Blades work fine and the performance optimization is great."
"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."
"The central management and logging are frankly one of the top selling points."
"In terms of the functionality, I think it's pretty straightforward. It's easy to pick up. It's also user-friendly."
"The solution comes with a common bundle which comprises all the feature."
"The interface is user-friendly and the product is easy to configure."
"The most valuable feature is the Intercept X. It is the advanced features that are used for malware detection, and antivirus."
"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."
"What I like about his program, is that it is easy to use and easy to manage."
"The two most valuable feature of Sophos XG is, one the option to filter according to different applications and two, the integration with the Active Directory."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"A lack of integration between our data centers."
"While FortiGate is cheaper than most other solutions, we're seeing increased license renewal costs. Most of our clients are asking for more significant discounts because the price is going up."
"They should make the rule sets more understandable for the end user. When you're trying to explain to somebody how a computer network is secured, sometimes it's difficult for an end user or customer to understand. If there was a way to make the terminology more accessible to the end user, the set up could be easier. They should translate the technical jargon to an easily relatable and understandable conversation for the end user, the customer, that would be brilliant. Particularly in an environment where the IT structure is audited regularly, there's always pressure from the auditor to up the standards and up the security and you get your USCERT's that come out and there's a warning about this and the customer will want to lock out so much and when you apply it they run into issue where they can't search the internet or print to their remote office. Of course they can't print to your remote office, they just locked it up. They should make the language more understandable for the customer. If there's a product out there that made the jargon understandable to John Q. Public, I would buy that."
"It could use more templates for third-party site-to-site VPN setups other than FortiGate and Cisco."
"I would like to have logs, monitoring, and reporting for a month without extra fees."
"The cloud features can be improved."
"To some degree, it's almost a question as to why some of this stuff isn't simpler. For example, for an AP deployment, while it's integrated, the number of steps that you have to go through in order to get the AP up, seems like a lot."
"The feature which gives us a lot of pain is ASIC architecture."
"They could improve by lowering prices."
"The upgrade is something we would like to be improved in the future as the frequency of hotfixes is too much, and by the time we finish the one round, we already have the new version released and are required to upgrade."
"When we hit a bug, the support team recommends some hotfix, and if we upgrade to that, we have to uninstall it before we apply some newer jumbo hotfix."
"It can be expensive, especially for small businesses."
"Finding support is a little bit hard."
"The main thing for a normal operations guy who is creating tools and firewalls, it is quite difficult to manage. It requires an expert level of knowledge in Check Point products to manage these scalable platform appliances and the virtual firewall that comes with it. We have to educate our guys and give them training on a regular basis to work on these products."
"I would like less CPU-intensive features to be introduced to replace the existing heavy-duty processes."
"It should allow more than two internet providers in its configuration of "ISP Redundancy"."
"Sophos XG could improve the connectivity with Microsoft 365 or Azure Active Directory(AD). It doesn't work directly as other solutions do, such as Fortinet FortiGate. The client needs a separate AD server which is a problem."
"I used to work with Fortinet, and sometimes I see that the SD-WAN feature could be better because it's much easier in Fortinet."
"When you are using it as a controller for the wireless access points, it doesn't perform well. It is not suitable for the public cloud. It is more suitable for enterprise data. It is not really the equipment for cloud data centers. I am looking for a data center firewall."
"Support for this product is something that is really important, and it needs to improve."
"It would be great if the user can have a portal to check on activities related to their account."
"I do prefer when updates come out a bit quicker."
"In the next release, I would like to see improvements made to the policy and simplify the policy-making, as the complexity of it makes it really tough."
"Network security is in need of improvement."
Check Point NGFW is ranked 7th in Firewalls with 279 reviews while Sophos XG is ranked 6th 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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