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.
"Fortinet FortiGate's reliability is valuable."
"Fortinet FortiGate appears to be scalable."
"A strong point of FortiGate is the graphical interface is complete and easy to use."
"The integration with Active Directory is one of the good features. Most of the customers are now looking for the Single Sign-on feature. So, being able to integrate Active Directory with the firewall is useful. It is also easy."
"The simplicity of the product is great. It's very easy to use, which is a compliment we get all the time in terms of feedback."
"It is a safe product."
"The solution is very user-friendly."
"The SD-WAN function is very developed. It has SD-WAN functionality with security features in one device. We can manage from one single console SD-WAN and the security policy."
"All policies can be deployed and managed in a very simple way."
"My favorite feature is the UTM piece and that was the main reason we bought it. It helps us to fine tune the network."
"Check Point is very administrator-friendly and the SmartDashboard is easy to use."
"It is easy to deploy or upgrade. There is no need to do this manually with commands. This solution can be set up online."
"Advanced logging capabilities: Check Point generates extensive logs which may be very useful to figure out the issues. Its logs also contain too much information which can be used to modify the policy as per user need and organizational security environment. The same can be used to figure out probable attack surface or necessary steps for mitigation."
"I have not had an infected machine behind the firewall since I first installed and started using NGFW."
"The rules are very easy to deploy and can be optimized pretty quickly."
"With the outstanding capabilities of Check Point, we managed to have stable site-to-site VPNs with all our partners and with every other vendor's devices."
"This kind of strategic technology makes it much easier to remove malware and address vulnerabilities quickly."
"Good security and a good interface."
"The scalability of Sophos XG is good."
"The solution's technical support is good."
"Sophos XG is very useful, it does many things."
"I like the fact that it can self remove malware and do updates on the cloud via Sophos Central."
"Sophos firewalls are scalable. They are pretty strong in security. So, when they provide any kind of firewall, they provide all the features such as anti-spam, antivirus, etc."
"The most valuable features are its nice interfaces and configuration. The endpoint is also very good."
"In the next release, maybe the documentation on how to use this solution could be improved."
"They are doing good, but they can improve the distributor assignment. The availability of the product and the timeline of delivery are the main things. The distribution should be swift, and the distributor should not reach out to end customers directly. They should work as a distributor. There should also be one more local distributor. Currently, there is only one distributor in Pakistan, and the rest of them are in UAE. It is difficult to work with only one distributor. Sometimes, you don't get along with the same distributor, and that's why they should have one more distributor. Their licensing should also be improved. The activation or renewal of the product should be done from the date of renewal, not from the date on which the license expired."
"The firmware needs improvement because there are bugs when a new release comes through. Sometimes, the configuration changes, and it's a bit harder to see where the fail is. The first time that you have the firmware, it tends to have some issues, and it's better to wait a bit to update the equipment."
"I would like reporting to be improved and should offer a lot more tools to monitor the products."
"The logs need to be better. They need to be more visible and easier to access."
"I have to say that the initial setup was complex. The deployment took a few days to get set up. Initially, we were using an IPVanish. We switched to this tool since we thought it would be easier. But it turns out it wasn't easier to set up and run."
"The cloud features can be improved."
"It can be a little bit more user-friendly in terms of policy definition and implementation. It seems a little bit complicated, and it could be simplified."
"Pricing needs to be lowered from start, this would be more effective than lowering it during negotiations."
"The software licensing model is too complicated with all the various tiers of SKUs (i.e. per software blade). They need to simplify this for easier purchasing and renewing."
"There is no email security."
"In our particular case, we have different web applications developed by the same organization, however, that requires a specialized protection element such as a WAF. Having this service or feature within the same solution would be very valuable."
"Our SAM rule is also not working to block the IP address which we don't allow in our organization so we have to create a traditional rule base block which is a time-consuming job for me and my team."
"It could be easier to access the installation of the Hostfix for VSX solutions. The CLI commands help us understand how virtual firewalls behave in terms of processor, memory, and other aspects. More graphic visualizations of CPUSE commands would be a welcome improvement, and Check Point could expand scripts to run within the solution for multiple tasks."
"The training for Check Point Firewall should increase, including the number of Training Centers. For most new people in our organization, we have to provide them training from our end, as they are not trained in Check Point Firewalls. So, we have to do the training, from our point of view, to make our engineers able to use Check Point Firewalls. However, with other firewalls, they are already trained, so we are not require to provide them training. This could be improved by the Check Point Community."
"With the version we're on, it's a bit time-consuming if you have multiple IP addresses to add. But in the later versions, which we're moving to, it makes it a lot easier to add IP addresses with dynamic objects, as they call it."
"Everything is working as expected at this moment, but the anti-spam solution in Sophos XG needs to be improved. It needs more granular features and more stability. The anti-spam solution currently doesn't have many features, and we would like to have more features. At this moment, there is no expression filter for anti-spam. We need something to be able to filter subjects or attachments in emails based on the keyword. Sometimes, there is an issue with anti-spam, and Sophos XG suddenly stops processing incoming or outgoing emails. The only solution for this issue is to restart the appliance. Their support should be improved. It takes a long time to escalate a support case from level one to level two."
"I would like to have a more efficient login process."
"In the product, the area revolving around SD-WAN has certain shortcomings where improvements are required."
"Sophos XG does not have the ability to disconnect a user."
"Technical support is difficult to access."
"Its price should be improved. Its features are pretty okay, but the price is the area where we have to fight more. They should do something about the price structure."
"We are not very happy with the customer support they provide — it's quite slow."
"In Sophos XG, the throughput for larger networks is an area of concern where improvements are required."
Check Point NGFW is ranked 5th in Firewalls with 275 reviews while Sophos XG is ranked 7th 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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