We performed a comparison between OPNsense and Sophos XG based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Sophos XG’s single pane of glass makes it easy for users to manage the entire solution from anywhere. The solution is very light, stable, and provides excellent real-time control. Users feel OPNsense is not a good product for medium to large businesses, as it has some very limited features and needs better reporting and documentation.
"Good load balancing feature."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is Quota."
"This is an easy solution to deploy."
"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 most valuable feature of Fortinet FortiGate is load balancing. It can provide central management and VPNA. Additionally, it has enhanced our security environment."
"The multi-tenancy feature is most valuable. It integrates very well with FortiManager and FortiAnalyzer."
"The most valuable feature of FortiGate is FortiView which provides proactive monitoring."
"The most valuable features are the policies, filtering, and configuration."
"We have been operating here in our lab for several months, and everything appears to be extremely stable."
"The most valuable features in OPNsense are reporting and visibility."
"The feature I find most valuable, is that the program helped me to realize all the requested functionality that was needed."
"The DNS-level filtering is impressive for thwarting time scanners."
"It is a very good solution. I like the dashboard. I can see what is going on and manage it as I like it."
"I have found the solution has some great features overall, such as guest access capabilities, dashboards, and ease of use. There is plenty of documentation and support and it has the plugins that I needed."
"The interface and the dashboard are the most valuable features of this solution."
"The initial implementation process is simple."
"Some of the most valuable features are filtering and application control. The DDoS detection also shows traffic jamming and traffic shaping."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"The solution's technical support is good."
"The product's initial setup phase was straightforward."
"The initial setup is pretty easy."
"The feature that we find most valuable is the VPN, which ensures that people working remotely have a secure connection."
"The scalability of Sophos XG is good."
"This solution does everything and anything a firewall can do."
"The non-error conserve mode has room for improvement."
"There are some problems that support cannot give you a logical reason as to why it happened. For example, I had a case where I was dealing with a WhatsApp application that was giving issues. Technical support gave more than one reason it could be giving issues, but none of them solved the problem. Eventually I solved the problem, but it was far from the solutions that support had given."
"The setup is pretty complex and not easy to implement."
"Currently, FortiGate is providing SSL VPN. But they're missing some features that are available in Palo Alto's SSL VPN."
"A sandbox would be good in order to be able to inspect the emails containing spam and be able to validate the emails that contain malware, prior to delivering to the customer."
"If I had any criticism that I would give FortiGate, it would be that they need to stop changing their logging format. Every time we do a firmware upgrade, it is a massive issue on the SIM. Parsers have to be rebuilt. Even the FortiGate guys came in and said that they don't play well in the sandbox."
"The product does need better support in the cloud environment. It's not exactly cloud-native right now."
"There are some tiny bugs that sometimes affect the operations. In the past revision of it, there was a bug. Because of the bug, we had to downgrade the version. It happened only with the last revision."
"The interface isn't so friendly user. But we have some technicians here who are quite confident with this tool. OPNSense could maybe add sets of rules so it's simpler to manage different groups with particular needs."
"The only thing that I would like to see improved is the Insight or the NetFlow analysis part. It would be good to have the possibility to dig down on the Insight platform. Right now, we can easily do only a few analyses. If this page becomes more powerful, it surely will be a well-adopted platform."
"There are some add-ons that need enhancements to make management easier for users, especially the reporting features. Some reports don't show the level of detail I'm looking for, and I've had trouble installing certain add-ons, especially for Internet bandwidth shaping within my company."
"The logging could improve in OPNsense."
"There are issues with stability and reliability."
"When using the solution at the beginning was difficult. There was a steep learning curve."
"Its interface should be a little bit better."
"OPNsense could improve by making the configuration more web-based rather than shell or command-line-based."
"The VPN has been a persistent problem for us. It's not straightforward to configure."
"The manuals or guides we are given are too simple. When we are implementing the product, it is difficult for us as we don't have more detailed information."
"I would like the update process to be easier, to update the firmware of the boxes. I think it's much better automatically than having to do it manually: Download the file, do network discovery. I they can make the update process much more automatic that would help."
"They need to improve the SD-WAN feature."
"There should be web caching to improve bandwidth utilization. It should have a very good caching feature. That's because we are in a very poor continent, and the connectivity cost is very high. We have low bandwidth, and the intensive usage of bandwidth is not easy here in Africa. If they improve services for web caching, it would be better."
"It would be better if they made their own hardware like Palo Alto and Fortinet. They use their own ASICs and claim it is more secure."
"There have been some issues when upgrading. For some reason, parts of the configuration become unconfigured, I then have to reconfigure it. I should not need to keep reconfiguring it after upgrades."
"The VPN features can be improved. Due to covid-19, we have a lot of employees that work from home and we need better VPN capabilities."
OPNsense is ranked 3rd in Firewalls with 36 reviews while Sophos XG is ranked 6th in Firewalls with 192 reviews. OPNsense is rated 8.4, while Sophos XG is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of OPNsense writes "Robust network security and management offering a user-friendly interface, open-source flexibility, and cost-effectiveness, with challenges regarding initial setup and the absence of official support". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sophos XG writes "Easy to use and deploy with an improved pricing structure in place". OPNsense is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Untangle NG Firewall, Sophos UTM, IPFire and WatchGuard Firebox, whereas Sophos XG is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Sophos XGS, SonicWall TZ, Sophos UTM and Meraki MX. See our OPNsense vs. Sophos XG report.
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