We performed a comparison between Palo Alto Networks PA-Series and Sophos XG 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."Centralized monitoring, policy management, and virtualized appliances allow us to take control over our public and private infrastructure."
"FortiGate firewalls are user-friendly, and I like the security profiling features."
"The stability and scalability of this solution are satisfactory. Its SD-WAN, VPN, and URL filtering features are very useful."
"The security features are about the best that I've seen anywhere."
"The pipe filter application is an outstanding feature."
"The email protection and VPN features are the most valuable."
"The features that I have found most valuable are the SD-WAN and their IP4 policy."
"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 offers application-based policy enforcement. Palo Alto Networks firewalls help us recognize protocol anomalies, contrasting with other vendors that may require policies based on port numbers. With Palo Alto Networks, the port number isn't a constraint because their devices handle protocol traffic at Layer 7, allowing for accurate identification of protocol usage and port numbers. They can identify which protocol actually uses which port."
"It is a stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"The solution is easy to manage."
"The solution has a three-layer architecture, and it helps customers to deploy the solution quickly."
"The reporting feature and application ID functionality within Palo Alto Networks PA-Series are incredibly valuable to us."
"Palo Alto Networks firewalls offer single-mode panel processing with live scanning."
"Comprehensive logging is essential for monitoring and analysis purposes. For remote users, the firewall can be configured as a VPN concentrator, with VPN policies defined within the firewall settings."
"The cloud-based aspect helps significantly. It integrates seamlessly with other Palo products like Prisma Cloud, offers robust VPN protection, and it's all in one convenient package."
"Easy to deploy and user friendly."
"Compared to other firewalls that I had looked at, I thought Sophos was the better solution. It just seems to be easier to manage versus Cisco, Fortinet, or one of the other options I was looking at."
"The initial setup is pretty simple."
"The solution is a next generation firewall and we have gotten good customer feedback."
"The installation is easy. There is a wizard that can be used for a single connection making it simple and if you have multiple connections you can configure it manually."
"The most valuable features are its nice interfaces and configuration. The endpoint is also very good."
"This solution is very user-friendly and even a non-professional can configure the policies."
"Sophos XG is very useful, it does many things."
"I think they need to improve more in order to be a competitor with the leaders of the field."
"One area for improvement is the performance on the bandwidth demands for smaller devices, as well as better web filtering."
"In terms of what could be improved, the SD-WAN is quite difficult, because if you install the new box, 15 is okay, but if you change from an old configuration, if there is already configuration and a policy when you change to SD-WAN, you must change the whole policy that you see in the interface."
"Currently, without the additional reporting module, we only have access to basic reporting."
"The stability could be a bit better."
"They should offer special pricing to premium partners and customers."
"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 like to see improvements in the product's application rules."
"The interface is complex."
"The solution's licensing price could be improved."
"The technical support offered by Palo Alto is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"The pricing of the solution needs improvement."
"The UI definitely needs work. In my opinion, the UI could be simpler and more user-friendly for the average user."
"There is room for improvement in streamlining this process for smoother transitions."
"Palo Alto Networks PA-Series is complicated to configure compared to one of its competitors."
"The product's high prices are an area of concern where improvements are required."
"The first area that needs to be improved is customer support."
"The current bandwidth consumption is no longer shown in the XG and XGS."
"The solution could be more secure."
"Their tech support is not great."
"Let's say I set up a rule to block users from accessing YouTube or Facebook. The rule will only block the HTTP traffic, which is non-secure traffic... The problem comes when you are trying to block, or allow, similar traffic that uses HTTPS. You have to create a certificate and import it into the users' web browsers, whatever they are using... The problem occurs when you're dealing with roaming users who use laptops and have to move between different sites that have different types of policies applied to them. You have to import all sorts of certificates from each site into their browser. Doing so will most probably conflict with something else that is totally irrelevant and cause a problem."
"Support for this product is something that is really important, and it needs to improve."
"In the next release, I would like to see improvements made to the policy and simplify the policy-making, as the complexity of it makes it really tough."
"Support could be improved."
Palo Alto Networks PA-Series is ranked 16th in Firewalls with 28 reviews while Sophos XG is ranked 7th in Firewalls with 192 reviews. Palo Alto Networks PA-Series is rated 8.6, while Sophos XG is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Palo Alto Networks PA-Series writes "Offers trained customer support, stability and ease of use ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sophos XG writes "Easy to use and deploy with an improved pricing structure in place". Palo Alto Networks PA-Series is most compared with OPNsense, SonicWall NSa, Juniper SRX Series Firewall, Netgate pfSense and WatchGuard Firebox, whereas Sophos XG is most compared with Netgate pfSense, OPNsense, Sophos XGS, SonicWall TZ and Sophos UTM. See our Palo Alto Networks PA-Series vs. Sophos XG report.
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