We performed a comparison between Fortinet FortiOS 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."SSL-VPN is very useful for us and has been very reliable."
"Some of the valuable features are the firewall, IPS, web filter, and gateway capabilities. Additionally, it is easy to use and flexible."
"The signature database and zero-day detection are Fortinet FortiGate's most valuable features."
"You can create multiple Virtual Domains (VDOMs), which are treated as separate firewall instances."
"It is useful for protecting and segregating the internal networks from the internet. Most of our customers also use the FortiGate client to connect to their offices by using the VPN client, and of course, they usually activate the antivirus, deep inspection, and intrusion prevention services. They are also using it for web filtering and implementing various policies dealing with forwardings, NAT, etc."
"It is very flexible to use."
"The Fortinet FortiGate local partners were good. I did not have direct contact with Fortinet support."
"The most important feature, normally for small business customers, is link load balancing."
"Has a very simple OS and a good price point."
"We found the initial setup to be straightforward."
"Fortinet has optimized the WAN environment for connecting users to the application."
"The interface is easy to understand, so when there are threats you get alerts. It's quite intuitive, but if you are ever confused they have instructional videos. For example, if you don't understand a graph there's a link to a video that explains what the graph means. It makes it very user-friendly."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiOS are user-friendliness, ease of use, and threat prevention."
"The most important features of Fortinet FortiOS are the ability to block and make white and black lists. Additionally, the filtering of user access to websites is useful."
"There are many useful features, such as web security and advanced threat detection."
"We have expanded the wireless access point and switches using Fortinet FortiOS."
"The product is extremely intuitive."
"UTM 9 brings along IPSec as well as iPhone and iPad support. This seems small but it’s useful."
"Brings greater visibility into the network traffic coming inside and passing away from the company."
"It works well without any maintenance. So far, it has worked pretty well regardless of the traffic."
"The stability of Sophos UTM is very good. The solution has been stable since Sophos took over Cyberoam which was the original company providing this solution."
"It improved bandwidth utilization and provided link load balancing features for internet and intranet lease lines."
"The most valuable feature is the price. I've been requesting prices all over these years between different solutions like Fortinet, Palo Alto, and Check Point and Sophos has been the cheapest and the best of all of them that I have tried. I have been working with Fortinet, it's a fact that the price is surprisingly better."
"The management suite is easy and the agent is easy to develop."
"I would like to see improvements in the product's application rules."
"NGN, reporting and controls."
"Maybe they could make some features more accessible, such as a way to translate directions between two networks that share the same subnets."
"I would like to see better pricing in the next release, as well as a simplification of the installation."
"Fortinet should focus on enhancing the capabilities of FortiGate by consolidating its various products, such as FortiGate Cloud, FortiManager, and FortiAnalyzer."
"With the reports, you can see it, and you can get good feelings so upper management can go, "Oh, wow. That looks pretty." However, it's very basic."
"Fortinet FortiGate is a stable solution. However, my issue is the performance only. When I use all the profiles, this affects the performance. From the beginning, I should have had a better sizing of the box."
"We were not able to build a full-mesh VPN; however, I am not sure if this was the fault of Fortinet FortiGate."
"It should also manage the local DSCP network."
"A switch should be introduced."
"The pricing of the product is too high."
"The solution needs to adjust its pricing models. With the way they are structured, everything is very disparate and sold separately, and, depending on the solution, it can get quite pricey."
"I would like to see more statistics in the monitoring part."
"Right now, we have to contend with CLI. We'd like it to be easier. We need the features to be in a UI."
"Fortinet FortiOS is stable. However, last month we had an issue with a released patch. We had to receive another update to fix the firewall issue consuming all of the resources. The patches should be tested more before going into circulation."
"I would like to see fewer bugs. If you use the box with its basic features, the solution is straightforward and stable, but you can run into bugs when using newer features or in more complex use cases. They included a DNS filter as a new feature, and I had issues that required raising a ticket with customer support."
"There's an issue that when we deploy UTM on fiber, it automatically upgrades to the latest version without giving an option to stay on the current one."
"The five-factor authentication needs improvement."
"Sophos UTM's firewall is a bit weak, and some of its features lack depth compared to other products like F5."
"The UI can be cumbersome and, sometimes, features are not where you think they should be."
"Initially, there were issues with the wireless network as wireless access points were disappearing from the dashboard after some time."
"They could definitely improve on the support, especially in other countries."
"I didn't like it much. It suits only small businesses. It isn't scalable and reliable. There is a very critical issue with the power supply."
"We would like to have unique viewable IDs for rules and in the packet filter logfile, for easier debugging of old log files."
Fortinet FortiOS is ranked 15th in Firewalls with 73 reviews while Sophos UTM is ranked 1st in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 110 reviews. Fortinet FortiOS is rated 8.4, while Sophos UTM is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Fortinet FortiOS writes "Provides effective filtering features, good stability but initial setup is moderately challenging". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sophos UTM writes "It's a highly stable platform with very few hardware issues". Fortinet FortiOS is most compared with Fortinet FortiManager, Fortinet FortiWeb, Fortinet FortiGate-VM, Infoblox Advanced DNS Protection and Darktrace, whereas Sophos UTM is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Sophos XG, OPNsense, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls and Cisco Secure Firewall. See our Fortinet FortiOS vs. Sophos UTM report.
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