Fortinet FortiGate vs Sophos XG comparison

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120,425 views|88,209 comparisons
90% willing to recommend
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59,794 views|42,752 comparisons
93% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary
Updated on Apr 30, 2024

Comparing Fortinet FortiGate and Sophos XG based on user reviews reveals distinct contrasts in user satisfaction levels, setup complexities, and interface experiences. FortiGate's customer service varies significantly, with some users satisfied and others seeking improvement, while Sophos XG also sees mixed support reviews but with emphasis on the need for more tutorials and documentation. Deployment times for FortiGate can extend significantly depending on the project, contrasting with Sophos XG's faster, albeit sometimes technical setup. FortiGate's interface and performance have been criticized for complexity and sluggishness, against Sophos XG's calls for a more intuitive interface and streamlined reporting. Licensing and costs are mixed for FortiGate, with some preferences over competing brands, whereas Sophos XG is noted for its reasonable, albeit varied, subscription pricing. Valuable features for each highlight FortiGate's robust security and customization, versus Sophos XG's emphasis on infiltration prevention, user-friendly monitoring, and comprehensive security solutions, displaying their individual strengths tailored to different user priorities.

  • Features: Fortinet FortiGate excels in advanced threat protection, customization, and handling heavy traffic seamlessly, focusing on robust security and performance. Sophos XG emphasizes infiltration prevention, Active Directory integration, and user-friendly management tools, prioritizing ease of deployment and comprehensive security solutions with a strong focus on application filtering and synchronized security.
  • Pricing and ROI: Fortinet FortiGate's setup cost and licensing receive mixed reviews, with some users favoring its scheme over Cisco's. In contrast, Sophos XG's pricing depends on subscription duration and features, ranging from $2,000 to $45,000, with generally considered reasonable rates and variations based on hardware and features., Fortinet FortiGate offers 20-30% cost reduction, emphasizing savings and enhanced security. Sophos XG users highlight 100% ROI, praising support quality, improved connectivity, and workflow efficiency. Differences focus on cost-savings vs. support and workflow improvements.
  • Room for Improvement: Fortinet's FortiGate struggles with a clunky UI and slow performance, needing better reporting and customer support. Sophos XG needs a more intuitive interface, simplified setup, customizable reporting, and improved support, highlighting differences in usability and setup complexity.
  • Deployment and customer support: Fortinet FortiGate's deployment and setup duration heavily varies, ranging from as little as a week to over three months, highlighting a broad spectrum of user experiences. In contrast, Sophos XG's setup time predominantly spans from an hour to a couple of days, with complexity largely hinging on the user's technical knowledge and specific issues like activation, suggesting a generally quicker but potentially variable initiation phase., Fortinet FortiGate's customer service varies widely, with reports of both satisfactory and poor support experiences. Sophos XG also has mixed feedback, but criticisms include unresponsive support and a need for better tutorials, suggesting a gap in self-help resources compared to Fortinet.

The summary above is based on 426 interviews we conducted recently with Fortinet FortiGate and Sophos XG users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.

To learn more, read our detailed Fortinet FortiGate vs. Sophos XG Report (Updated: March 2024).
769,599 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Q&A Highlights
Question: Which solution do you prefer: Fortinet FortiGate or Sophos XG?
Answer: I evaluated both for a multi-site environment, and eventually chose FortiGate, based on the centralized management and reputation of Fortinet. Eventually we plan to move to FortiSwitches and maybe even Fortinet access points, so it makes sense to use Fortimanager to manage all the Fortinet devices. Sophos also have a good solution, but reading reviews of the XG I got the impression they were not as reliable or had as many features as Fortigate.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"We have found it to be very reliable and that's why our teams and various users in our company use it as our main firewall every day.""This solution made it very easy to manage our bandwidth.""The scalability of Fortinet FortiGate is good.""The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiGate are remote access, web filtering, and IPS.""Their proxy-based inspection is responsive and secure.""It's very easy to set up, it's very easy to make policies and, for an organization, that means you don't need IT expert in firewalls. You just need to have somebody who knows a little bit of IT, and that's it. With other products, you need someone with a "Masters" degree in firewalls.""Virtual Domains (VDOMs) are a feature that we found valuable.""FortiGate Secure SD-WAN includes best-of-breed next-generation firewall (NGFW) security, SD-WAN, advanced routing, and WAN optimization capabilities, delivering a security-driven networking WAN edge transformation in a unified offering."

