We performed a comparison between Netgate pfSense 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 IPsec tunnels are very easily created, and quite interoperable with devices from other vendors."
"I like Fortinet FortiGate's antispam filter, SPN, and clustering features."
"You can purchase switches and you don't need to do anything with them. You just put in the firewall and the switches get all the policies and rules that you already have in the firewall. With Fortinet, you just connect the FortiSwitch to the Fortinet and that's it."
"The usage in general is pretty good."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiGate are it is one of the most mature firewalls in the UTM bundle."
"The solution is stable."
"The payment function for applications is good."
"Using this product makes the VPN seamless and almost invisible to me in the sense that I don't have to think about it."
"The initial setup is easy."
"One of the advantages of pfSense is that it is very easy to work with. It is a very good open-source solution, and it works really well. pfSense provides a complete package. For some features, it could be the first solution in the world. It is a very good alternative in the market for a firewall solution. You don't need to go to Cisco or other brands with expensive firewalls. pfSense also allows us to offer some support services."
"It is a very good solution for enterprises that need a VPN for their employees. It is the best way to provide a remote work facility to employees at a very low cost. Other solutions that I have had in the past were very expensive. Enterprises don't always have that kind of money to invest."
"We like the fact that the product is open-source. It's free to use. There are no costs associated with it."
"I had some outages in the network and we provide services for our company. We sell mobile credits. The terminal gets access to our own server inside the network and if one internet fails, then the other one is still up and we have a back-up link on the devices."
"Stability has been excellent. We have experienced no issues; it never fails."
"Its reliability and cost-effectiveness stand out."
"Some of the terminologies were more familiar to me than it was when I first encountered Cisco."
"Technical support is very responsive."
"It has allowed us to design a bespoke cloud space for our clients, while still having an excellent level of protection."
"Sophos UTM's best feature is synchronized security."
"With Sophos, we have not had any incidents this year. The security provided has been good. It has proven to be okay for our needs."
"It does not take much effort or thinking to understand how it works."
"It helps us with protection, with concurrent use of the VPN."
"UTM 9 brings along IPSec as well as iPhone and iPad support. This seems small but it’s useful."
"Sophos UTM's most valuable features are profiling and its simple configuration."
"I think the only issue that needs improvement is the interface."
"Backup can be improved."
"I would like to see improvements in the product's application rules."
"The security of Fortinet FortiGate could improve."
"One issue that I have had is that sometimes I need to monitor the traffic, so I need to filter it according to the user and which user is using it the most. I experience a bottleneck most of the time, particularly at the peak time when the number of contracts and users are at maximum."
"There are mainly two areas of improvement in Fortinet FortiGate— the licensing cost and the timing of upgrading licenses for boxes."
"Some of the filtering is not robust, you can escape it with a VPN. Some of the users bypass some of the filters. It catches some but it also misses some, that area could be improved. It's functioning reasonably but there's room for improvement in that area."
"Some of the web policy reports could be improved."
"The solution could always work at being more secure. It's a good idea to continue to work on security features and capabilities in order to ensure they can keep clients safe."
"The solution’s interface must be improved."
"I've never tried it in large environments. All my clients are small businesses with a handful of employees, so I am not sure how it works in large environments. I keep up with recent versions, and there's nothing I'm waiting for, and nothing breaks when I get a new version."
"A way to clean squid cache from the GUI."
"The GUI could use more “bells and whistles”. It's got plenty of info for a Sysadmin but some people like shiny things."
"I believe improving integration with various antivirus vendors could be beneficial."
"The VPN feature of the solution could improve by adding better functionality and providing easier configure ability."
"The solution could use better reporting. They need to offer more of it in general. Right now, the graphics aren't the best. If you need to provide a report to a manager, for example, it doesn't look great. They need to make it easier to understand and give users the ability to customize them."
"Last year, Sophos had some major internal management changes that negatively impacted their support."
"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."
"The classification segregation of applications lacks sufficient definition."
"Sophos customer support could use some improvement."
"Anti-phishing functionality should be improved."
"There can be a delay when it comes to reaching out to technical support."
"Stay away from the wireless models, since you cannot put them in HA. They start to give you some weird issues once you start getting into multiple SSIDs and networks."
"There is still room for improvement in wireless protection. I don't mean their WiFi device is bad, but there are still things to improve on, such as WiFi roaming."
Netgate pfSense is ranked 1st in Firewalls with 128 reviews while Sophos UTM is ranked 1st in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 110 reviews. Netgate pfSense is rated 8.6, while Sophos UTM is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Netgate pfSense writes "User-friendly, easy to manage the firewall, rule-wise and interface-wise". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sophos UTM writes "It's a highly stable platform with very few hardware issues". Netgate pfSense is most compared with OPNsense, Sophos XG, KerioControl, Cisco Secure Firewall and WatchGuard Firebox, whereas Sophos UTM is most compared with Sophos XG, OPNsense, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Cisco Secure Firewall and Untangle NG Firewall. See our Netgate pfSense vs. Sophos UTM report.
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pfSense is opensource and has been the last 10 years in the top 10 best
firewall solutions in the world, it is free, stable, scalable, and easy to
administer ... and above all very safe, since it is one of the few systems
that could have been violated. It's free.
In fact, Karl, the 50-IP free version is for home use only, and not even then if it also protects business assets. You did a great job of explaining the difference, so I won't comment further.
To the original poster, it's cheaper to hire a Sophos consultant to create your original configuration. It costs twice as much to get a configuration "repaired" that wasn't correctly designed. A Sophos Solution Partner that has a Sophos Certified Architect with plenty of experience and good referrals is probably your best bet.
With Sophos is easy to configure and you have the support from the frabicant, with pfSense you have to learn from the community and learning curve is a little hard, last occasion with pfSense it don't have support for vpn dynamic, with Sophos they have RED equipment that is an extension from the core, only you need the serial number from the remote equipment and you have the vpn , both are great equipment and software, depend of the budget, pfSense is free and they have support if you pay the license very cheap
pfSense is just a basic firewall with VPN and Captive Portal functionality but does its job great. Only needs minimum resources to function. Price is right (FREE)
Sophos UTM is much more, hence the UTM. It does firewall, advance threat protection, VPN, Secure web gateway, email protection (AV, Spam, Encryption, and DLP), endpoint protection, Mobile Device control, Web Application Firewall, User Portal, built in reporting, and central management. It does require more resources but you get a lot more out of it. Two options depending on the size of your office, commercial version or the Free version that you can build on your own hardware. The free version is restricted to 50 IP addresses. (www.sophos.com)
I have used both and both have their place but using Sophos in my environment just because it offers a lot more functionality, nice dashboard, reports, and easy to use through the GUI.
One other big difference is that pfSense is FreeBSD based while Sophos UTM is linux based. It is also worth having a lool on cacheguard which is a proxy oriented product and also Linux based.
I´m afraid I am not able to help in this matter. We´ve decided to for FortiGate as services, based on our relationship with our IT security provider and the FortiGate reviews available on the net.
We used to use pfSence for one particular open network but let the full control on de FortiGate. During the investigation and analysis period we thought of Sophos but felt more comfortable going for FortiGate pretty much based on price and our relationship with our IT security provider. Hence my experience wouldn´t help in this case.
My best advice would is to refer to the article available on:
www.itcentralstation.com