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."We purchased Fortinet because of the pricing, its functionality, because it met our requirements, and the total cost of ownership over five years was quite reasonable. In the market, Fortinet is rated quite well."
"FortiGate has a very strong unified threat management system."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiGate are it is one of the most mature firewalls in the UTM bundle."
"The CLI is robust and powerful, enabling rapid, consistent changes via SSH."
"The most valuable feature is the VDOM, which allows the customer to have multiple firewalls in a single campus."
"Fortigate is very scalable to serve our customers' needs. We have scaled already from fifty to more than a hundred instances of Fortinet FortiGate. Around 20 staff are required for deployment and maintenance, mostly engineers."
"Fortinet FortiGate has many valuable features, such as IDS, and intrusion detection. It has security features that are in part with the technologies that are available in the market."
"The notable features that I have found most valuable are that it includes the antivirus, and also IPS, and even SD-WAN."
"It is a stable product... I rate the solution's technical support a nine out of ten...The initial setup is quite easy because they have all the information on their website."
"The most valuable features of this solution are the firewall application and application control."
"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."
"Installing Sophos UTM is straightforward. The deployment itself doesn't take long, but you have to spend some time planning and waiting for the hardware to be delivered."
"It has helped by identifying threats within the company. If there are computers or servers that are compromised, then we are able to identify them right away in the system."
"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 is not an easy task to protect your web servers from the big bad internet. The Web Server Protection in this solution does it elegantly and, if configured correctly, even hides the server's base system from prying eyes."
"Sophos UTM has a good user interface and granular security controls."
"It is stable and does not require you to reboot all the time."
"Reputation Enabled Defense indicates that some websites are so infested that it's not even worth visiting them, and therefore saving the bandwidth of going through the detection process."
"WatchGuard XTM is fairly basic. We use it as the perimeter firewall. The main point is to protect from attack software and hacking."
"SNMP status monitoring and the Central Management Software."
"There is a site-to-site VPN configuration between others people."
"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."
"Application Control is fantastic with over 2,500 applications and the granularity that we can either allow people to view but not be able to log on to Facebook; or view it and log onto it if they're in the marketing department, but not play Facebook games. There are all sorts of different options like that. So it's highly granular."
"Monitoring of network activity is included in the box."
"I don't like that anything more than very basic reporting is not included."
"The search tool needs improvement. It's very difficult to search for policies right now."
"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."
"To some degree, it's almost a question as to why some of this stuff isn't simpler. For example, for an AP deployment, while it's integrated, the number of steps that you have to go through in order to get the AP up, seems like a lot."
"There are mainly two areas of improvement in Fortinet FortiGate— the licensing cost and the timing of upgrading licenses for boxes."
"Some of the features in the graphical user interface do not work, which requires that we used the command-line-interface."
"This product could be improved with Active directory integration and better handling in IPsec and GRE Tunnels."
"Vulnerability scanning could be improved."
"The classification segregation of applications lacks sufficient definition."
"In short, the UI and UX are the areas of improvement in Sophos UTM and similar solutions compared to Palo Alto."
"We had some problems with the configuration. They had provided a CloudFormation template, and we had to go several rounds to make it work."
"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."
"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."
"I would like to see Sophos UTM add support for all the new threat-detection technologies and the ability to respond to novel security threats that come along every day."
"I would like to see the SD-WAN feature improved."
"It is a pretty straightforward setup, but it should be some sort of documentation that takes you step-by-step to help set it up for your VPC."
"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."
"I would like them to improve the product's overall protections. This would be good for all product users."
"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 VPN errors are not helpful when troubleshooting."
"Syslog (Dimension) is focused on presentation, but needs more focus on utility like SonicWall syslog (GMS/Analyzer)."
"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."
"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."
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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