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."Fortinet has a very good solution for Secure SD-WAN. One very good feature is that they have robust and simple FortiOS through which they provide all solutions. That's their strength. There's not much complexity involved with the Secure SD-WAN solution of Fortinet as compared to Cisco's solution, which has a lot of flexibility but complexity also comes with that flexibility."
"The technical support is great."
"Allows for firewall rules to be programmed and named in a way that makes it “readable”"
"Its user interface is good, and it is always working fine."
"The main benefit is the grouping of our security monitoring."
"The usage in general is pretty good."
"Reliability is the best feature. We faced some issues when we were setting it up, but the service, portal, and administration are good."
"FortiGate is very simple to manage and easy to use."
"Some of the terminologies were more familiar to me than it was when I first encountered Cisco."
"The classic features such as content inspection, content protection, and the application-level firewall, are the most important."
"The initial setup is easy."
"The solution has good customization abilities and plenty of features."
"Technical support is perfect, excellent."
"We can run it on any hardware."
"It is very easy to use. The interface is quite understandable. There is a good community, and I can take over at any time I want. If there is anything wrong with it, I could just reinstall the whole thing and start all over again, and I'll be up again in less than a few minutes"
"It is a stable solution. It is also easy to install and can be deployed and maintained by one team member."
"The scalability is good."
"It is a very good product. The threat monitoring process is the most valuable feature."
"UTM 9 brings along IPSec as well as iPhone and iPad support. This seems small but it’s useful."
"Sophos SG UTM had all the basic functionality that you needed. It is user-friendly and easy to manage for any integrator."
"Stability-wise, I rate this solution a ten out of ten...Scalability-wise, I rate this solution a ten out of ten."
"The cost of the solution is very reasonable."
"The solution is stable."
"The most valuable features of Sophos UTM are the ease of use, it is very user-friendly. You can understand what they implement in the new firmware, and it's easy to manage the firewalls."
"The updates Fortinet provides are sometimes unstable."
"Fortinet FortiGate can improve by integrating the web application firewall and the DDoS protection part of the solution. Having a WAF feature, web application firewall, and proxy together would be a good benefit."
"There were quite a few problems with the stability of the system."
"The cloud features can be improved."
"I think the only issue that needs improvement is the interface."
"The stability could be a bit better."
"The customization could be improved. Cisco, for example, is much better at this. They need to work to be at least as good as they are."
"Fortinet FortiGate should improve the VPN tokens."
"The solution’s interface must be improved."
"The security could be improved."
"It needs better parsing of logs. At the moment, you have to use an external server for this if you want a deeper analysis."
"The technical support needs to be improved."
"If you want to take advantage of all of the solution's options, you need to have a bit of a technical background. It's not for a layperson."
"The integration could be improved."
"Adjustment in the interfaces: I had to adjust those interfaces manually and of course that is a great feature that you can restore it but it is immediately also one point for improvement. If you don't have to adjust, if it's just stamped and it works, that's great."
"There are several levels of firewall configuration such as beginner, advanced, and expert configurations. At each level, it becomes more complex and more tricky to set up the firewall. For example, if you want to install the firewall on your computer system, it would be a lot easier if it just tells you that this is the internet NIC and this is the Wi-Fi NIC."
"The ease of use could be a bit better."
"Stay away from the wireless models, since you cannot put them in HA. They start to give you some weird issues once you start getting into multiple SSIDs and networks."
"They could use more SSL VPN support."
"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 only time we face a problem or issues is when we place a ticket. We have found that response is very slow."
"There is absolutely no support when using AWS. If you buy the on-premise Sophos solution, you get support."
"Sophos should improve its ability to check something like bandwidth consumption for users or something more real-time."
"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."
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, Cisco Secure Firewall, KerioControl and Untangle NG Firewall, 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. (https://www.sophos.com/en-us/products/free-tools/sophos-utm-home-edition.aspx)
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:
https://www.itcentralstation.com/products/comparisons/pfsense_vs_sophos-utm