We performed a comparison between Palo Alto Networks VM-Series 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 most valuable feature is the interface, which is very user friendly. We are utilizing most of the features, like content filtering. The firewall is powerful."
"We use the FortiGate Sandbox to detect zero-day vulnerabilities, such as anomalies or malware, that are unknown and have not yet been discovered."
"It is very flexible to use."
"The security features are about the best that I've seen anywhere."
"Some of the key features of the solution is that it has good reporting, you can receive many details from the connection, for example, clients and website information."
"With FortiClient, you can easily connect when you are home, check out what you want to do, and connect to your network when you are not at work. You can switch on servers and you can check what is wrong."
"What's most important is the ease of use."
"The pipe filter application is an outstanding feature."
"We use the product on our Azure network firewalls."
"They now know the details about their network traffic that they did not know before: Applications that they are using and some application they did not know they were using."
"It is very stable. It is fairly easy to use."
"It is nice to have a rock solid security platform that we can count on."
"Centralized management is valuable because it allows us to configure settings in one location and apply them across all three locations."
"The VM-Series reports how much bandwidth a particular IP is using. You don't need to regularly log into a website, like a Cisco command, to see what kind of ACL it's getting. There isn't an ACL use portal event. You can go there and see how much my ACL has been getting me."
"Palo Alto Networks VM-Series has everything centralized. You have the VPN solution, firewall, routing, UDR, flexibility, updates, and full visibility of your traffic."
"Embedding it into my application development lifecycle prevents data loss and business disruption, allowing the adoption to operate at the speed of my AWS Cloud."
"The three most important features for us are web protection, web server protection, and network protection."
"Scaling out cannot be easier, as there are many migration paths."
"It works well without any maintenance. So far, it has worked pretty well regardless of the traffic."
"Sophos integrates seamlessly, and we don't even feel it is running in the background."
"It helped to connect our satellite offices to the main Amazon infrastructure in a circular way."
"It now controls all the security aspects of our web servers with Sophos UTM WAF."
"The UTM features are reasonably strong and the patterns are updated on a regular basis"
"The most valuable feature is the IPS. It also protects us from malware."
"The pricing could be a bit better, especially when you consider how they have the most basic offering priced."
"It would be nice if FortiGate incorporated some built-in endpoint protection features. I would also like a built-in SOC dashboard for managing multiple Fortinet firewalls."
"Fortinet FortiGate could improve the user interface. There should be more functionality and options through the GUI."
"The solution lacks multi-language support."
"The solution can have more features in a single box that can be multi-applied to integrate everything."
"I don't really have anything negative to say as far as Fortinet firewalls are concerned. If anything, they can support a user a little bit better. They can stop being so time-sensitive about how much time the support call has taken, and they can help you do it yourself."
"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."
"I would suggest that Fortinet add sandboxing to their solution."
"It would be good if the common features work consistently in physical and virtual environments. There was an integration issue in the virtual deployment where it didn't report the interface counters, and we had to upgrade to the latest version, whereas the same thing has been working in the physical deployment for ages now. It seems that it was because of Azure. We were using VMware before, and we didn't have any such issues. We do see such small issues where we expect things to work, but they don't because of some incompatibilities. There also seems to be a limitation on how to do high availability in a virtualized environment. All features should be consistently available in physical and virtual environments. It is not always easy to integrate Palo Alto in the network management system. We would like to be able to compare two network management systems. They can maybe allow monitoring an interface through the GUI to create a reference or do a baseline check about whether your network monitoring system is actually giving you the correct traffic figures. You need traffic figures to be able to recognize the trends and plan the capacity."
"There could be dynamic DNS features similar to Fortinet in the product."
"The solution's licensing could be improved, and training should be included before installation."
"The current licensing model can be a sore point as we're paying for features we're not fully utilizing."
"The implementation should be simplified."
"The solution must improve Zero Trust integration and use cases."
"The one issue that I didn't like is that the SNMP integration with interfaces didn't record the interface counters."
"The solution needs to have more easily searchable details or documentation about it online, so it's easier to Google if you have queries."
"The solution is not scalable."
"Reporting: We have had to work manually in many of our reports."
"The only time we face a problem or issues is when we place a ticket. We have found that response is very slow."
"The initial setup was straightforward. The full deployment takes approximately two days which could be simplified to reduce the time. The major part of the process is the configuration and the policy setup."
"The interface configuration could be improved."
"We had some problems with the configuration. They had provided a CloudFormation template, and we had to go several rounds to make it work."
"The solution could be improved by adding cloud soundboxing."
"An area for improvement in Sophos UTM is load balancing because my company cannot use it currently. If Sophos could release a new configuration for the load balancing feature to work for my company, that would be great."
Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is ranked 10th in Firewalls with 53 reviews while Sophos UTM is ranked 1st in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 110 reviews. Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is rated 8.6, while Sophos UTM is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Palo Alto Networks VM-Series writes "Many features are optimized for troubleshooting real-time scenarios, saving a lot of time". 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 VM-Series is most compared with Azure Firewall, Fortinet FortiGate-VM, Cisco Secure Firewall, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls and Meraki MX, whereas Sophos UTM is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Sophos XG, OPNsense, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls and Cisco Secure Firewall. See our Palo Alto Networks VM-Series vs. Sophos UTM report.
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