We performed a comparison between Netgate pfSense and Sophos UTM based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Firewalls solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."Whenever I need something, Fortinet improves and updates the software for me."
"Centralized monitoring, policy management, and virtualized appliances allow us to take control over our public and private infrastructure."
"The SD-WAN is the most valuable feature."
"The license management is very valuable. You can get a new license each year, or you can enroll every two to four years. You can get the logs, and you will get the information on the risk in your network and the entire organization. With this information, you can take action on your actives, computers, or devices. You can bring your own device as an SSE."
"It can expand easily."
"It blocks the vulnerabilities that can negatively impact us."
"We have been able to offer several services to customers in a single box."
"The user interface is relatively easy. The devices are easy to deploy and figure out when you have experience with other security appliances."
"An incomparable stability is achieved with other firewall systems."
"The most valuable features are the VPN and the capture photo."
"The tools' most valuable feature is load balancing."
"Content protection, content inspection, and the application level firewall."
"The initial setup was straightforward, therefore I wanted to continue using the product."
"I'm the expert when it comes to Linux systems, however, with the pfSense, due to the web interface, the rest of the staff can actually make changes to it as required without me worrying about whether they've opened up ports incorrectly or not. The ease of use for non-expert staff is very good."
"Centralized administration with multiple services, which allows for execution in several important functionalities of information security."
"The solution is very easy to use and has a very nice GUI."
"The initial setup was easy."
"I would recommend UTM over XG because it's easier to manage."
"The initial setup is easy."
"It helped to connect our satellite offices to the main Amazon infrastructure in a circular way."
"The cost of the solution is very reasonable."
"Sophos UTM is the simplest of these products to setup."
"It's a stable solution."
"Sophos has a single pane of glass which allows me to manage all my VPCs from a single instance, managing all my firewall from one place."
"If they had better integration with security products, such as Cisco ISE or Rapid Threat Containment, then it would be an improvement."
"Due to its higher cost, Fortinet FortiGate can lead to increased operational expenses."
"In the future, I would like to see improvements made to cloud-based management."
"There are problems with the custom reporting of the unique traffic. The data is there, but it is too difficult for us to extract."
"I would like to see improvements in the product's application rules."
"Vulnerability scanning could be improved."
"Difficult to add or define, and not that easy to configure and manage."
"The graphical user interface of Fortinet's FortiGate product does not function well with text-based interfaces."
"Their support could be better in terms of the response time."
"pfSense is not user-friendly. I hope to have something to make the interfaces more user-friendly."
"It needs better parsing of logs. At the moment, you have to use an external server for this if you want a deeper analysis."
"Also, the GUI is helpful, but it's not user-friendly. It's complicated. It should be more intuitive for the average user and have an excellent graphical view. Of course, the user will typically know about network administration, but it still should be easy to understand."
"ClamAV AntiVirus can cause some crashes. That service should be improved."
"It should integrate with LDAP, Active Directory, etc, to improve the way in which the traces and connections of each IP, or user connected through the firewall, are shown."
"The solution could always work at being more secure. It's a good idea to continue to work on security features and capabilities in order to ensure they can keep clients safe."
"The product could offer more integrated plugins."
"There is still room for improvement in wireless protection. I don't mean their WiFi device is bad, but there are still things to improve on, such as WiFi roaming."
"The interface configuration could be improved."
"With Sophos UTM, there is a general rule in the firewall when the country blocking can block some countries from accessing your data. In the current version, you still need to add it by putting in the IP range. This feature would be helpful for administrators and it gives them the advantage to block stuff in less time."
"They could use more SSL VPN support."
"I would like them to move from the Classic Load Balancer to the Network Load Balancer. This would make it easier to do certain things with Amazon. They are able to do some enhancements with Network Load Balancer that they are unable to do with Classic Load Balancer."
"As it stands right now, when we have an internet failure on WAN1, it takes several minutes before our WAN2 connection picks up the traffic"
"The technical support only communicates via email. I would prefer to communicate directly with someone."
"Initially, there were issues with the wireless network as wireless access points were disappearing from the dashboard after some time."
Netgate pfSense is ranked 1st in Firewalls with 128 reviews while Sophos UTM is ranked 1st in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 110 reviews. Netgate pfSense is rated 8.6, while Sophos UTM is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Netgate pfSense writes "User-friendly, easy to manage the firewall, rule-wise and interface-wise". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sophos UTM writes "It's a highly stable platform with very few hardware issues". Netgate pfSense is most compared with OPNsense, Sophos XG, KerioControl, Cisco Secure Firewall and WatchGuard Firebox, whereas Sophos UTM is most compared with Sophos XG, OPNsense, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Cisco Secure Firewall and Untangle NG Firewall. See our Netgate pfSense vs. Sophos UTM report.
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pfSense is opensource and has been the last 10 years in the top 10 best
firewall solutions in the world, it is free, stable, scalable, and easy to
administer ... and above all very safe, since it is one of the few systems
that could have been violated. It's free.
In fact, Karl, the 50-IP free version is for home use only, and not even then if it also protects business assets. You did a great job of explaining the difference, so I won't comment further.
To the original poster, it's cheaper to hire a Sophos consultant to create your original configuration. It costs twice as much to get a configuration "repaired" that wasn't correctly designed. A Sophos Solution Partner that has a Sophos Certified Architect with plenty of experience and good referrals is probably your best bet.
With Sophos is easy to configure and you have the support from the frabicant, with pfSense you have to learn from the community and learning curve is a little hard, last occasion with pfSense it don't have support for vpn dynamic, with Sophos they have RED equipment that is an extension from the core, only you need the serial number from the remote equipment and you have the vpn , both are great equipment and software, depend of the budget, pfSense is free and they have support if you pay the license very cheap
pfSense is just a basic firewall with VPN and Captive Portal functionality but does its job great. Only needs minimum resources to function. Price is right (FREE)
Sophos UTM is much more, hence the UTM. It does firewall, advance threat protection, VPN, Secure web gateway, email protection (AV, Spam, Encryption, and DLP), endpoint protection, Mobile Device control, Web Application Firewall, User Portal, built in reporting, and central management. It does require more resources but you get a lot more out of it. Two options depending on the size of your office, commercial version or the Free version that you can build on your own hardware. The free version is restricted to 50 IP addresses. (www.sophos.com)
I have used both and both have their place but using Sophos in my environment just because it offers a lot more functionality, nice dashboard, reports, and easy to use through the GUI.
One other big difference is that pfSense is FreeBSD based while Sophos UTM is linux based. It is also worth having a lool on cacheguard which is a proxy oriented product and also Linux based.
I´m afraid I am not able to help in this matter. We´ve decided to for FortiGate as services, based on our relationship with our IT security provider and the FortiGate reviews available on the net.
We used to use pfSence for one particular open network but let the full control on de FortiGate. During the investigation and analysis period we thought of Sophos but felt more comfortable going for FortiGate pretty much based on price and our relationship with our IT security provider. Hence my experience wouldn´t help in this case.
My best advice would is to refer to the article available on:
www.itcentralstation.com