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 most important feature, normally for small business customers, is link load balancing."
"Its user interface is good, and it is always working fine."
"The technical support is great."
"One of the valuable features is a standardized OS."
"Fortinet FortiGate's reliability is valuable."
"We can use our devices to check all of the perimeters. It secures email websites."
"This is a quality product with ok support, and it is better than the competition we've tried."
"There is an easy process for configuring it, and it is straightforward to implement the device from scratch."
"Sophos is a unified solution. We have anti-virus protection, firewall rules, knotting, and DACC all in one box."
"The isolation of infected machines is a big feature. Also, the ability to detect external sources that change files on a file server is really big."
"The initial setup was easy."
"Sophos integrates seamlessly, and we don't even feel it is running in the background."
"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."
"Advanced protection (Sophos Sandstorm) - Protects against crypto viruses in real-time."
"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."
"The solution's sandboxing, application center, and database engine are good."
"After installing the product, we achieved awareness of our data protection needs and email misuse."
"It is stable and does not require you to reboot all the time."
"WatchGuard XTM is fairly basic. We use it as the perimeter firewall. The main point is to protect from attack software and hacking."
"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."
"Monitoring of network activity is included in the box."
"There is a site-to-site VPN configuration between others people."
"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."
"The UI could be improved."
"WAN load-balancing could be a lot better at detecting when a link is poor or inconsistent, and not just flat out dead."
"Fortinet FortiGate needs to improve to be on par with its competitors, such as Palo Alto and Sophos. They are the market leaders. Fortinet FortiGate needs to improve its capabilities. However, we are happy with Fortinet FortiGate."
"The support is the main thing that needs to be improved."
"The solution could be more evenly structured."
"Fortinet FortiGate can be integrated with different platforms. They have integrations in place, but I can't say they're 100%."
"Fortinet Fortigate could benefit by simplifying some of their processes."
"This product could be improved with Active directory integration and better handling in IPsec and GRE Tunnels."
"The virus updates will always depend on new viruses that are discovered. Maybe they can send a notification or a reminder for update time."
"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."
"Reporting: We have had to work manually in many of our reports."
"I would like this solution to support ICAP. Also, they no longer support on-premises management, and are forcing clients to use centralized management via the cloud, which I don't agree with."
"Stay away from the wireless models, since you cannot put them in HA. They start to give you some weird issues once you start getting into multiple SSIDs and networks."
"In Sophos UTM there is always a problem with the routing tables. If you want to see the routing table, you have to use the UI. You can't do it via a web browser. The routing table is better in Fortinet."
"The solution needs to do better at covering mobile devices, although they may have an integrated solution for that purpose."
"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."
"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 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."
"Syslog (Dimension) is focused on presentation, but needs more focus on utility like SonicWall syslog (GMS/Analyzer)."
"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."
"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."
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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