We performed a comparison between Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls 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."It does a lot for you for intrusion protection and as an antivirus. The threat management bundle is worth the money. You don't need another company to monitor your web traffic for you. You can do everything yourself on the firewall. You restrict your own black list for people on the firewall. You don't need to pay some other company for another product to do that for you. The firewall can do that for you. So, it's an easy-to-use product for people to be independent. They don't need to rely on other vendors to do what the firewall can do. They can do everything."
"There are great templates, so you don't have to customize them if you don't want to. You do have the option to custom create some folders and some reports, however, with what is there, you don't really need to go through extra effort, as they already give you a lot of predefined views of reports and so forth."
"The most valuable feature is the SSL VPN, as it allows us to connect and it separates this product from other firewalls."
"The most valuable features are the possibility of having one fabric for switching on security."
"It is user friendly, and has all the features you need."
"Easy to use support and licensing portal as well as activation process."
"You can create multiple Virtual Domains (VDOMs), which are treated as separate firewall instances."
"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 technology's very good. We have had a lot of good experience with this solution."
"The feature that I like the most is its IPS model, the WildFire model. I really like how the whole threat protection model functions, including the vulnerability and anti-spyware aspects. That is really awesome."
"The solution allows us to set parameters on where our users can go. We can block certain sites or ads if we want to."
"One of the key features for us is product stability. We are a bank, so we require 24/7 service."
"The most valuable features are application inspection and sandboxing. Application inspection decides where traffic is transmitted. If I have a perimeter report for a particular service, then other services or malicious services cannot use an open port. In this way, application inspection is doing a fantastic job. We also have a very good sandbox with almost no rate limit. It will inspect any file that comes in and goes out in a dedicated patch to identify malware. Therefore, these two things help me to protect our organization from any bad actors."
"The user experience is good and the configuration is very easy."
"One of the things I really like about it is that we have the same features and functions available on the entry-level device (PA-220), as do large corporations with much more costly appliances."
"All the features are valuable, but my main one is the straightforward and well-designed GUI. I'm over 50 and have been in this business since the internet started. I'm not a GUI guy; I prefer using the command line. The product's GUI is excellent, and so is the threat intelligence. It's also straightforward to configure and flexible. The solution even has good networking, such as VLAN and subinterfaces, which is great because, in my experience, if the firewall is good, then the router usually isn't and vice-versa, but Palo Alto has both."
"The solution is stable."
"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 helps us with protection, with concurrent use of the VPN."
"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."
"I have no problem with the cost or licensing of this solution. This is a primary reason whay I wanted this solution. It does the same thing cheaper than other name brands."
"It is not an easy task to protect your web servers from the big bad internet. The Web Server Protection in this solution does it elegantly and, if configured correctly, even hides the server's base system from prying eyes."
"It allows our developers to be able to securely log into servers to deploy and manage software."
"We find all of the features valuable because together they fit the needs of our customers."
"I think they need to improve more in order to be a competitor with the leaders of the field."
"It would be a benefit if Fortinet would release a one-stop solution that is better integrated with other products and an automated emergency response system."
"There are some cloud-based features that could be much more flexible than they currently are."
"The UTM filtering needs improvement."
"We would like to see a better training platform implemented."
"Palo Alto has a feature called WildFire Analysis that is unavailable in FortiGate. WildFire is better than a sandbox because it can address zero-day threats and vulnerabilities. It can immediately identify zero-day threats from the cloud."
"One area for improvement is the performance on the bandwidth demands for smaller devices, as well as better web filtering."
"The central management for the FortiGate Fortinet Firewall needs improvement. They have the manager to do the essential management for both SD-WAN and for the security policy. They should also improve the SD-WAN function."
"The solution needs some management tool enhancements. It could also use more reporting tools."
"Need improvement with their logs, especially the command line interface."
"The biggest thing that needs to be improved with them is their training. I took a training class for the 8.0 build, then I took it again for the 9.0 and 10 builds. They add new features every time that they do a new major release, but the training doesn't keep up. It is the same basic training that probably was with the 3.0 build, and they just change the screenshots. I would love to see them do some more work since they have all these bells and whistles, but we don't know how to use those features on a large scale."
"For an upcoming release, they could improve on the way to build security rules per user."
"Palo Alto should improve their support. It's sometimes difficult to get the right technician or engineer to fix the problem as soon as possible."
"The solution could offer better pricing. We'd like it if it could be a bit more affordable for us."
"This solution cannot be implemented on-premises; it's only a cloud solution. The price is high as well."
"The customer-facing side needs to be improved in terms of the engagement and involvement of support staff."
"Sophos UTM's firewall is a bit weak, and some of its features lack depth compared to other products like F5."
"Sophos UTM could improve if there was no limitation on users."
"I would like this solution to support ICAP. Also, they no longer support on-premises management, and are forcing clients to use centralized management via the cloud, which I don't agree with."
"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."
"We'd like to see them offer their services on mobile devices like tablets. I'm not sure if that's an option or not."
"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."
"Sophos UTM sometimes falls short in high-availability environments. They used to launch firmware that didn't work very well in a high-availability environment."
"As it stands right now, when we have an internet failure on WAN1, it takes several minutes before our WAN2 connection picks up the traffic"
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Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is ranked 6th in Firewalls with 162 reviews while Sophos UTM is ranked 1st in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 110 reviews. Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is rated 8.6, while Sophos UTM is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls writes "We get reports back from WildFire on a minute-by-minute basis". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sophos UTM writes "It's a highly stable platform with very few hardware issues". Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is most compared with Check Point NGFW, Azure Firewall, Meraki MX, Sophos XG and Juniper SRX Series Firewall, whereas Sophos UTM is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Sophos XG, OPNsense, Cisco Secure Firewall and Untangle NG Firewall. See our Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls vs. Sophos UTM report.
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