More Fortinet FortiGate Pros →

"Easy to deploy and user friendly.""Sophos began with a basic version and evolved into something more efficient in terms of performance.""I like the web filter, application filter, and VBA.""Good security and a good interface.""The initial setup is very straightforward and the solution is extremely user-friendly.""Sophos XG has cybersecurity. It integrates with the antivirus software.""The firewall provides network visibility and reporting capabilities, constantly improving over time. It can be integrated with the cloud console, allowing centralized management of multiple firewalls. integration with endpoint security products ensures seamless traffic flow and rule enforcement, even when endpoints are not directly connected to the firewall.""The most valuable feature is that it scans all of the data for any kind of malware."

More Sophos XG Pros →

Cons
"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.""They sometimes hide some features and if you want to enable them, you have to go in the CLI, enable the feature and configure it through the CLI. Customers, typically, like everything to be done by the GUI.""It's my understanding that more of the current generation features could be brought in. There could be more integration with EDRs, for example.""We would like to see better pricing.""The solution can have more features in a single box that can be multi-applied to integrate everything.""If I had any criticism that I would give FortiGate, it would be that they need to stop changing their logging format. Every time we do a firmware upgrade, it is a massive issue on the SIM. Parsers have to be rebuilt. Even the FortiGate guys came in and said that they don't play well in the sandbox.""The reporting in Fortinet FortiGate could improve. Customers are having to purchase additional reporting components. When I have used the Sophos solution it is a complete solution, in Fortinet FortiGate you have to use additional tools to have the features needed.""The feature which gives us a lot of pain is ASIC architecture."

More Fortinet FortiGate Cons →

"The solution could improve by making the graphical interface better and increasing the performance.""XG is at its end of life. People are moving to XGS.""The product's technical support services could be better.""The solution could be improved if it offered more documentation or at least provided more information about the products themselves.""It's easy to use, but it's hard to configure exact settings. They need to make it easier to access advanced features.""When it comes to improvements that the vendor can make, we see that the cloud integration for managing all the firewalls is essentially a replacement of the on-prem version we had and is not sufficiently mature.""It would be better if they made their own hardware like Palo Alto and Fortinet. They use their own ASICs and claim it is more secure.""Integration with Active Directory is not reliable."

More Sophos XG Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "Fortinet has one or two license types, and the VPN numbers are only limited by the hardware chassis make."
  • "These boxes are not that expensive compared to what they can do, their functionality, and the reporting you receive. Fortinet licensing is straightforward and less confusing compared to Cisco."
  • "Go for long term pricing negotiated at the time of purchase."
  • "Work through partners for the best pricing."
  • "The value is the capability of having multiple services with one unique license, not having the limitation per user licensing schema, like other vendors."
  • "Easy to understand licensing requirements."
  • "​We saved a bundle by not needing all the past appliances from an NGFW.​"
  • "The cost is too high... They have to focus on more features with less cost for the customer. If you see the market, where it's going, there are a lot of players offering more features for less cost."
  • More Fortinet FortiGate Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "For licensing the XG 210, we paid approximately $3000 for three years. There are no additional fees on top of this."
  • "It's a suitable price and license."
  • "We are paying about $1,500 yearly for the Enterprise Plus. As far as I know, there aren't costs above this standard fee."
  • "The Sophos pricing, in general, is better than SonicWall, Fortinet, WatchGuard, or anybody else."
  • "We paid for our licensing for three years, upfront, and there are no costs in addition to the standard fees."
  • "The price is cheaper than that of some competing vendors."
  • "The pricing is flexible. Sophos looks at a country's economy and offers flexible pricing. This is how they have managed to penetrate the market."
  • "It's approximately $6,000 for each device."
  • More Sophos XG Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Comparison Review
    Anonymous User
    I have used both Sophos and Fortinet products in production and I have found the Sophos UTM appliances (hardware and virtual) to be a better fit most of the time -- with a few caveats which I will touch on below. In both instances, the transition from TMG will be mostly straightforward. The main hang-ups will be with the VIP/load balancing and SSL. For some reason that completely escapes me, both of these vendors make getting valid certificates onto their boxes unnecessarily difficult -- the Fortinet appliances more so than the Sophos UTM appliances. At one point a Fortinet engineer had to write an entire manual on how to get an SSL certificate uploaded successfully on the 4.x firmware Sophos: The one feature that is missing (and this makes some amount of sense) from the Sophos appliance is BITS caching for updates. Other than that, Sophos offers a full replacement for TMG on UTM9. The XG platform also offers a replacement for the TMG; however, some of the rumblings about upcoming releases suggests that Sophos is going to give XG the Apple iOS treatment and "streamline" the interface...potentially cutting out/hiding some functionality. On the effectiveness of the NGFW, Sophos is mostly good but has a few issues blocking all pieces of an application. For instance, we had to build custom blocking rules for OpenVPN (the vpn was being used to bypass the content filter) because the default Application Control wasn't effectively blocking the application. Fortinet: If it… Read more →
    Answers from the Community
    Sherif Anter
    Harish (Kumar) - PeerSpot reviewerHarish (Kumar)
    Real User

    Go with Sophos XG or if you have tight budget and technical expertise then can move with pFsense.

