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."Valuable features include the Web Application Firewall, and it even has DLP (data leak prevention)."
"LinkGreat firewall capabilities"
"It's an easy solution to set up."
"It is very flexible to use."
"Our project needs to link two sides through the internet. One of these was in Cairo and the other in another city. We used FortiGate as the integrating solution between the two locations, i.e. the Fortinet 30E & 100E."
"It is useful for protecting and segregating the internal networks from the internet. Most of our customers also use the FortiGate client to connect to their offices by using the VPN client, and of course, they usually activate the antivirus, deep inspection, and intrusion prevention services. They are also using it for web filtering and implementing various policies dealing with forwardings, NAT, etc."
"We are very happy with the general bandwidth agility we have seen from one website to another website."
"The customization potential is quite impressive."
"I would recommend UTM over XG because it's easier to manage."
"The most valuable feature is ransomware protection."
"It now controls all the security aspects of our web servers with Sophos UTM WAF."
"It has made our organization more secure, because we are using a VPN. We are not accessing services directly. It allows us to segregate some of the traffic for individuals which may be more of a developer role rather than an operational role needing access to developer resources, but not necessarily production operational resources."
"UTM 9 brings along IPSec as well as iPhone and iPad support. This seems small but it’s useful."
"Sophos UTM provides security for our network here and access through a VPN connection for our remote users. It also offers the flexibility to create different tools for accessibility."
"What I like about the solution is the ease of use."
"The most valuable feature is the IPS. It also protects us from malware."
"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."
"After installing the product, we achieved awareness of our data protection needs and email misuse."
"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."
"It is stable and does not require you to reboot all the time."
"I like the hostwatch because I can see what traffic uses the most bandwidth and I can block that site."
"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."
"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."
"They should offer special pricing to premium partners and customers."
"The cloud features can be improved."
"Their software support needs improvement. I would prefer to have better support for bug fixes. Sometimes, we open a ticket, and it is very difficult to get a solution. Specifically, we are not at all happy with their support for load balancing."
"A lack of integration between our data centers."
"Sometimes you do need to know some CLI commands, so it's a bit harder for technicians or new people that don't know it."
"The support from Fortinet FortiGate could improve. They are not easily accessible when we need them. They could improve their response time."
"Fortinet should focus on enhancing the capabilities of FortiGate by consolidating its various products, such as FortiGate Cloud, FortiManager, and FortiAnalyzer."
"Fortinet FortiGate should improve the VPN tokens."
"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."
"The ease of use could be a bit better."
"The logs are not clear, which means that you need an additional piece of software in order to read them clearly."
"We had some problems with the configuration. They had provided a CloudFormation template, and we had to go several rounds to make it work."
"It does have built-in policies, which enable you to disable USB devices, etc. It would be nice if they had more policies because there are not that many of them."
"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."
"Email spam filtering only works if you have an on-prem Exchange server. It doesn't interface with Office 365 like the XG model. That would be one feature that they could improve. They're not going to do it because they're trying to push us all to XG."
"Last year, Sophos had some major internal management changes that negatively impacted their support."
"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."
"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 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."
"Syslog (Dimension) is focused on presentation, but needs more focus on utility like SonicWall syslog (GMS/Analyzer)."
"The VPN errors are not helpful when troubleshooting."
"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."
"I would like them to improve the product's overall protections. This would be good for all product users."
Earn 20 points
Sophos UTM is ranked 1st in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 110 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, the top reviewer of WatchGuard XTM [EOL] writes "The multi-layer security of the products are the primary reason we use these appliances, however, the gateway wireless functionality for managing access points leaves much to be desired". 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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