We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Firewall and Sophos XG based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: The two solutions are very comparable. The only major difference between the two is that some users of Cisco Secure Firewall consider the deployment to be somewhat complex.
"Its stability is the most valuable."
"Layer-3 firewall and routing are the most valuable features."
"Fortinet FortiGate is easy to use."
"The solution is very user friendly. The user interface in particular is quite nice."
"Fortinet FortiGate's ease of management is the most valuable feature."
"It is a one box solution, which covers most of the edge device’s requirements."
"The most valuable features are that it is very simple to configure and to manage."
"I like several features that this product has, such as antivirus and internet navigation inspection. It is also simple to use."
"The transparency of the single UI to ensure security. A product has to be simple so that an administrator can use it."
"The stability is good. Very simple. Upgrades are great."
"Logging is great. It will show when it reaches its capacity before it is too late, unless you have bursts of traffic."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is AMP (Advanced Malware Protection), as this is really needed to protect against cyber threats."
"The most important feature is its categorization because on the site and social media you are unified in the way they are there."
"It makes it very easy to have delineated roles and responsibilities between network engineering and network security."
"AnyConnect has been very helpful, along with the ability to use LDAP for authentication."
"The most valuable feature that Cisco Firepower NGFW provides for us is the Intrusion policy."
"The updates are helpful and add to the solution in a positive way."
"I recommend the solution due to its ease of use and pricing."
"We've had good experiences with technical support."
"It is feature-rich, I like the server authentication, and the reports are good."
"Dashboard is easy to use and the reporting offers a lot of detail."
"We get good usage out of the features. It has enabled us to gain popularity. It has great features."
"What we found valuable is the way they deal with emails, as well as the way the bandwidth usage is shown."
"The security of Sophos XG is very good."
"The solution lacks multi-language support."
"I would like to see improvements made to the dashboard and UI, as well as to the reporting."
"Its price could be better."
"Fortinet needs to overhaul its documentation."
"There are a lot of bugs I have found in the solution and it is difficult to upgrade. These areas need improvement."
"Security is a continuous process. In every product, there is a requirement for improvement. Its pricing should also be improved according to Indian market requirements. They must also improve on the reporting part. Its reporting can be more precise. If we can get a real-time report in a specific format, it will be helpful for customers to know about the current status of their security."
"They have to just improve its performance when we enable all UTM features. When you enable all the features, the performance of FortiGate, as well as of Sophos and SonicWall, goes down."
"I think there could be more QoS features"
"The change-deployment time can always be improved. Even at 50 seconds, it's longer than some of its competitors. I would challenge Cisco to continue to improve in that area."
"Maybe the dashboard could be a bit better."
"It seems very clunky and slow. I would like to be able to tune it to be a more efficient product."
"We have encountered problems when implementing new signatures and new versions on our firewall. Sometimes, there is a short outage of our services, and we have not been able to understand what's going on. This is an area for improvement, and it would be good to have a way to monitor and understand why there is an outage."
"The initial setup was a bit complex. It wasn't a major challenge, but due to our requirements and network, it was not very straightforward but still easy enough."
"The only improvement that we could make is maybe [regarding] the roadmap, to have better visibility as to what we are targeting ahead in the next few quarters."
"Sometimes my customers say that Cisco Firewalls are a bit more difficult compared to Fortigate or Palo Alto. There is complexity in the configuration and the GUI could be improved."
"Our latest experience with a code upgrade included a number of bugs and issues that we ran into. So more testing with their code, before it hits us, would help."
"The reaction time of the GUI is terrible when compared to other manufacturers."
"There is an area that is very specific to our setup, where working tools you cannot easily establish a VPN between two internal networks."
"The VPN is in need of improvement."
"In the Firewall, the Intrusion Prevention System can be improved."
"In the Sophos XG, the SD-WAN has all the rules done separately, such as net policy routing. In the previous version, they were all in a single rule and everything was done that way. The way it is now is difficult for us because we are not used to this newer version. The firewall rules should be easier to configure and create. Everything should be done with a single click."
"Our clients use Karios, and while it integrates well with it, the integration could be improved."
"Content filtering could be more effective and efficient."
"The two main areas where this product needs improvement are routing and reporting."
Cisco Secure Firewall is ranked 4th in Firewalls with 404 reviews while Sophos XG is ranked 7th in Firewalls with 192 reviews. Cisco Secure Firewall is rated 8.2, while Sophos XG is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Cisco Secure Firewall writes "Highlights and helps us catch Zero-day vulnerabilities traveling across our network". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sophos XG writes "Easy to use and deploy with an improved pricing structure in place". Cisco Secure Firewall is most compared with Palo Alto Networks WildFire, Netgate pfSense, Meraki MX, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls and Juniper SRX Series Firewall, whereas Sophos XG is most compared with Netgate pfSense, OPNsense, Sophos XGS, SonicWall TZ and SonicWall NSa. See our Cisco Secure Firewall vs. Sophos XG report.
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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.
My preference is the Sophos XGS, particularly when you team it up with the Sophos Endpoint Protection client and configure it for synchronized security.
Both can be managed through Sophos Central and are available at a decent price for the power they offer the SMB.
I recommend Sophos XGS firewall. It will offer the best solution for malware protection.
Also, I recomend Sophos CIXA with XDR (Sophos Endpoint), so you can use Syncronized Security.