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."Web filtering and two-factor authentication are great features."
"Secure, user-friendly, stable, and scalable network security solution. Installation is straightforward."
"It's very easy to set up, it's very easy to make policies and, for an organization, that means you don't need IT expert in firewalls. You just need to have somebody who knows a little bit of IT, and that's it. With other products, you need someone with a "Masters" degree in firewalls."
"The base firewall features are quite valuable to us."
"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."
"Whenever I need something, Fortinet improves and updates the software for me."
"It has improved our security capabilities."
"The most valuable features are that it is very simple to configure and to manage."
"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 initial setup was very easy."
"One of the best firewalls on the market."
"I can enable the features I want and configure the policies based on the user and not all users and network traffic, making firewall management much easier."
"Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls enable efficient application search, viewing, and configuration access across various services for different user groups within our company."
"The key aspect of this solution that provides the most value is its next-gen capabilities, which represented a significant change for us."
"There are many valuable features, such as wireless cloud features."
"The implementation with the AWS environment was good."
"UTM 9 brings along IPSec as well as iPhone and iPad support. This seems small but it’s useful."
"Sophos has a single pane of glass which allows me to manage all my VPCs from a single instance, managing all my firewall from one place."
"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."
"The most valuable feature of Sophos UTM is reporting, it is flexible. I can monitor the end user's devices, even when they are not on my network. It has good drill-down capabilities."
"The stability, overall, is excellent. I haven't had a problem in the last two years."
"Sophos UTM has a good user interface and granular security controls."
"So far, the solution has been problem-free."
"Fortinet FortiGate is a stable solution. However, my issue is the performance only. When I use all the profiles, this affects the performance. From the beginning, I should have had a better sizing of the box."
"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."
"Fortinet currently has many products bundled with FortiGate including the basic firewall and load balancer, and I think that that they need to have separate product portfolios for each of these specialized services."
"It could use better throughput on some of the smaller boxes for the branch offices."
"The support team for Fortinet FortiGate needs to be more customer friendly."
"FortiGate is really good. We have been using it for quite some time. Initially, when we started off, we had around 70 plus devices of FortiGate, but then Check Point and Palo Alto took over the place. From the product perspective, there are no issues, but from the account perspective, we have had issues. Fortinet's presence in our company is very less. I don't see any Fortinet account managers talking to us, and that presence has diluted in the last two and a half or three years. We have close to 1,500 firewalls. Out of these, 60% of firewalls are from Palo Alto, and a few firewalls are from Check Point. FortiGate firewalls are very less now. It is not because of the product; it is because of the relationship. I don't think they had a good relationship with us, and there was some kind of disconnect for a very long time. The relationship between their accounts team and my leadership team seems to be the reason for phasing out FortiGate."
"There are mainly two areas of improvement in Fortinet FortiGate— the licensing cost and the timing of upgrading licenses for boxes."
"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."
"I'm thinking about a new feature. They have decryption. It's a good idea to use decryption on Palo Alto. It would be good if they had offloading of the traffic, and if they could decrypt the traffic and offload it. Like, for example, ASM on our site. We have an SSL decryption to offload the traffic. We could use that on Palo Alto."
"The tool's central management system is complicated, making it challenging to manage multiple devices centrally. Individually, the firewalls are easy to use and manage. I'd like to see better central management features in the next release. They've introduced some, but I haven't tried them yet, so I can't say how effective they are. However, having a single management interface would be a big improvement."
"Generating reports is not so easy."
"Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls work slowly for vulnerability management. Its performance could be faster."
"Having a better pricing model would make this product more competitive, and more affordable for our customers."
"The scalability compared to other products is not good. You need to change the box whenever you want your number of connection sessions to increase."
"Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls do not provide a unified platform that natively integrates all security capabilities."
"The areas that need to improve are network protection and user identification."
"During initial configuration, I encountered a few issues."
"The initial setup may be difficult for those not familiar with the product."
"Sophos should improve its ability to check something like bandwidth consumption for users or something more real-time."
"The solution needs better integration with captive portals and XGs."
"It needs a better user interface. The one they have is not so good."
"This product could use some improvement with web filtering. It takes a lot of time and effort to set up and maintain."
"The management suite is easy and the agent is easy to develop."
"VPN needs IKEv2, but it’s in the roadmap. Also, all new, cool features will only come to the new Sophos XG Firewall."
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Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is ranked 6th in Firewalls with 163 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 WatchGuard Firebox. See our Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls vs. Sophos UTM report.
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