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 FortiGate is user-friendly and affordable."
"The most useful functionality of Fortinet FortiGate is the user interface, multiple engines, and their cloud with the latest integrations. Additionally, the Security Fabric tool is very good."
"Overall, the pricing of the solution is very good. The product offers good value."
"The security features that they have are quite good. On top of that, their licensing model is quite nice where they don't charge you anything for the SD-WAN functionality for the firewall."
"It is a safe product."
"All of the features of Fortinet FortiGate are useful and the security protection is good."
"UTM/NGFW features and FortiCloud for logs and backups are awesome."
"Allows for firewall rules to be programmed and named in a way that makes it “readable”"
"The ability to create a VPN allows me to monitor branch offices from a central location."
"Great extensibility of the platform."
"Its scalability is a strong point."
"The "OpenVPN Client Export" package is really helpful in exporting the VPN client software on most popular devices: iOS/Android, Windows, Mac, Linux, and a handful of SIP handsets."
"The intrusion detection feature is the most valuable. It is an open-source firewall, so there is a lot of material on it. I also find the open VPN capability very nice. It is pretty customizable. The clustering and the high availability are the two biggest things to be able to get out of a firewall."
"I use pfSense because it gives me the flexibility to greatly expand basic firewall features."
"The GUI is easy to understand."
"At our peak time, we have reached more than 5,000 concurrent connections."
"The implementation with the AWS environment was good."
"This is a very stable product."
"The most valuable features of the solution are application filtering and web filtering."
"UTM 9 brings along IPSec as well as iPhone and iPad support. This seems small but it’s useful."
"The most valuable feature of Sophos UTM is reporting, it is flexible. I can monitor the end user's devices, even when they are not on my network. It has good drill-down capabilities."
"The initial setup is pretty easy."
"The most valuable feature is the IPS. It also protects us from malware."
"The initial configuration is straightforward thanks to the web GUI. In 30 minutes, you can have a running firewall with UTM protection enabled."
"My only complaint about FortiGate is a lack of QinQ VLAN tunneling. I haven't found this feature in any Fortinet product. You can do this on all Cisco routers, including the smaller models. However, QinQ isn't available on the biggest, most expensive Fortinet units. They still don't have that. I think now we're on software version 6.0, and they still haven't found a solution for QinQ. It isn't a dealbreaker, but that's my main complaint."
"Some of the filtering is not robust, you can escape it with a VPN. Some of the users bypass some of the filters. It catches some but it also misses some, that area could be improved. It's functioning reasonably but there's room for improvement in that area."
"I use the FortiGate 60D model and realized the 300Mbps bandwidth limitation. Because it is a product that offers many services, I think it could have greater bandwidth capacity."
"The feature which gives us a lot of pain is ASIC architecture."
"They have to just improve its performance when we enable all UTM features. When you enable all the features, the performance of FortiGate, as well as of Sophos and SonicWall, goes down."
"I would like to see a more intuitive dashboard."
"For the migration, everyone has a firewall in use and I am selling Fortinet. Typically, I am replacing another firewall. Previously, there was a tool available to convert configurations from one firewall, such as Palo Alto, to Fortinet, but this tool is no longer free. If it could be made free again, it would be very beneficial."
"Some of the software stability could improve."
"For the third-party packages, I'd rather have it built-in, like a core feature of pfSense, part of the core model."
"A way to clean squid cache from the GUI."
"One concern I have with Netgate pfSense is related to packet filtering. Specifically, issues can arise with certain functionalities like GP, and, at times, there may be bugs."
"The technical support needs to be improved."
"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."
"I would like to see pfSense integrate WireGuard. Currently, pfSense uses OpenVPN, and there's nothing wrong with it, but WireGuard is a lot leaner and meaner."
"The integration could be improved."
"Ease of use is a problem for a user who is unfamiliar with this product because, in the interface, everything has to be set manually."
"The reporting could improve by providing information on where, or from which device attacks are coming from. We are already given the country where the attack is coming from but more information would be beneficial."
"I think that additional metrics features are needed to be able to monitor other areas or to monitor as much as you can, at a fine-grain resolution."
"It is a little too CPU resource intensive, so we would like to see improvements there."
"They could reduce the price."
"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."
"It's stable, but the reaction time of the GUI is terrible."
"We had some problems with the configuration. They had provided a CloudFormation template, and we had to go several rounds to make it work."
"In short, the UI and UX are the areas of improvement in Sophos UTM and similar solutions compared to Palo Alto."
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.
See our list of best Firewalls vendors.
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.
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