We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Firewall 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: The two solutions are very comparable. The only major difference between the two is that some users of Cisco Secure Firewall consider the deployment to be somewhat complex.
"The most valuable feature of this solution is Quota."
"I only deal with it from a security analyst's point of view. I don't really get into the features of the actual FortiGate. From the security point of view, it works, and it does its job."
"We've found the solution to be pretty stable."
"Secure, user-friendly, stable, and scalable network security solution. Installation is straightforward."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiGate are the ease of use and there are several operating systems that can include the hardware capacities. In the newer releases, the resources were more useful because they were included in the operating system."
"The reporting you receive out of this appliance is excellent. You will not need an external management system."
"Provides good firewall security and has great VPN features."
"The interface is very user-friendly and I like it very much."
"VPN and firewall are good features."
"The AnyConnect remote access VPN gives us an easy way to deploy remote working for our users."
"With the FMC and the FirePOWERs, the ability to quickly replace a piece of hardware without having to have a network outage is useful. Also, the ability to replace a piece of equipment and deploy the config that the previous piece of equipment had is pretty useful."
"We get the Security Intelligence Feeds refreshed every hour from Talos, which from my understanding is that they're the largest intelligence Security Intelligence Group outside of the government."
"It brings us the ability to work from anywhere and has allowed us to work remotely without having to incur a lot of other costs. If we didn't have this type of solution, since we have so many on-prem services that are required, we would have likely lost money and been unable to deliver. We have a video services team who helped build the content for our sporting events. When you are watching a Leaf game and those swipes come by as well as the clips and things, those are all generated in-house. Without the ability to access our on-premise resources, we would have been dead in the water. So, the return on that is pretty impressive."
"One of the most valuable features is the AMP. It's very good and very reliable when it comes to malicious activities, websites, and viruses."
"I like the user interface because the navigation is very easy, straightforward on your left side pane you have all the sites that you need to browse. Unlike any other firewalls, it's pretty straightforward."
"Even in very big environments, Cisco comes in handy with configuration and offers reliability when it comes to managing multiple items on one platform."
"Sophos XG is very useful, it does many things."
"The most valuable feature, according to the setup we have at our work place here, is the flexibility of the system or the firmware that's running the appliance. It's so flexible, performing multiple rules with different configurations. According to the set up here, we need to implement several firewalls with different access levels, because we have a variety of users. For this requirement, it's very flexible and very easy to use."
"Each user has the ability to manage the solution."
"The VPN is easy and has good logging, monitoring and notifications."
"The initial setup was straightforward."
"The valuable features of this solution are the VPN, load balancer, and the QoS for splitting the ISP band."
"The solution's most valuable feature stems from its ability to protect our organization's web servers."
"The product has a console that is based in the cloud for all their products. In this console, they have email security, firewall security, endpoint security, et cetera. All of the products on offer in the console are very useful for us."
"The initial setup is complex."
"One of the problems I was having was with user mapping, and it is an issue for which I have escalated tickets with Fortinet support."
"The security of Fortinet FortiGate could improve."
"I would like some automated custom reporting."
"It's my understanding that more of the current generation features could be brought in. There could be more integration with EDRs, for example."
"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."
"The monitor and the visibility, in this proxy, is very weak."
"It needs to improve its ISP load balancing."
"The use of it has really bogged down our response time for certain problems, given we have to go through AT&T for everything."
"It doesn't have Layer 7 security."
"They should improve their interface."
"The pricing is a bit high."
"The only con that I have really seen with it is the reporting structure. FirePOWER is good. It has been a great help because, before that, it was not good at all."
"One of the few things that are brought up is that for the overall management, it would be great to have a cloud instance of that. And not only just a cloud instance, but one of the areas that we've looked at is using an HA type of cloud. To have the ability to have a device file within a cloud. If we had an issue with one, the other one would pick up automatically."
"We cannot have virtual domains, which we can create with FortiGate. This is something they should add in the future. Additionally, there is a connection limit and the FMC could improve."
"Licensing is complex, and I'd like it to be simplified. This is an area for improvement."
"In the product, the area revolving around SD-WAN has certain shortcomings where improvements are required."
"The uploading and downloading of reports should be included."
"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 support from the vendor needs to be improved."
"The solution is tied to the US dollar. You need to pay whatever the equivalent is in your own currency, and, if the exchange is bad, it can really add to the cost."
"Let's say I set up a rule to block users from accessing YouTube or Facebook. The rule will only block the HTTP traffic, which is non-secure traffic... The problem comes when you are trying to block, or allow, similar traffic that uses HTTPS. You have to create a certificate and import it into the users' web browsers, whatever they are using... The problem occurs when you're dealing with roaming users who use laptops and have to move between different sites that have different types of policies applied to them. You have to import all sorts of certificates from each site into their browser. Doing so will most probably conflict with something else that is totally irrelevant and cause a problem."
"The support service level agreement in regard to the amount of time needed to upgrade things is too low. It should be higher."
"There's an IP address delivery for our VPN client and a limited range of IP addresses. So this is a problem in the latest firmware release, but rather than using homework scenarios, we need a lot of VPN clients."
Cisco Secure Firewall is ranked 4th in Firewalls with 404 reviews while Sophos XG is ranked 7th in Firewalls with 192 reviews. Cisco Secure Firewall is rated 8.2, while Sophos XG is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Cisco Secure Firewall writes "Highlights and helps us catch Zero-day vulnerabilities traveling across our network". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sophos XG writes "Easy to use and deploy with an improved pricing structure in place". Cisco Secure Firewall is most compared with Palo Alto Networks WildFire, Netgate pfSense, Meraki MX, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls and Juniper SRX Series Firewall, whereas Sophos XG is most compared with Netgate pfSense, OPNsense, Sophos XGS, SonicWall TZ and SonicWall NSa. See our Cisco Secure Firewall vs. Sophos XG report.
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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.
My preference is the Sophos XGS, particularly when you team it up with the Sophos Endpoint Protection client and configure it for synchronized security.
Both can be managed through Sophos Central and are available at a decent price for the power they offer the SMB.
I recommend Sophos XGS firewall. It will offer the best solution for malware protection.
Also, I recomend Sophos CIXA with XDR (Sophos Endpoint), so you can use Syncronized Security.