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."Allows for firewall rules to be programmed and named in a way that makes it “readable”"
"The most valuable feature is the FortiManager for centralized management."
"You can create multiple Virtual Domains (VDOMs), which are treated as separate firewall instances."
"Initial setup is easy to configure."
"FortiGate firewalls are user-friendly, and I like the security profiling features."
"There are lots of features and most of them are deployed for internet security. Users are protected if they accidentally go to some malicious sites."
"Virtual Domains (VDOMs) are a feature that we found valuable."
"FortiGate has a very strong unified threat management system."
"UTM 9 brings along IPSec as well as iPhone and iPad support. This seems small but it’s useful."
"It allows our developers to be able to securely log into servers to deploy and manage software."
"It gives us the ability to manage our firewalls from the cloud and deploy a unified configuration onto them. Other competitors like Meraki have that ability, but they fail to optimize it in the way that Sophos has."
"The most valuable feature is ransomware protection."
"The stability of Sophos UTM is very good. The solution has been stable since Sophos took over Cyberoam which was the original company providing this solution."
"It makes it a lot easier for us to maintain things. Prior to it, things were more difficult. This means less time on us. We can focus on other things. The recovery is more in man-hours for us than anything else."
"Sophos is a unified solution. We have anti-virus protection, firewall rules, knotting, and DACC all in one box."
"It now controls all the security aspects of our web servers with Sophos UTM WAF."
"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."
"It configures in all-in-one place."
"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."
"It is stable and does not require you to reboot all the time."
"After installing the product, we achieved awareness of our data protection needs and email misuse."
"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."
"SNMP status monitoring and the Central Management Software."
"I like the hostwatch because I can see what traffic uses the most bandwidth and I can block that site."
"It would be nice if backups could more easily migrate between different models."
"The central management for the FortiGate Fortinet Firewall needs improvement. They have the manager to do the essential management for both SD-WAN and for the security policy. They should also improve the SD-WAN function."
"The solution lacks sufficient filtering."
"We would like to see better pricing."
"The support is the main thing that needs to be improved."
"The search tool needs improvement. It's very difficult to search for policies right now."
"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."
"The non-error conserve mode has room for improvement."
"We didn’t find any issues but I know there have been some in the last few years."
"There is absolutely no support when using AWS. If you buy the on-premise Sophos solution, you get support."
"Sophos UTM could improve the way the configuration has to be done. I have to do the configuration through the command line interface but if it could be done through the graphical user interface it would be much better."
"Flexibility in pricing could be improved. It's more rigid in its pricing compared to its competitor: Kaspersky."
"The reporting system needs to allow for customizations because many reports do not include details that we expect."
"The logs are not clear, which means that you need an additional piece of software in order to read them clearly."
"Sophos UTM's firewall is a bit weak, and some of its features lack depth compared to other products like F5."
"When we call support, we get put on hold for a long time."
"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."
"The VPN errors are not helpful when troubleshooting."
"Sometimes we have had issues with stability of the product."
"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 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."
"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."
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 .
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.