We performed a comparison between Meraki MX and Sophos UTM based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Unified Threat Management (UTM) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."I use Meraki in my POCs and with my customers as well."
"It is very fast to implement."
"It is easy to manage, which is one of the most important things for us. It is also flexible, stable, and scalable."
"Point-to-point VPNs can dynamically follow IP changes with no need for static IPs."
"Site to Site VPN: The device can establish a VPN connection to multiple sites in a mesh environment in seconds, and without complex VPN knowledge."
"When you try to create an IP or when you have an alert about when a website is banned, these features are helpful."
"In general, Meraki MX is easy to work with."
"The simplicity of configuration is the most valuable feature of the solution."
"It has helped by identifying threats within the company. If there are computers or servers that are compromised, then we are able to identify them right away in the system."
"It is not an easy task to protect your web servers from the big bad internet. The Web Server Protection in this solution does it elegantly and, if configured correctly, even hides the server's base system from prying eyes."
"Sophos UTM provides security for our network here and access through a VPN connection for our remote users. It also offers the flexibility to create different tools for accessibility."
"It is easy to manage."
"An easy solution to learn because the graphics are very intuitive."
"It allows our developers to be able to securely log into servers to deploy and manage software."
"The most valuable feature of Sophos UTM is the simple-to-use interface."
"We've found the technical support to be helpful."
"It is very expensive."
"Meraki MX can come across as an expensive solution."
"Meraki MX firewalls are great for small to medium-sized businesses, but other solutions are better for enterprise-sized companies."
"The whole Cisco Meraki range requires easier access for cameras. For a security center, it would be helpful to have easier access to cameras through the portal. Its licensing cost could also be better."
"FortiGate is cheaper than Meraki. Even the license renewal is less than Meraki."
"Expensive licensing and firewall stops immediately working if the license is not renewed at expiration date."
"We can’t access GUI management and CLI opening features when the Internet is unavailable."
"The product is quite complex to set up."
"Sophos UTM could improve if there was no limitation on users."
"In Sophos UTM there is always a problem with the routing tables. If you want to see the routing table, you have to use the UI. You can't do it via a web browser. The routing table is better in Fortinet."
"When we call support, we get put on hold for a long time."
"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."
"Initially, there were issues with the wireless network as wireless access points were disappearing from the dashboard after some time."
"We had some problems with the configuration. They had provided a CloudFormation template, and we had to go several rounds to make it work."
"I would like this solution to support ICAP. Also, they no longer support on-premises management, and are forcing clients to use centralized management via the cloud, which I don't agree with."
"The solution is not scalable."
Meraki MX is ranked 2nd in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 57 reviews while Sophos UTM is ranked 1st in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 110 reviews. Meraki MX is rated 8.2, while Sophos UTM is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Meraki MX writes "Cost-effective, simplified, easy to manage, and reliable with advanced security features and granular visibility". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sophos UTM writes "It's a highly stable platform with very few hardware issues". Meraki MX is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Cisco Secure Firewall, Sophos XG and Zyxel Unified Security Gateway, whereas Sophos UTM is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Fortinet FortiGate, Sophos XG, OPNsense and Juniper SRX Series Firewall. See our Meraki MX vs. Sophos UTM report.
See our list of best Unified Threat Management (UTM) vendors.
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To be honest, if you are still buying firewall appliances and UTM licenses you are already behind a very obvious requirement to move to Cloud security. Buying UTM does not solve the growing risk of mobility and cloud application delivery. It would be worthwhile reading Gartner's SASE paper on security transformation. Or research Zscaler, who has been delivering this model for 10 years.
If a user is in your network behind your UTM, what stops him from connecting to his mobile phone Hotspot and bypassing all UTM, DLP, etc. Security has to move from the network to the endpoint. Protection regardless of location, device or network. Anything less is a massive compromise and a false sense of actual security.
Sophos gives on-premise UTM functionalities that work like traditional UTMs (such as FortiGate, Firepower and the likes). Meraki MX devices are managed from the cloud and are subscription-based but also extremely easy to configure.
If you want a very easy to configure solution with a minimum IT staff and prefer OPEX over CAPEX, go with Meraki.
If you want on-premise control, and prefer CAPEX over OPEX, go with Sophos.
I haven't had any experience with Sophos, but in small business environments I've found the Meraki devices to be needlessly complex. As one who has worked quite a bit with enterprise Cisco devices, I can't say I'm surprised. In my opinion, complexity doesn't necessarily denote better functionality.
Most concerning to me, though, the Meraki devices also stop functioning entirely if you don't renew. their licenses, and it's some $500 per year *per device.* Any situation where a license not being reactivated can shut down your entire network is a huge concern, particularly at such high cost. We aren't talking Karen not being able to use Acrobat or something here... we're talking entire site outage. That is enough to make any technician worth their salt have a mild seizure.
When it comes to Security, I have very good experiences with Sophos, I can say the security solution is absolutely great in Sophos. Whereas I have never used Meraki, so I can't comment anything on it.
SD-WAN; no experience on any of the requested products, so better not to make any false comment/advice.