We performed a comparison between Sophos UTM and WatchGuard XTM [EOL] based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Netgate, Fortinet, OPNsense and others in Firewalls."Security, SD-WAN, and Streetscape are valuable features."
"It's great for capturing the traffic and troubleshooting it."
"The scalability of Fortinet FortiGate is good."
"Fortinet FortiGate's most valuable features are ease of use, flexibility, and most of the configuration we can be done using the GUI. When we compare Fortinet FortiGate with other solutions the firewall policy are very easy to understand."
"The most valuable features are SD-WAN, application control, IPS control, and FortiSandbox."
"The most important feature, normally for small business customers, is link load balancing."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiGate are the ease of use and the UI. It has always provided me with what I needed. I have no need for additional costs that other solutions have, such as Sophos."
"The SD-WAN feature is the most valuable. This feature evolved from link load balancing. It has helped us in terms of our uptime and privatizing applications whenever we experience an outage. The SD-WAN feature has been a plus for us. Two-factor authentication has allowed us to add more users in terms of remote working. We have two-factor authentication for remote workers to authenticate them before they get on the network."
"If a computer does get infected the Sophos appliance lets us know via it's Advanced Threat Protection so we can get a much faster response time."
"It allows our developers to be able to securely log into servers to deploy and manage software."
"It now controls all the security aspects of our web servers with Sophos UTM WAF."
"Stability-wise, I rate this solution a ten out of ten...Scalability-wise, I rate this solution a ten out of ten."
"It works well without any maintenance. So far, it has worked pretty well regardless of the traffic."
"Advanced protection (Sophos Sandstorm) - Protects against crypto viruses in real-time."
"Monitoring and reporting are areas that need improvement."
"What I like about the solution is the ease of use."
"There is a site-to-site VPN configuration between others people."
"It is stable and does not require you to reboot all the time."
"Monitoring of network activity is included in the box."
"SNMP status monitoring and the Central Management Software."
"WatchGuard XTM is fairly basic. We use it as the perimeter firewall. The main point is to protect from attack software and hacking."
"We have used technical support for WatchGuard many times and overall, we are satisfied with it. They are always listening and there is a good reaction time to our findings. When there are issues, they really try to resolve them."
"After installing the product, we achieved awareness of our data protection needs and email misuse."
"They have a reporting system which can store data over a very long period of time. Not many other firewall vendors provide a reporting system, but if they do, like Fortinet does, then you've got buy that as an additional product and that can be more than twice as expensive as the initial investment in the firewall. And without reporting over a long-term period, you're just about wasting your time."
"There are some cloud-based features that could be much more flexible than they currently are."
"The support we receive when we need to upgrade is not satisfactory and has room for improvement."
"I think there could be more QoS features"
"It could use better throughput on some of the smaller boxes for the branch offices."
"They've become quite expensive."
"There were quite a few problems with the stability of the system."
"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 filtering is sometimes too precise or strict. We sometimes have to bypass and authorize some of the sites, but they get blocked. We know that they are trusted sites, but they are blocked, and we don't know why."
"We didn’t find any issues but I know there have been some in the last few years."
"Sophos UTM could be simplified, and they can improve on the many other features, like SD-WAN and load balancing. Sophos UTM is missing a few features that their competitors have. For example, if you have multiple branches you would like to connect, the load balancing features aren't available on multilink. If we create a VPM for multiple LAN links, we cannot load balance the traffic."
"The reporting system needs to allow for customizations because many reports do not include details that we expect."
"Sophos should be more user-friendly, have more dashboards, and an easier implementation."
"I am going to flat out say technical support is terrible. Being a Platinum level customer, I am not happy with the support."
"The only time we face a problem or issues is when we place a ticket. We have found that response is very slow."
"There's an issue that when we deploy UTM on fiber, it automatically upgrades to the latest version without giving an option to stay on the current one."
"The technical support only communicates via email. I would prefer to communicate directly with someone."
"Syslog (Dimension) is focused on presentation, but needs more focus on utility like SonicWall syslog (GMS/Analyzer)."
"I would like them to improve the product's overall protections. This would be good for all product users."
"One huge issue with WatchGuard XTM is that I'm not getting reports in a readable format. Readable means, I don't want Excel online. We repeat auditing when we trigger the report or setup calendar. That functionality is what we are looking for from WatchGuard XTM here."
"Sometimes we have had issues with stability of the product."
"The VPN errors are not helpful when troubleshooting."
"The setting policies need improvement. It needs an easier way to do static NAT and check on what policy is being used for that specific traffic."
"WatchGuard doesn't have a product that allows them to get into the data center. And that's just because there is no hardware to do the job. The software could do it, but there's no hardware that allows that to happen at the moment. So it doesn't scale as well as some other products, that's for sure."
"The initial setup is neither simple nor complex. If you know the base in networking and how the firewall works, you will be able to figure it out."
Earn 20 points
Sophos UTM is ranked 1st in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 29 reviews while WatchGuard XTM [EOL] doesn't meet the minimum requirements to be ranked in Firewalls. Sophos UTM is rated 8.4, while WatchGuard XTM [EOL] is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Sophos UTM writes "It's a highly stable platform with very few hardware issues". On the other hand, Sophos UTM is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Sophos XG, OPNsense, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls and Cisco Secure Firewall, whereas WatchGuard XTM [EOL] is most compared with .
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