We performed a comparison between Azure Firewall and Sophos XG based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: The main difference between these two products is the scalability. While Azure Firewall users say the scalability could be improved, users of Sophos XG are satisfied with the solution’s capability to scale. Azure users also mention that the interface and the reporting, logging, and monitoring features all need improvement.
"Easy to use support and licensing portal as well as activation process."
"Its stability is the most valuable."
"The most valuable feature is the VDOM, which allows the customer to have multiple firewalls in a single campus."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the analytics."
"The CLI and GUI do a good job of putting a lot at your fingertips."
"It enables our organization to become more productive. Also, it protects our NEtWare from viruses and malware."
"We were looking for the VPN feature and controlling the inflow and outflow of all the traffic within the site and across the sites. We are also using it for the VPN and VLANs."
"The most important feature, normally for small business customers, is link load balancing."
"The solution can autoscale."
"It is easy for me to protect certain ports or even the IP addresses, as well as do whitelisting, blacklisting, and the FQDN when we want virtual machines connected and to protect certain websites."
"I think that one of the best features is definitely the premium version, along with the IDPs in terms of the intrusion detection and prevention system."
"The firewall policy control, URL content control, and antivirus are all the most valuable aspects. Threat prevention is as well quite good."
"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."
"We secure the entry point to the virtual data center with the firewall."
"One of the best features is that it natively integrates with Azure Services and tools. When you have a third-party offering, that is not the case. But Azure Firewall provides a comprehensive and seamless security solution for your Azure resources."
"We use the solution for application and server deployment."
"The security of Sophos XG is very good."
"I like the tunneling part which we are using for the VOIP. We have various other sites where we connect via tunneling. The tunneling part is very fast and easy to implement."
"Sophos XG is very useful, it does many things."
"Definitely, its usability is very good, and it's a very robust firewall."
"I have found configuring the ports to be easier in Sophos XG compared to the other devices."
"The most valuable feature, according to the setup we have at our work place here, is the flexibility of the system or the firmware that's running the appliance. It's so flexible, performing multiple rules with different configurations. According to the set up here, we need to implement several firewalls with different access levels, because we have a variety of users. For this requirement, it's very flexible and very easy to use."
"The most valuable features are the reporting, dashboards, and graphical user interface. It gives a good overall picture of what is happening over the network."
"I like the fact that it can self remove malware and do updates on the cloud via Sophos Central."
"One area for improvement is the performance on the bandwidth demands for smaller devices, as well as better web filtering."
"Difficult to add or define, and not that easy to configure and manage."
"The non-error conserve mode has room for improvement."
"Fortinet FortiGate should improve the VPN tokens."
"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 use the FortiGate 60D model and realized the 300Mbps bandwidth limitation. Because it is a product that offers many services, I think it could have greater bandwidth capacity."
"I would like to see a more intuitive dashboard."
"I would prefer to have more detailed logs within the FortiGate products themselves rather than relying on a separate tool."
"The interface could be improved, it's not very user friendly."
"It's a little heavy compared to a FortiGate or other firewalls."
"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."
"Right now, with Azure Firewall, we cannot have a normal inbound traffic flow. For inbound, Microsoft suggests using application gateways, so the options are very limited. I cannot use this firewall as an intermediate firewall because of the limitations, and I cannot point routing to another firewall. So if I want to use back-to-back firewall architecture in my environment, I cannot use Azure Firewall for that type of configuration either."
"It is a cloud service, but the lending speed for each region is not always the same. For example, in China, the speed is slow. They need to think about how to make sure that the service pace or speed is always the same in all regions. It would be a great improvement if they can provide the same pace worldwide."
"Azure Firewall should have a free trial version for new users so that they can evaluate it before deploying it."
"For large organizations, a third-party firewall would be an added advantage, because it would have more advanced features, things that are not in Azure Firewall."
"Even though things work on the back end, we have encountered bugs in the solution."
"An area of improvement would be the reporting as diagnostic graphs take a long time to load and refresh. If there could be an option to show only select graphs, it may speed up the graphics."
"Having a web portal where you could make requests for the categorization of non-categorized items, would be beneficial."
"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."
"I wish to see an antivirus feature added to the solution."
"It would be great if the user can have a portal to check on activities related to their account."
"Scalability could be improved. It could be better."
"Technical support is difficult to access."
Azure Firewall is ranked 16th in Firewalls with 33 reviews while Sophos XG is ranked 7th in Firewalls with 192 reviews. Azure Firewall is rated 7.2, while Sophos XG is rated 8.2. 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 XG writes "Easy to use and deploy with an improved pricing structure in place". Azure Firewall is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate-VM, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Palo Alto Networks VM-Series, Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Meraki MX, whereas Sophos XG is most compared with Netgate pfSense, OPNsense, Sophos XGS, SonicWall TZ and Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls. See our Azure Firewall vs. Sophos XG report.
See our list of best Firewalls vendors.
We monitor all Firewalls reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.