    Dr. Ravi_Sharma - PeerSpot reviewerDr. Ravi_Sharma
    Real User

    Dear Sharif.


    For 150 users any firewall will work perfectly. You can choose as per your convenience, availability, price, and better implementation partner in your region. Keep a bigger box at the central location and configure SD-WAN. SOPHOS has by default SD WAN. Make sure you have secure access to the cloud and all endpoints should have endpoint protection else only firewall will not help.

    Most of the cloud service providers work on any-any rule because their responsibility is network uptime and availability. Security of your setup is your responsibility.

    Manageability is better in Fortinet however features are better in SOPHOS. License bundle & ATP functions are are good in SOPHOS. Support response is good in SOPHOS but you will find less tickets in FORTINET once it is implemented as per your setup.

    Overall both are good for your setup. You can choose as per convenience.


    Hope this will help.. Greetings .. Ravi

    Yafar Khan - PeerSpot reviewerYafar Khan
    Real User

    In my opinion, the first point of strength is the support, and FortiGate is doing a great job in terms of support. It has numerous reference guides for configuration. The other advantage is ease of management in both the UI and CLI levels. You can use FortiGate modules to protect against web and virus attacks.

    Andre Boettcher  - PeerSpot reviewerAndre Boettcher
    MSP

    Hello Sharif,  


    I prefer FortiGate SDWAN Devices (FortiGate) even though we also deliver Sophos to our clients. 


    The decentralized FortiGate devices work as firewalls with an excellent security ecosystem. FortiGate and most other items work as Hardware units or on virtual machines.



    As a Telco company we have a lot of companies working in different industries with various requirements. We can support them all with FortiGate.
    Our customers prefer the security features, the stable ecosystem for life cycle management, for device/user/policy management, thread detection & prevention, intrusion prevention, sandboxing, ... the low operation effort to build a stable company network that supports the need of any customer size.

    In our business, we also like that the architecture of a company network can be easily changed if the customer requirements change. From single-line sites to Data Centers with high availability and Cloud integration FortiGate can be used in any design.

    The different security features that can be added by the license are powerful and integrated into the management dashboard. Updates of protection mechanisms against new threads happen automatically as soon as a new protection mechanism is available when new threads occur. The security team at Fortinet is excellent.

    Greetings
    Andre

    Cesar Reza - PeerSpot reviewerCesar Reza
    Reseller

    Hi, XG is EOL the new series is XGS, both are excellent equipment but I prefer Fortigate, why ??? DHCP slection, leader SD-WAN, many IPSEC dynamics is possible on SOPHOS but is limit the are conflicts with many IP's dynamics you need to use DDNS, SSL tunnel for remote clients, VRF, advanced routing with OSPF and BGP ("as path"). Greetings  









    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer: When you compare these firewalls you can identify them with different features, advantages, practices and usage at large. In my opinion, Fortinet would be the best option and l use Fortinet too.… more »
    Top Answer:From my experience regarding both the Sophos and FortiGate firewalls, I personally would rather use FortiGate. I know the firewalls change every 5 to 7 years as stated but you really do need to… more »
    Top Answer:As a solution, Sophos UTM offers a lot of functionality, it scales well, and the stability and performance are quite good. The most valuable features for me are their web and email filtering. I would… more »
    Top Answer:Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls have both great features and performance. I like that Palo Alto has regular threat signatures and updates. I also appreciate that I can just import addresses and URL… more »
    Top Answer:Hi Arvind P ,  The Sophos XG firewall has a number of models right from XG86 to XG135w under the 1U Desktop Form Factor. The Sophos XG appliance that offers a direct competition to the Fortigate 80F… more »
    Top Answer:The Sophos UTM is a UTM and Sophos XG is the NGFW. First, you must know about the difference between a UTM and NGFW. They can not be compared with each other because the price, license, firewall… more »
    Ranking
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    Also Known As
    FortiGate 60b, FortiGate 60c, FortiGate 80c, FortiGate 50b, FortiGate 200b, FortiGate 110c, FortiGate
    Learn More
    Overview

    Fortinet FortiGate enhances network security, prevents unauthorized access, and offers robust firewall protection. Valued features include advanced threat protection, reliable performance, and a user-friendly interface. It improves efficiency, streamlines processes, and boosts collaboration, providing valuable insights for informed decision-making and growth.

