We performed a comparison between Fortinet FortiGate and Sophos UTM based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Fortinet FortiGate and Sophos UTM had a similar user rating regarding ease of deployment, service and support, and ROI. If pricing is a factor, Sophos UTM is a more cost-effective solution based on user reviews. In terms of features, Fortinet FortiGate users felt the interface was complex, and the reporting feature needed improvements. In contrast, Sophos UTM users felt the solution needed to do a better job at covering mobile devices.
"The most valuable feature is the SSL VPN, as it allows us to connect and it separates this product from other firewalls."
"UTM/NGFW features and FortiCloud for logs and backups are awesome."
"The base firewall features are quite valuable to us."
"The solution is stable."
"Initial setup is straightforward. There weren't too many issues with setting it up. It takes one hour or so."
"The most valuable feature of Fortinet FortiGate is security. They are known for efficiency and are on the top of Gartner Quadrant reviews. Fortinet FortiGate has an easy-to-use platform with a good graphical interface. The configuration is simple and the solution provides an overall good layer of security."
"The interface is very user-friendly and I like it very much."
"The application control features, such as Facebook blocking and Spotify blocking, are the most valuable."
"It helped to connect our satellite offices to the main Amazon infrastructure in a circular way."
"It's easy to use."
"An easy solution to learn because the graphics are very intuitive."
"The scalability is good."
"The initial setup has been fine."
"Sophos UTM has a good user interface and granular security controls."
"I would recommend UTM over XG because it's easier to manage."
"Stability-wise, I rate this solution a ten out of ten...Scalability-wise, I rate this solution a ten out of ten."
"If they could extend their fabric towards other vendor environments for integration, that would be great."
"The debugging and troubleshooting has room for improvement."
"Its reporting capabilities can be improved. It should have some out-of-the-box reporting capabilities and some degree of customization. The basic reporting that it currently has is not sufficient to create more usable reports. It needs some sort of out-of-the-box reporting. They try to make customers purchase FortiAnalyzer for this kind of reporting, which is an additional cost. Other firewall vendors, such as SonicWall and Sophos, provide this sort of reporting without any additional cost."
"There aren't really any negative aspects to discuss."
"The scalability could be better."
"I would suggest that Fortinet add sandboxing to their solution."
"The logging details need to be improved."
"I need user-behavior analytics, to find threat scenarios from inside the organization, insider attacks. That would be very helpful for us. In addition, I would like next-generation features for small and medium businesses. These businesses require UTM, all in one product. Fortinet must include it."
"The initial setup was straightforward. The full deployment takes approximately two days which could be simplified to reduce the time. The major part of the process is the configuration and the policy setup."
"In short, the UI and UX are the areas of improvement in Sophos UTM and similar solutions compared to Palo Alto."
"We'd like to see them offer their services on mobile devices like tablets. I'm not sure if that's an option or not."
"The documentation during the AWS integration was a little fuzzy on getting it to work with how the whole public exposure versus private exposure, then routing some of the traffic."
"I would like some features that are available in other brands. For example, I sometimes a person is using too much bandwidth, and it isn't easy to find this information in Sophos. Also, we have to switch connections manually when we are using a VPN and lose the MPLS connection. It isn't automatic."
"The integration capabilities could be better."
"The virus updates will always depend on new viruses that are discovered. Maybe they can send a notification or a reminder for update time."
"There is absolutely no support when using AWS. If you buy the on-premise Sophos solution, you get support."
Fortinet FortiGate is ranked 2nd in Firewalls with 306 reviews while Sophos UTM is ranked 1st in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 110 reviews. Fortinet FortiGate is rated 8.4, while Sophos UTM is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Fortinet FortiGate writes "It's a reliable solution that's easy to install and cheaper than competitors ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sophos UTM writes "It's a highly stable platform with very few hardware issues". Fortinet FortiGate is most compared with Sophos XG, Cisco Secure Firewall, Netgate pfSense, Meraki MX and WatchGuard Firebox, whereas Sophos UTM is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Sophos XG, OPNsense, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls and Cisco Secure Firewall. See our Fortinet FortiGate vs. Sophos UTM report.
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I would have no doubt in recommending Fortinet. I do not know the Sophos UTM product specifically but in general, in companies, we have had unpleasant experiences with Sophos with customers. They typically declare performance values that are overestimated in the field.
We replaced Fortinet with Sophos as our public-facing UTM in 2017 & since then the ride has been extremely rough. I would not recommend Sophos for any mission-critical environment.
Fortinet is easy to manage and it include secure SDWAN as well including many features with easy to configure.
Both firewalls are easy to deploy. But the issue you will encounter when performing troubleshooting. You will not get flexibility in troubleshooting through Cli in Sophos whereas, in FortiGate, we have much more control. Besides if you are deploying a firewall on a large scale where visibility, control, performance as well as the flexibility is important it is better to go with Fortinet rather than Sophos.
I would also like to elaborate on the reporting part in FortiCloud. There is no need to pay any extras. Every box connects to ForticCoud service, and if you want reports to be greater than 7 days (meaning to be kept longer than that in their memory system) then you have to pay. In the meantime, by default Forticloud will send daily emails with reports and once a week you will get 4 to 5 reports, with lots of granular information. These reports are all in PDF with color graphics. In reality, I would be happy to send you some of the reports as in words typed herein would be more than a book. The FortiGate appliance also comes with 10 endpoint security (Forticlient) licences. So you can put this endpoint protection software to servers or clients. It also has a two-factor authentication license included. With these boxes, you can also create VDOM (Virtual Domains, totally separate).
They can afford that as the hardware, as I mentioned before (ASIC) has the power to do that. In 3 years I have had 1 spam message entering my mail server, is that telling you something??? In my first reply, I did tell you that where I work now they purchase Sophos. Well, when the antivirus is set the CPU gets up to 90%. My Fortigate CPU is 0% and peaks during attacks. And I have had quite a few. They were attempting to break into the mail server. More than 2 million attempts in less than 2 hours. Have a look at NSS Labs site. FortiGate is a Rolls Royce, you cannot compare.
Here in Australia, where I work now, the decision was to go with Sophos, ONLY ON PRICE. Yes, great brains. Now they regret that big time. FortiGate is a much more powerful device, especially when it comes to being able to handle the traffic. Most of the models handle throughput via ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) which is nothing more and less than a customer semiconductor. So, this is handled via hardware. It may be initially more difficult to implement. Now, what does "difficult" mean? To me when there is an unknown, difficult comes up till you learn. So if you make a decision on price and because "it is the easiest" to install.
I would not touch Sophos. Simple as that.
Sophos UTM is better by far. but it is more expensive
Done many installations of both Sophos and FortiGate, Sophos is the easiest to install and best in terms of features.
Reporting is free in Sophos while we need an extra subscription for FortiGate. Deep packet inspection, intrusion prevention advanced threat protection, web filtering, app control and email protection are key features of Sophos. Browsing is made safe with phishing protection and new functionality of ransomware protection. Sophos support is brilliant and community website from Sophos answers to all your questions and ease deployment.
I can’t really comment on FortiGate. We’ve been working with Sophos for years and like it’s integration with their endpoint.