We performed a comparison between Palo Alto Networks and Sophos XG based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Palo Alto Networks comes out on top in this comparison. It is robust, performs well, and has good support. Sophos XG does, however, do better in the Pricing and Ease of Deployment categories.
"The most useful functionality of Fortinet FortiGate is the user interface, multiple engines, and their cloud with the latest integrations. Additionally, the Security Fabric tool is very good."
"The web tutor and automatic rules by schedule are good features."
"Fortinet FortiGate is stable. It's used across all the countries, this is the way most multinationals run their system."
"We have been able to offer several services to customers in a single box."
"Fortinet FortiGate's ease of management is the most valuable feature."
"One of the nice things about FortiGate is that it can be deployed on the cloud or on-premises. You can actually do both. That's the biggest reason why I stick with this solution as opposed to something like Cisco Meraki. Another nice thing is that I can log directly into a FortiGate or get to it through their FortiCloud access products. They're pretty reliable and consistent. One of the reasons why I started using the product was their single pane of management. I can deploy their line of firewalls in conjunction with their switching and access points, and I can manage the entire network from one interface. I don't have to log into one interface for the firewall, another one for the access points, and another one for the switches. These firewalls have access point controller functionality built right into the system, so I don't even have to purchase additional devices to manage them."
"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."
"What's most important is the ease of use."
"The most valuable features are the power of the threat prevention and the WildFire service. Its strength comes from the huge number of sensors all over the world. The firewalls have a rich library of signatures."
"The most valuable features are the IPS/IDS subscriptions."
"In general, its performance and ease of use are the most valuable. Its performance is good, stable, and reliable. The user interface is friendly and easy to use. Customers find it easy to work with and easy to learn."
"The user experience is good and the configuration is very easy."
"The packet level inspection is the most valuable feature. The traffic restriction features allow us to restrict the sub-features of any platform."
"They have a good system operator in the firewalls and it provides many tools that they can use to protect their networks."
"The most significant benefit is threat protection. Anti-malware uses signatures, so dynamic analyzers like WildFire are the best way to protect the company. It is a firewall based on application control, user ID, and security policy. We can use it based on user and application ID without a stateless firewall or TCPIP ports."
"It is critical that Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls embeds machine learning in the core of the firewall to provide inline, real-time attack prevention. In my environments, we have an integration with a third-party vendor. As soon as there is new information about new threats and the destination that they are trying to reach on any of our network devices, that traffic will be stopped."
"It has a very friendly interface like the Cyberoam iNG units, it has customizable policies, it has proper templates that you can even modify, and you can customize the rules, down to each single user."
"What we found valuable is the way they deal with emails, as well as the way the bandwidth usage is shown."
"The most valuable features are its nice interfaces and configuration. The endpoint is also very good."
"It is simple to use."
"The firewall feature of Sophos XG has been the most effective for threat prevention."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is that the license offers everything."
"I have found the feature allowing you to manage everything from a centralized location beneficial."
"One feature of Sophos XG that I found incredibly beneficial for threat prevention is its endpoint protection."
"If they had better integration with security products, such as Cisco ISE or Rapid Threat Containment, then it would be an improvement."
"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."
"Fortinet already improved FortiGate, but in the current market, many brands of security devices have improved together. Fortinet still needs to catch up with market standards. Fortinet is lacking in features in comparison to competitors."
"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."
"I would like to see improvements in the product's application rules."
"We sometimes have issues with FortiGate's routing table in the latest firmware update. We had to downgrade the device because our customers complained about bugs."
"With the addition of some features, it is possible that FortiGate can be used in all verticals."
"Currently, without the additional reporting module, we only have access to basic reporting."
"When it comes to their support, we have to select every single component that we want to include in a particular bundle. That is a very tedious process. T"
"When we looked at it originally, we needed to host the Panorama environment ourselves. I would prefer it if we could take this as a service. It might be that it is available, but for some reason we didn't choose it. The downsides of hosting are that we need to feed and water the machines. We are trying to move to a more SaaS environment where we have less things in our data centers, whether they be in our cloud data centers or physical data centers, which can reduce our physical data center footprint."
