We performed a comparison between Sonicwall TZ and Sophos XG based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Sophos XG’s single pane of glass makes it easy to manage the entire solution and it can be done anywhere. Users find it very light, stable, and it provides excellent real-time control. Users say SonicWall TZ struggles a bit with load balancing and data filtering, making it a slightly less desirable solution.
"We can detect any attack of viruses or malware at the first point of contact."
"FortiGate is flexible and easy to use."
"The most valuable features are the policies, filtering, and configuration."
"It's very good and very stable for businesses. It works very well."
"It's quite comfortable to handle the FortiGate firewall."
"Fortinet FortiGate protects against internet-based threats, both internal and external. It is scalable, stable, easy to use, and easy to install."
"Advanced routing (RIP, OSPF, BGP, PBR). It gives you a seamless and simple integration into a large network."
"Whenever I need something, Fortinet improves and updates the software for me."
"The performance has been very good. Overall, the solution is quite stable."
"I have found the stability of this product to be excellent."
"It lets me monitor in live time if someone is 'hogging' bandwidth."
"The best thing about the product is the very good threat prevention output."
"I find the security we are able to do with the policies to be valuable. The monitoring is valuable as well."
"Offers the right amount of control without being incredibly convoluted and frustrating."
"Ease of management and the VPN integration."
"The installation is straightforward and took approximately 30 minutes."
"I rate Sophos support 10 out of 10. When my device was freezing, I contacted them, and sent me a replacement. It only took a couple of days for Sophos to ship the device to Kenya. I didn't have a redundant device, so it was urgent."
"The SL VPNs are the most valuable feature. I have a lot of systems out of the head office that need to connect to the local networks, and they all connect wirelessly via the Sophos VPN client."
"The stability of Sophos XG is good, it has good performance."
"The initial setup is pretty simple."
"The solution seems to be very easy to use."
"I like their firewall and the intrusion detection feature"
"The firewall feature of Sophos XG has been the most effective for threat prevention."
"Everything is consolidated into a single box, offering comprehensive functionality, including Wi-Fi access and other features."
"Fortinet FortiGate could improve by having more storage in the hardware for log data."
"Some of the features in the graphical user interface do not work, which requires that we used the command-line-interface."
"Fortinet FortiGate needs to improve to be on par with its competitors, such as Palo Alto and Sophos. They are the market leaders. Fortinet FortiGate needs to improve its capabilities. However, we are happy with Fortinet FortiGate."
"I would like to have logs, monitoring, and reporting for a month without extra fees."
"There are mainly two areas of improvement in Fortinet FortiGate— the licensing cost and the timing of upgrading licenses for boxes."
"A lack of integration between our data centers."
"Fortinet FortiGate could improve by having more capabilities for troubleshooting VPN connections. For example, I do get some feedback about the current status, but I could use some history and logging of important events. The information is logged in our Syslog server, but I could use that information from the device. If they could provide a GUI to have some more insight on what's going with my VPN would be useful."
"They have to just improve its performance when we enable all UTM features. When you enable all the features, the performance of FortiGate, as well as of Sophos and SonicWall, goes down."
"It needs more robust self-help documentation along with examples and things to watch out for."
"GUI interface could be improved."
"It could be made more user friendly."
"SonicWall TZ can improve the UI application and when you create any net policies or any new policy, it will not sync or work properly."
"Sometimes there is a glitch between the network connection. Last time, something happened on our IP phone, the SonicWall team did some updates to fix the issue. However, glitches happen very rarely. I did not experience any other types of problems."
"The lack of support is having me look into other solutions to replace SonicWALL."
"I can't get the support that I need from SonicWall."
"The log analyzer in SonicWall TZ is something that they need to improve upon."
"It would be beneficial if the platform provided more flexible support for a variety of devices."
"Content filtering could be more effective and efficient."
"Their technical support needs improvement. I've been on hold with them for hours waiting for their support."
"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."
"The GUI and support could be better. I think there are other products that we are going to deploy instead of Sophos. We have already upgraded a month ago because the interfaces and support for Sophos are really weak. But other products like Juniper, Cisco, or FortiGate are better than Sophos. It's also complicated, and the end-user or client does not understand it."
"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."
"There needs to be a way that we can distinguish between educational institutions on Youtube and other Youtube videos. You can do this on Fortinet. Basically, they can block all other Youtube videos besides those that are from educational institutions. With Sophos, you either allow for all Youtube videos or none at all. They need to allow for more specification on different websites."
"I would like to have a more efficient login process."
SonicWall TZ is ranked 12th in Firewalls with 78 reviews while Sophos XG is ranked 6th in Firewalls with 192 reviews. SonicWall TZ is rated 8.0, while Sophos XG is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of SonicWall TZ writes "Has efficient user access control feature and good technical support services ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sophos XG writes "Easy to use and deploy with an improved pricing structure in place". SonicWall TZ is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Meraki MX, SonicWall NSa, WatchGuard Firebox and Cisco Secure Firewall, whereas Sophos XG is most compared with Netgate pfSense, OPNsense, Sophos XGS, Sophos UTM and Meraki MX. See our SonicWall TZ vs. Sophos XG report.
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