    Sophos XG Firewall is a complete firewall solution that provides all the real-time security and insights you need to protect your network from ransomware and advanced threats. Sophos XG Firewall provides visibility into suspicious users, unknown and unwanted apps, encrypted traffic, and other threats. With its advanced artificial intelligence capabilities, Sophos XG Firewall immediately identifies potential risks and intrusions on web servers and networks.

    Sophos XG Firewall Features

    Sophos XG Firewall offers a wide range of security features, including:

    • Application control: Prevent widespread infections with XG’s Security Heartbeat. XG Firewall automatically identifies the source of an infection on a network and automatically prevents it from accessing other network resources.

    • Synchronized user ID: Eliminate the need for client or server authentication agents by sharing user identification between the endpoint and the firewall through Security Heartbeat.

    • Centralized management: Easily manage all activities with Sophos Central. The XG cloud management platform allows users to easily set up, manage, and monitor XG firewalls along with other Sophos products. Some of Sophos Central’s features include alerting, backup management, one-click firmware updates, and rapid deployments of new firewalls.

    • Lateral movement protection: Automatically isolate compromised systems at every point in the network to stop attacks dead in their tracks.

    • Network protection: Protect networks from attacks and threats while providing secure network access.

    • Web protection: Gain clear visibility and control over all users’ web and application activity.

    • Web server protection: Solidify web servers and applications against hacking attacks while providing secure web access.

    • Email protection: Consolidate email protection with anti-spam, DLP, and encryption. XG’s Live Anti-Spam provides protection from the most recent spam campaigns, phishing attacks, and malicious attachments. Data Loss Prevention automatically triggers encryption on sensitive data in outgoing emails.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Sophos XG Firewall stands out among its competitors, among other reasons, for its intrusion detection capabilities, its user-friendly management platform, and in general, for being a complete and robust firewall solution.

    Niranjan P., a network & system support engineer, writes, “Sophos is a comprehensive solution which allows me to configure all the attendant products, such as Sophos's firewall, endpoint, and encryption features. A nice feature of Sophos is that it offers in sync and heartbeat security. When my clients have a perimeter involving Sophos firewall and endpoints with Sophos Endpoint, they can communicate with each other.”

    Antonio D., sales manager at INFOSEC, notes, “The product has a console that is based in the cloud for all their products. In this console, they have email security, firewall security, endpoint security, et cetera. All of the products on offer in the console are very useful for us. The solution is stable. The solution works well for enterprises and large-scale organizations.”

    Antony M., ICT/HMIS supervisor at a healthcare company, writes, “The VPN feature is the most valuable. It has come in handy during this period when people are working from home. The filtering feature is also valuable because you can easily filter the sites that you don't want to visit. You can also set timely surfing quotas”

    Sample Customers
    1. Amazon Web Services 2. Microsoft 3. IBM 4. Cisco 5. Dell 6. HP 7. Oracle 8. Verizon 9. AT&T 10. T-Mobile 11. Sprint 12. Vodafone 13. Orange 14. BT Group 15. Telstra 16. Deutsche Telekom 17. Comcast 18. Time Warner Cable 19. CenturyLink 20. NTT Communications 21. Tata Communications 22. SoftBank 23. China Mobile 24. Singtel 25. Telus 26. Rogers Communications 27. Bell Canada 28. Telkom Indonesia 29. Telkom South Africa 30. Telmex 31. Telia Company 32. Telkom Kenya
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    Buyer's Guide
    Fortinet FortiGate vs. Sophos XG
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Fortinet FortiGate vs. Sophos XG and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    769,599 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Fortinet FortiGate is ranked 2nd in Firewalls with 306 reviews while Sophos XG is ranked 7th in Firewalls with 192 reviews. Fortinet FortiGate is rated 8.4, while Sophos XG is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Fortinet FortiGate writes "It's a reliable solution that's easy to install and cheaper than competitors ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sophos XG writes "Easy to use and deploy with an improved pricing structure in place". Fortinet FortiGate is most compared with Cisco Secure Firewall, Netgate pfSense, Meraki MX, WatchGuard Firebox and Check Point NGFW, whereas Sophos XG is most compared with Netgate pfSense, OPNsense, Sophos XGS, SonicWall TZ and Meraki MX. See our Fortinet FortiGate 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.