"The first level of support will usually do nothing for you. If you're an IT company, you're not looking for level one support. You need to escalate. Other vendors have a direct support line for enterprise clients, but not Palo Alto."
"We would like to see the external dynamic list for this solution improved. The current version does not automatically block malicious IP addresses, which would be very useful."
"The machine learning in Palo Alto NG Firewalls for securing networks against threats that are able to evolve and morph rapidly is good, in general. But there have been some cases where we get false positives and Palo Alto has denied traffic when there have been new updates and signature releases. Valid traffic gets blocked. We have had some bad experiences with this. If there were an ability, before it denies traffic, to get some kind of notification that some traffic is going to be blocked, that would be good."
"From a documentation standpoint, there is room for improvement. Even Palo Alto says that their documentation is terrible."
"Need improvement with their logs, especially the command line interface."
"Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls need better training modules. You have to do a lot of reading prior to watching the training videos, and it's good for people who are really into it. However, often you want to use a video for a TID. You want to see how to do something rather than spend 30 minutes reading and then another 30 minutes watching the class. As a result, I take third-party training classes rather than Palo Alto's training because they are a lot better."
"Support for this product is something that is really important, and it needs to improve."
"The MTR feature needs enhancing."
"I think that the main area for improvement is the quality assurance of the updates."
"The only area that requires improvement is scalability."
"We are having challenges when using Zoom with Sophos XG deployed."
"The interface of Sophos XG could be improved. I would prefer the Sophos XG to have an interface for the technician who is setting it up similar to the Sophos SG. I felt the Sophos SG user interface was superior. however, in terms of the functionality of the product, Sophos XG is in many ways more powerful than the Sophos SG. I have no complaints about the quality of the product or the end result. For someone who has used both, I preferred the old interface to the new one."
"The management console could be improved and the solution lacks good technical support."
"There could be some room for improvement in its pricing since my clients usually feel like the product is on the expensive side."
More Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls Pricing and Cost Advice →
Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is ranked 5th in Firewalls with 164 reviews while Sophos XG is ranked 6th in Firewalls with 192 reviews. Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is rated 8.6, while Sophos XG is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls writes "We get reports back from WildFire on a minute-by-minute basis". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sophos XG writes "Easy to use and deploy with an improved pricing structure in place". Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is most compared with Check Point NGFW, Azure Firewall, Meraki MX, Netgate pfSense and Cisco Secure Firewall, whereas Sophos XG is most compared with Netgate pfSense, OPNsense, Sophos XGS, SonicWall TZ and WatchGuard Firebox. See our Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls vs. Sophos XG report.
See our list of best Firewalls vendors.
We monitor all Firewalls reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls have both great features and performance. I like that Palo Alto has regular threat signatures and updates. I also appreciate that I can just import addresses and URL objects from the external server. Palo Alto has a dedicated management interface, which makes it easy to manage the device and handle the initial configuration. It has fantastic throughput and its connection speed is pretty fair, even when dealing with a high traffic load. With Palo Alto I can configure and manage with REST API integration. And Palo Alto provides deep visibility into your network activity via Application and Command Control.
Although Palo Alto has great things going for it, there are a few things I dislike about it. For example, when the CPU is 100%, the GUI can take a very long time to respond. Booting time is also time-consuming, and committing the configuration takes more time than I would like it to.
Like Palo Alto, Sophos XG is quick and easy to configure. It is compact in size, and therefore does not weigh a lot either. Similar to Palo Alto as well, it can handle heavy traffic and has a solid performance. A good thing about Sophos XG is that it supports IPsec connection with multiple vendor firewalls. However, I am not impressed with the CLI which is not so useful, and I don’t like that there is no option to import bulk address objects.
Conclusion:
Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls and Sophos XG are both good products. However, Palo Alto has certain features I really like and that’s why I chose it. For me, Palo Alto’s dynamic address group option is a big advantage because it is a huge time saver instead of having to create address groups manually. Another biggie for me was its DNS Sinkhole feature because it is something I rely on a lot and it is very effective in blocking C2 command control traffic.