We performed a comparison between Sophos UTM and WatchGuard Firebox based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Unified Threat Management (UTM) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The tool is a nice product and easy to handle. The software's user interface is also good. You can easily implement remote access in the solution."
"Fortinet offers the latest versions to cater to the needs of enterprises."
"From the firewall perspective, the rules and policies are very sufficient and easy to use."
"It's very good and very stable for businesses. It works very well."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is Quota."
"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."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiGate are the ease of use and there are several operating systems that can include the hardware capacities. In the newer releases, the resources were more useful because they were included in the operating system."
"I have found Fortinet FortiGate to be scalable."
"It allows our developers to be able to securely log into servers to deploy and manage software."
"It now controls all the security aspects of our web servers with Sophos UTM WAF."
"It helps us with protection, with concurrent use of the VPN."
"The packet filtering's great. You get out what you put into it. It works great as long as you know your security and configure everything adequately. If you just pop one in and it's not configured, then it's basically wide open. It kind of depends on the admin skill, but it's an excellent product."
"Has great security features and does a good job of protecting the network."
"It's easy to use."
"The scalability is good."
"The solution is easy to handle and configure."
"The throughput is great. It's perfect. We have no issues whatsoever. The management features are very powerful..."
"There are many fantastic features."
"The firewall aspect and the branch office VPNs are the most valuable features... We don't have any issues with it. We don't have to spend a lot of time maintaining it."
"Among the most valuable features is the ease of use — love the interface — of both the web interface and of the WatchGuard System Manager."
"From my experience with their customer service team, I would say that they seem quite knowledgeable and fairly quick to respond."
"There are no problems with the technical support. If a problem occurs it gets resolved immediately with our technical support partners."
"Their centralized console simplifies management for organizations with multiple Fireboxes."
"WatchGuard has a very easy VPN and branch office VPN setup, so we use those pretty extensively."
"I use the FortiGate 60D model and realized the 300Mbps bandwidth limitation. Because it is a product that offers many services, I think it could have greater bandwidth capacity."
"Fortinet doesn't provide multiple virtual firewalls which would facilitate end users and customers."
"In the balance between links feature normally you can just choose one option to balance. It would be better for the solution to have more than one option, preferably three."
"In the next release, maybe the documentation on how to use this solution could be improved."
"I think there could be more QoS features"
"They should offer special pricing to premium partners and customers."
"We would like to see an upgrade to the VPN feature, we are using the VPN from outside of our office and there is a limitation to 10 connections, more connections would be suitable."
"The solution can have more features in a single box that can be multi-applied to integrate everything."
"Updates come out agonizingly slowly, a trickle."
"Last year, Sophos had some major internal management changes that negatively impacted their support."
"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."
"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."
"The technical support only communicates via email. I would prefer to communicate directly with someone."
"The reporting could improve by providing information on where, or from which device attacks are coming from. We are already given the country where the attack is coming from but more information would be beneficial."
"We had some problems with the configuration. They had provided a CloudFormation template, and we had to go several rounds to make it work."
"Anti-phishing functionality should be improved."
"The UI and web view aren't nice."
"Reporting is something you've got to set up separately. It's one of those things that you've got to put some time into. One of the options is to set up a local report server, which is what I did. It's not great. It's okay... Some of the stuff is a little complicated to get up and running. Once you do, it becomes very user-friendly and easy to work with, but I find there are some implementation headaches with some of their stuff."
"There are a couple of things I wished that it would do, but I can't think of those off the top of my head."
"Sometimes, the writing rules are a little confusing in how am I doing them."
"We bought Firebox four or five years ago, and with the first version I had to reboot it every two or three months for no apparent reason. We upgraded last year to the M370 and it's been running, but it is rebooting from time to time. I don't know why."
"This solution needs the option to add an external hard drive."
"In terms of what could be improved, I would say their web blocker feature. It is still quite a confusing setup, especially when you want to filter out a particular category for granularity. For example, you do not want to filter Facebook but you do want to filter Facebook games only. It can be done, but the process to do it is very confusing."
"In WatchGuard Firebox, the antivirus and malware detection systems are areas with shortcomings that require improvement since they are the most important elements of a cybersecurity tool."
Sophos UTM is ranked 1st in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 110 reviews while WatchGuard Firebox is ranked 3rd in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 79 reviews. Sophos UTM is rated 8.4, while WatchGuard Firebox is rated 8.4. 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 Firebox writes "Offers a streamlined deployment, intuitive interface and robust security features". Sophos UTM is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Sophos XG, OPNsense, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls and Untangle NG Firewall, whereas WatchGuard Firebox is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Sophos XG, OPNsense, SonicWall TZ and Sophos XGS. See our Sophos UTM vs. WatchGuard Firebox report.
See our list of best Unified Threat Management (UTM) vendors and best Firewalls vendors.
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