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."The most valuable feature of Fortinet FortiGate is URL filtering."
"The IPS is good. It protect my network from attackers."
"The stability and scalability of this solution are satisfactory. Its SD-WAN, VPN, and URL filtering features are very useful."
"We can detect any attack of viruses or malware at the first point of contact."
"The most valuable feature is the VDOM, which allows the customer to have multiple firewalls in a single campus."
"Fortinet FortiGate's ease of management is the most valuable feature."
"The solution is very user friendly. The user interface in particular is quite nice."
"It enables our organization to become more productive. Also, it protects our NEtWare from viruses and malware."
"The features I have found best are ease of use, GUI, and performance."
"The gain in performance and security from configuring the VPN connections was significant."
"It has a very nice web interface, and it is very simple to use. The way policies are working is also good."
"We can run it on any hardware."
"Improved service performance and availability through redundancy."
"Technical support is perfect, excellent."
"Easy to deploy and easy to use."
"Great extensibility of the platform."
"The stability, overall, is excellent. I haven't had a problem in the last two years."
"I have no problem with the cost or licensing of this solution. This is a primary reason whay I wanted this solution. It does the same thing cheaper than other name brands."
"Sophos UTM has improved the porting section. It has improved security by seeing the gaps. For example, when you discover that an entry has been using a certain application, with Sophos UTM acting as a Layer 7 firewall, you can block the application, not the port."
"Scaling out cannot be easier, as there are many migration paths."
"The most valuable feature of Sophos UTM is the simple-to-use interface."
"Sophos is a unified solution. We have anti-virus protection, firewall rules, knotting, and DACC all in one box."
"Has great security features and does a good job of protecting the network."
"Advanced protection (Sophos Sandstorm) - Protects against crypto viruses in real-time."
"They should improve the interface to make it more user-friendly."
"There is room for improvement related to the logging and reporting aspect."
"Some of the software stability could improve."
"We sometimes have issues with FortiGate's routing table in the latest firmware update. We had to downgrade the device because our customers complained about bugs."
"Fortinet FortiGate could improve by adding enhancements to FortiMail, FortiSOAR, and FortiDeceptor."
"One issue that I have had is that sometimes I need to monitor the traffic, so I need to filter it according to the user and which user is using it the most. I experience a bottleneck most of the time, particularly at the peak time when the number of contracts and users are at maximum."
"Fortinet needs more memory to save the log files. We need it to save the logs on the hardware and not in the cloud. I know this feature is available in FortiCloud, but if we need this log locally, it is not available."
"Its price could be better."
"In an upcoming release, the reporting could be more user-friendly. For example, the reporting in graphs and charts for the host can be cumbersome."
"The integration could be improved."
"I've never tried it in large environments. All my clients are small businesses with a handful of employees, so I am not sure how it works in large environments. I keep up with recent versions, and there's nothing I'm waiting for, and nothing breaks when I get a new version."
"Perhaps the documentation is not clear and because it is supported in the community there is no basic documentation."
"When I checked other packages, it seems they use different tools that are installed on the PSS for functionality. They rely on third-party tools, unlike Fortinet, for example, which has its own tools. In comparison, we also use third-party tools on pfSense. For example, we had a situation where we needed a tool to identify authorized users, and when I searched for a solution, I found a third-party tool. However, using such tools may come with additional costs."
"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 multiple DNS servers running on individual interfaces."
"This product needs improvements with respect to reporting and auditing."
"The virus updates will always depend on new viruses that are discovered. Maybe they can send a notification or a reminder for update time."
"Flexibility in pricing could be improved. It's more rigid in its pricing compared to its competitor: Kaspersky."
"In short, the UI and UX are the areas of improvement in Sophos UTM and similar solutions compared to Palo Alto."
"The technical support team’s response time could be improved."
"Sophos UTM's firewall is a bit weak, and some of its features lack depth compared to other products like F5."
"There can be a delay when it comes to reaching out to technical support."
"Finding information about Sophos’ sizing guidelines can actually be difficult. Also, Sophos does not make it clear what they mean by “users” when you are sizing a firewall, which then leads to undersized implementations."
"Sophos UTM sometimes falls short in high-availability environments. They used to launch firmware that didn't work very well in a high-availability environment."
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