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."The UTM feature is quite good. FortiAP is easy to deploy because both Fortigate and FortiAP are under the same brand. Otherwise, you need to do more work on the configuration."
"Provides good firewall security and has great VPN features."
"From the firewall perspective, the rules and policies are very sufficient and easy to use."
"Security management tool that's easy to integrate and easy to work with. No issues found with its stability and scalability."
"We purchased Fortinet because of the pricing, its functionality, because it met our requirements, and the total cost of ownership over five years was quite reasonable. In the market, Fortinet is rated quite well."
"The web tutor and automatic rules by schedule are good features."
"It is easy to use and performs very well."
"The security features that they have are quite good. On top of that, their licensing model is quite nice where they don't charge you anything for the SD-WAN functionality for the firewall."
"Firepower has reduced our firewall operational costs by about 25 percent."
"The best features are stability and scalability."
"Cisco ASA works out-of-the-box. With the setup wizard, it was easy to get it deployed quickly, even by novice IT users."
"VPN and firewall are good features."
"The features I have found most valuable are the ASA firewalls. I like to have features like most integrated systems in ACI."
"A stable, reliable solution used to protect the network's perimeter."
"The Firepower IPS, based on Snort technology, has an amazing detection engine and historical analysis capability of files that eases threat investigations a lot."
"The content filtering is good."
"The isolation of infected machines is a big feature. Also, the ability to detect external sources that change files on a file server is really big."
"The most valuable feature is that it is easy to administer."
"Sophos UTM has a good user interface and granular security controls."
"The initial setup has been fine."
"It allows me to easily connect with more than forty-five remote sites and more than fifty remote users between IPsec and SSL VPN, applying the web filter and application filter to ensure a secure connection."
"With over 150 firewalls in our portal, management and monitoring have never been easier."
"The cost of the solution is very reasonable."
"The stability, overall, is excellent. I haven't had a problem in the last two years."
"The central management for the FortiGate Fortinet Firewall needs improvement. They have the manager to do the essential management for both SD-WAN and for the security policy. They should also improve the SD-WAN function."
"Fortinet FortiGate needs to improve the protection, it did not prevent us from being attacked. Additionally, Fortinet FortiGate could provide more features for WAF devices. I should not have to purchase two solutions, it would be a benefit to combine these features into one solution."
"It is very expensive, and their support is not very good. I hope that their technical support will be better in the future."
"You do need some IT knowledge in order to effectively work with the solution."
"The user interface could be improved to make it less confusing and easier to set up."
"Cisco Meraki products are rising very quickly in the cloud and the connected era. Meraki products offer much better ROI, upgradability, and manageability."
"I don't really have anything negative to say as far as Fortinet firewalls are concerned. If anything, they can support a user a little bit better. They can stop being so time-sensitive about how much time the support call has taken, and they can help you do it yourself."
"Due to its higher cost, Fortinet FortiGate can lead to increased operational expenses."
"Integration aspects and traffic shaping need improvement."
"The GUI interface could be improved when compared to other solutions."
"When we talk about data centers, we are talking about 100 gig capacity or 400 gig capacity. When it comes to active-active solution clustering and resilience and performance, Cisco should look into these a little bit more."
"FlexConfig is there as a bridge for features that are not yet natively integrated into Firepower. It is a way of allowing you to be able to configure things that wouldn't otherwise be possible until the development team can add them into Firepower's native capability. There is still some work that needs to be done around FlexConfig. There are still quite a few complex things, like policy-based routing, that have to be done in FlexConfig, and it doesn't always work perfectly. Sometimes, there are some glitches. It is recommended that you configure FlexConfig policies with Cisco TAC. It would be good to see Cisco accelerate some of those configurations that you can only do in FlexConfig into the platform, so that they are there natively."
"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."
"Firewalls, in general, were not really designed for normal IT personnel, but for firewall and network experts. Therefore, they missed a lot of options and did not provide any good reporting or improvement options."
"I would like for the user interface to be easier for the admin and network admin. I would also like to be able to access everything from the GUI interface. The way it is now, it needs somebody experience in iOS to be able to operate it. I would like to have a GUI interface."
"It has poor performance."
"The reporting system needs to allow for customizations because many reports do not include details that we expect."
"The application control is really bad. It needs a lot of enhancements. The traffic shaping and bandwidth control, and application control need a lot of work."
"Reporting: We have had to work manually in many of our reports."
"We'd like to see them offer their services on mobile devices like tablets. I'm not sure if that's an option or not."
"The technical support only communicates via email. I would prefer to communicate directly with someone."
"The solution is not scalable."
"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."
"The logs are not clear, which means that you need an additional piece of software in order to read them clearly."
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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