We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure 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."We are very happy with the general bandwidth agility we have seen from one website to another website."
"Good anti-malware and web filtering features."
"It has very easy management and an amazing ETM configuration."
"The IPsec tunnels are very easily created, and quite interoperable with devices from other vendors."
"LinkGreat firewall capabilities"
"Fortinet FortiGate has many valuable features, such as IDS, and intrusion detection. It has security features that are in part with the technologies that are available in the market."
"Fortinet FortiGate protects against internet-based threats, both internal and external. It is scalable, stable, easy to use, and easy to install."
"The network security and cloud security are most valuable."
"It makes it very easy to have delineated roles and responsibilities between network engineering and network security."
"The IPS (In-plane switching) is the most valuable feature."
"The initial setup was completely straightforward."
"One thing I like about the product is the logging features, the way it logs, the way it forwards the logs in Syslog."
"The user interface is easy to navigate."
"The most valuable feature would be ASDM. The ability to go in, visualize and see the world base in a clear and consistent manner is very powerful."
"My confidence continues to build upon using Cisco firewalls."
"The grouping of the solutions helps save time. If you have a problem and you have a high-level overview of the system, you can easily dig deeper into the problem. For example, I can check to see why ASA isn't working but the reason for the outage is actually because of Duo. I can spend a lot of time working in the wrong direction because I didn't have an overview."
"It makes it a lot easier for us to maintain things. Prior to it, things were more difficult. This means less time on us. We can focus on other things. The recovery is more in man-hours for us than anything else."
"The product is extremely intuitive."
"It's a stable solution."
"The initial setup was easy."
"The most valuable feature is the IPS. It also protects us from malware."
"Sophos UTM's most valuable features are profiling and its simple configuration."
"It now controls all the security aspects of our web servers with Sophos UTM WAF."
"Sophos UTM is the simplest of these products to setup."
"One of the features that I would like to have is to do with endpoint production, it should be integrated. For example, the firewall gets notified of any kind of forensic event that needs to be done, such as if there is a ransomware attack and how it originated, all those records have to be available from the firewall, which is not."
"FortiOS is not simple."
"It is quite new for us, and we need to go more in-depth into the monitoring tools. It provides different features that we need to do what we want. So far, it is okay for us. In terms of improvement, in the future, they can provide a faster implementation of features. Some of the features are first available in other solutions. Fortinet sometimes takes a little bit longer than other solutions, such as Check Point, to implement new features."
"I would prefer to have more detailed logs within the FortiGate products themselves rather than relying on a separate tool."
"I don't like that anything more than very basic reporting is not included."
"With FortiGate, the main complaint that I have heard is about the technical support."
"At first glance, the interface for the device is very confusing."
"There are some tiny bugs that sometimes affect the operations. In the past revision of it, there was a bug. Because of the bug, we had to downgrade the version. It happened only with the last revision."
"The intelligence has room for improvement. There are some hackers that we haven't seen before and its ability to detect those types of attacks needs to be improved."
"The reporting and other features are nice, but there is an issue with applying the configuration. That part needs some improvement."
"The user interface is a little clunky and difficult to work with. Some things aren't as easy as they should be."
"We have seen some bugs come up with Cisco Secure Firewall in terms of high availability. The solution should be improved to avoid these bugs."
"The software was very buggy, to the point it had to be removed."
"There was an error in the configuration, related to our uplink switches, that caused us to contact technical support, and it took a very long time to resolve the issue."
"The one thing that the ASAs don't have is a central management point. We have a lot of our environments on FTD right now. So, we are using a Firewall Management Center (FMC) to manage all those. The ASAs don't really have that, but they are easy to use if you physically go into them and manage them."
"It should have an additional “operating mode”, like a “candidate configuration mode”, where you would have the possibility to test the changes you are going to implement and also the possibility to validate these changes."
"The technical support only communicates via email. I would prefer to communicate directly with someone."
"It does have built-in policies, which enable you to disable USB devices, etc. It would be nice if they had more policies because there are not that many of them."
"The reporting system needs to allow for customizations because many reports do not include details that we expect."
"We need a better VPN client for the customers."
"The support could be better."
"Support for IKEv2 is needed in this solution."
"We didn’t find any issues but I know there have been some in the last few years."
"I think that additional metrics features are needed to be able to monitor other areas or to monitor as much as you can, at a fine-grain resolution."
Cisco Secure Firewall is ranked 4th in Firewalls with 404 reviews while Sophos UTM is ranked 1st in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 110 reviews. Cisco Secure Firewall is rated 8.2, while Sophos UTM is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Cisco Secure Firewall writes "Highlights and helps us catch Zero-day vulnerabilities traveling across our network". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sophos UTM writes "It's a highly stable platform with very few hardware issues". Cisco Secure Firewall is most compared with Palo Alto Networks WildFire, Netgate pfSense, Meraki MX, Sophos XG and SonicWall NSa, whereas Sophos UTM is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Sophos XG, OPNsense, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls and Untangle NG Firewall. See our Cisco Secure Firewall vs. Sophos UTM report.
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