We performed a comparison between Azure 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."The solution is very easy to understand. It's not overly complex."
"Secure, user-friendly, stable, and scalable network security solution. Installation is straightforward."
"The SD-WAN feature is the most valuable. This feature evolved from link load balancing. It has helped us in terms of our uptime and privatizing applications whenever we experience an outage. The SD-WAN feature has been a plus for us. Two-factor authentication has allowed us to add more users in terms of remote working. We have two-factor authentication for remote workers to authenticate them before they get on the network."
"FortiGate firewalls are easy to manage through a user-friendly web interface. They also have advanced features like DDoS and DLP. However, I wouldn't recommend enabling all of these features on one device because it can cause performance issues."
"It's super reliable. I don't think I've ever had a reliability issue with it."
"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."
"The Intrusion Prevention System and the web filtering are both working well."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"One of the notable advantages of Azure Firewall is its user-friendly interface, which closely resembles or shares similarities with other Azure components."
"We use the solution for application and server deployment."
"Network filtering is valuable. The scalability capability from the cloud-native service helps us a lot because it simplifies our day-to-day maintenance activity."
"All its features are good. That's why we recommend it."
"In terms of the reporting, it's beautiful. It integrates with Azure monitoring and with Azure policies. That piece is a big help. You can set governing policies and you can use the application firewall, as well as the Azure Firewall, to enforce those policies."
"The solution is very stable. When comparing it to other environments, it's actually quite impressive."
"It provided ease of maintenance. If a new firewall was needed, we only had to run the pipelines for this. So, the maintenance was very easy."
"The solution is stable."
"I like the web filtering options."
"Sophos UTM's best feature is synchronized security."
"The packet filtering's great. You get out what you put into it. It works great as long as you know your security and configure everything adequately. If you just pop one in and it's not configured, then it's basically wide open. It kind of depends on the admin skill, but it's an excellent product."
"So far, the solution has been problem-free."
"The solution is stable."
"It has allowed us to design a bespoke cloud space for our clients, while still having an excellent level of protection."
"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."
"What I like about Sophos UTM is that it improves my company's security. The solution is easy to set up, which I like, and it's very stable."
"There are mainly two areas of improvement in Fortinet FortiGate— the licensing cost and the timing of upgrading licenses for boxes."
"If they had better integration with security products, such as Cisco ISE or Rapid Threat Containment, then it would be an improvement."
"In the next release, I would like to see the interface simplified to be more user-friendly."
"The captive portal could be improved."
"I feel that the reporting needs to be improved."
"The solution lacks multi-language support."
"The initial setup is complex."
"Some configuration elements cannot be easily altered once created."
"The reporting, logging, and monitoring features, as well as the flexibility of the policies, need to be improved."
"Azure should be able to work better as a balancer also, instead of just being a firewall. It should have a wider mandate."
"The threat intelligence part could be better. I don't see why our customers have to get an additional solution with Azure Firewall. It would be great if they made it on par with Palo Alto."
"The tool needs to improve the onboarding and transition process for on-prem users."
"Currently, it only supports IP addresses, so you have to be specific about the IPs that are in your environment."
"Azure Firewall definitely needs a broader feature base. It should be able to go all the way up to layer 7 when looking at applications and things like that."
"We find it's different implementing it region-to-region. It might help if it was universal across all regions."
"It has fewer features than you can get from other firewalls, like anti-spam and anti-phishing. Those kinds of things are not included. It only includes IDS and IDB."
"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."
"The classification segregation of applications lacks sufficient definition."
"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."
"Support for IKEv2 is needed in this solution."
"This product could use some improvement with web filtering. It takes a lot of time and effort to set up and maintain."
"Sophos UTM's firewall is a bit weak, and some of its features lack depth compared to other products like F5."
"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"
"The technical support only communicates via email. I would prefer to communicate directly with someone."
Azure Firewall is ranked 21st in Firewalls with 33 reviews while Sophos UTM is ranked 1st in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 110 reviews. Azure Firewall is rated 7.2, while Sophos UTM is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Azure Firewall writes "Easy to use and configure but could be more robust". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sophos UTM writes "It's a highly stable platform with very few hardware issues". Azure Firewall is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate-VM, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Palo Alto Networks VM-Series and Check Point NGFW, whereas Sophos UTM is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Sophos XG, OPNsense, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls and Cisco Secure Firewall. See our Azure Firewall vs. Sophos UTM report.
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