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."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."
"Fortigate's most valuable feature is that it doesn't need a push policy when writing rules."
"Allows for firewall rules to be programmed and named in a way that makes it “readable”"
"I am "headache free" that I don't have to categorize all the websites and that security has been pre categorized by the people, and that the services are getting updated. At least one part of my problem is over."
"The features that I have found most valuable are the SD-WAN and their IP4 policy."
"Valuable features include the Web Application Firewall, and it even has DLP (data leak prevention)."
"Fortinet FortiGate is a stable solution."
"The most valuable feature is the policy routing and application control."
"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."
"The most valuable feature of Sophos UTM is the efficiency and mail filtering module."
"The initial setup was easy."
"It allows our developers to be able to securely log into servers to deploy and manage software."
"The three most important features for us are web protection, web server protection, and network protection."
"It is a very good product. The threat monitoring process is the most valuable feature."
"The initial configuration is straightforward thanks to the web GUI. In 30 minutes, you can have a running firewall with UTM protection enabled."
"The initial setup is pretty straightforward."
"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."
"Monitoring of network activity is included in the box."
"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."
"After installing the product, we achieved awareness of our data protection needs and email misuse."
"SNMP status monitoring and the Central Management Software."
"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."
"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."
"Backup can be improved."
"The support we receive when we need to upgrade is not satisfactory and has room for improvement."
"The pricing could be a bit better, especially when you consider how they have the most basic offering priced."
"Its price could be better."
"It is very expensive, and their support is not very good. I hope that their technical support will be better in the future."
"The search tool needs improvement. It's very difficult to search for policies right now."
"It claims it does DLP, but the degree and level of controls are very basic."
"The feature which gives us a lot of pain is ASIC architecture."
"There were a lot of features and functionality in Sophos SG UTM but nothing was state of the art in terms of technology. You did not get the latest functions. It was very monolithic as it was based on an old Linux PuTTY system."
"With Sophos UTM, there is a general rule in the firewall when the country blocking can block some countries from accessing your data. In the current version, you still need to add it by putting in the IP range. This feature would be helpful for administrators and it gives them the advantage to block stuff in less time."
"VPN needs IKEv2, but it’s in the roadmap. Also, all new, cool features will only come to the new Sophos XG Firewall."
"During initial configuration, I encountered a few issues."
"The five-factor authentication needs improvement."
"It's stable, but the reaction time of the GUI is terrible."
"An area for improvement in Sophos UTM is load balancing because my company cannot use it currently. If Sophos could release a new configuration for the load balancing feature to work for my company, that would be great."
"It needs a better user interface. The one they have is not so good."
"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."
"Syslog (Dimension) is focused on presentation, but needs more focus on utility like SonicWall syslog (GMS/Analyzer)."
"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."
"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."
"Sometimes we have had issues with stability of the product."
"The VPN errors are not helpful when troubleshooting."
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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