We performed a comparison between Forcepoint Next Generation Firewall and Sophos UTM based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Firewalls solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The web filtering feature and the intrusion protection system are the most valuable. It is a resilient appliance. I never had an issue with it in terms of any security breaches."
"The solution is very user friendly. The user interface in particular is quite nice."
"Unified Threat Management (UTM) features."
"We can detect any attack of viruses or malware at the first point of contact."
"The network security and cloud security are most valuable."
"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."
"It is a safe product."
"The solution is easy to configure and maintain remotely."
"I have found that Forcepoint Next Generation Firewall is easy to use, highly secure, and the main VPN tunnel is created automatically which is a benefit."
"The initial setup is very easy."
"One of the most valuable features is having the ability to cluster multiple firewalls even if they are different versions."
"It is stable and scalable. In addition, their support is great. When you ask them for something, they provide support, and if required, they also involve the R&D team to help you to resolve the issues in your configuration."
"The Forcepoint Next Generation Firewall is a scalable product."
"I like the IPS. IPS is the master feature. I depend on the firewall and sandbox."
"The VPN is great."
"It is a scalable product. I know a customer who has deployed more than 4,000 firewalls in a single deployment."
"Monitoring and reporting are areas that need improvement."
"The features that I've known to be most valuable are both the web security features as well as the web firewall capabilities. As a partner of Sophos firewall, we have some clients and they are using Sophos firewall UTM and we are using it as well."
"It gives us the ability to manage our firewalls from the cloud and deploy a unified configuration onto them. Other competitors like Meraki have that ability, but they fail to optimize it in the way that Sophos has."
"Has great security features and does a good job of protecting the network."
"Sophos integrates seamlessly, and we don't even feel it is running in the background."
"With over 150 firewalls in our portal, management and monitoring have never been easier."
"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."
"So far, the solution has been problem-free."
"Fortinet FortiGate could improve the user interface. There should be more functionality and options through the GUI."
"If they could extend their fabric towards other vendor environments for integration, that would be great."
"They should make the rule sets more understandable for the end user. When you're trying to explain to somebody how a computer network is secured, sometimes it's difficult for an end user or customer to understand. If there was a way to make the terminology more accessible to the end user, the set up could be easier. They should translate the technical jargon to an easily relatable and understandable conversation for the end user, the customer, that would be brilliant. Particularly in an environment where the IT structure is audited regularly, there's always pressure from the auditor to up the standards and up the security and you get your USCERT's that come out and there's a warning about this and the customer will want to lock out so much and when you apply it they run into issue where they can't search the internet or print to their remote office. Of course they can't print to your remote office, they just locked it up. They should make the language more understandable for the customer. If there's a product out there that made the jargon understandable to John Q. Public, I would buy that."
"Some features of Fortinet FortiGate are actually fee enabled that are inconvenient for deploying in production. Other issues relate to isolation with Cisco products and your server."
"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 pricing could be a bit better, especially when you consider how they have the most basic offering priced."
"FortiGate should have a better way of detecting and managing the system memory because otherwise if the memory is too low, a system restart is required."
"The feature which gives us a lot of pain is ASIC architecture."
"While they offer a comprehensive bundled solution, some users may prefer on-premise deployments for certain features, such as URL filtering."
"This solution would be improved with the inclusion of custom reporting."
"The interface is complicated. It's difficult to locate all the necessary menus and functions."
"They should have a GUI on the product itself, not a separate management tool to be used on the management server or on a server to be used to manage the file. It should be all in one device. The device should be controlled through its own GUI. They also have to improve the learning center and the documents as the documents don't really help."
"When it comes to a complex deployment, the rules, firewall features, SD-WAN core features, and auto-scaling can cause the device to be not quite stable."
"Making this solution easier to use would be an improvement."
"Management could be better. They can improve the management. I think all our customers can't accept firewalls that have standalone management. So, they prefer Fortinet or Palo Alto. But overall, inspection and other features are working fine."
"Its interface is complex when compared with a firewall like FortiGate. Forcepoint Next Generation Firewall needs a management console, whereas FortiGate doesn't need any console. When you have a few devices, a console is not really necessary. It's good to have a private console only when you have a lot of devices."
"It needs a better user interface. The one they have is not so good."
"Monitoring and reporting are areas that need improvement."
"The memory and processing were problematic. The interface could be better."
"I would like to see Sophos UTM add support for all the new threat-detection technologies and the ability to respond to novel security threats that come along every day."
"In short, the UI and UX are the areas of improvement in Sophos UTM and similar solutions compared to Palo Alto."
"Sophos customer support could use some improvement."
"Anti-phishing functionality should be improved."
"Last year, Sophos had some major internal management changes that negatively impacted their support."
More Forcepoint Next Generation Firewall Pricing and Cost Advice →
Forcepoint Next Generation Firewall is ranked 25th in Firewalls with 40 reviews while Sophos UTM is ranked 1st in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 110 reviews. Forcepoint Next Generation Firewall is rated 7.6, while Sophos UTM is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Forcepoint Next Generation Firewall writes "Provides decent protection for the LAN but complicated interface". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sophos UTM writes "It's a highly stable platform with very few hardware issues". Forcepoint Next Generation Firewall is most compared with Palo Alto Networks Advanced Threat Prevention, Check Point NGFW, Cisco Secure Firewall, Sophos XG and Netgate pfSense, whereas Sophos UTM is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Sophos XG, OPNsense, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls and Cisco Secure Firewall. See our Forcepoint Next Generation Firewall vs. Sophos UTM report.
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