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 simplicity of the configuration and the stability of the product are most valuable. The VPN concentrator is very useful."
"The most valuable feature is the bundled subscription, which is IPS, TV and web filtering."
"The most valuable feature is the SSL VPN, as it allows us to connect and it separates this product from other firewalls."
"I like several features that this product has, such as antivirus and internet navigation inspection. It is also simple to use."
"A strong point of FortiGate is that the graphical interface is complete and easy to use, especially if we think there is a list of operations that we are able to perform inside."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiGate are remote access, web filtering, and IPS."
"Good anti-malware and web filtering features."
"Fortinet FortiGate is easy to use. Anyone can easily maintain it."
"The firewall and policy side are easy to use."
"I like the Cisco ASDM (Adaptive Security Device Manager), which is the configuration interface for the Cisco firewall."
"IPS and Snort are very important because they also differentiate Cisco from other vendors and competitors."
"I like them mostly because they don't break and they have great diagnostics."
"The grouping of the solutions helps save time. If you have a problem and you have a high-level overview of the system, you can easily dig deeper into the problem. For example, I can check to see why ASA isn't working but the reason for the outage is actually because of Duo. I can spend a lot of time working in the wrong direction because I didn't have an overview."
"They are easy to maintain."
"Cisco's technical support is the best and that's why everybody implements their products."
"Cisco Secure Firewall is a good solution. In some ways, it is a reactive solution and we have it sitting in a whitelist mode rather than a blacklist mode. It seems to work fairly well for us."
"The most valuable feature of Sophos UTM is the efficiency and mail filtering module."
"The product is extremely intuitive."
"Sophos UTM's best feature is SIM in the cloud, which combines the gateway solution and endpoint solution to send telemetry data to the cloud and provides full contact visibility regarding security."
"Advanced protection (Sophos Sandstorm) - Protects against crypto viruses in real-time."
"Brings greater visibility into the network traffic coming inside and passing away from the company."
"Sophos UTM's most valuable features are profiling and its simple configuration."
"The management suite is easy and the agent is easy to develop."
"The most valuable feature is that it is easy to administer."
"Web security solutions can be improved."
"I could not configure sFlow from the FortiGate graphical user interface. I realized that the sFlow configuration is available only from the CLI, and discovered that sFlow is not supported on virtual interfaces, such as VDOM links, IPsec, or GRE."
"My only complaint about FortiGate is a lack of QinQ VLAN tunneling. I haven't found this feature in any Fortinet product. You can do this on all Cisco routers, including the smaller models. However, QinQ isn't available on the biggest, most expensive Fortinet units. They still don't have that. I think now we're on software version 6.0, and they still haven't found a solution for QinQ. It isn't a dealbreaker, but that's my main complaint."
"The Web-filter in this solution is not very good."
"The room for improvement is about the global delivery time period. Usually I need to wait for almost one month to deliver it overseas. So if you can shorten the deliver time it'd be great."
"We had some issues in the beginning while setting it up, but after doing the firmware update, it is working fine."
"The product does need better support in the cloud environment. It's not exactly cloud-native right now."
"Their software support needs improvement. I would prefer to have better support for bug fixes. Sometimes, we open a ticket, and it is very difficult to get a solution. Specifically, we are not at all happy with their support for load balancing."
"I'm not a big fan of the FDM (Firepower Device Manager) that comes with Firepower. I found out that you need to use the Firepower Management Center, the FMC, to manage the firewalls a lot better. You can get a lot more granular with the configuration in the FMC, versus the FDM that comes out-of-the-box with it. FDM is like Firepower for dummies."
"The configuration in Firepower Management Center is very slow. Deployment takes two to three minutes. You spend a lot of time on modifications. Whereas, in FortiGate, you press a button, and it takes one second."
"The central management tool is not comfortable to use. You need to have a specific skill set. This is an important improvement for management because I would like to log into Firepower, see the dashboard, and generate a real-time report, then I question my team."
"They should improve their interface."
"I don't have to see all the object groups that have been created on that firewall. That's just something that I would really appreciate on the CLA, even though it already exists on the GUI."
"If Cisco could stop rebranding, combine all the CLIs/GUIs, and give a consistent experience, this would be great."
"The only con that I have really seen with it is the reporting structure. FirePOWER is good. It has been a great help because, before that, it was not good at all."
"I think they need to review their whole UI because it feels like it was created by a whole bunch of different teams of developers who didn't fully talk to each other. The net policy screen is just a mess. It should look like the firewall policy screen, and they should both act the same, but they don't. I feel like it's two different buildings or programming, who don't talk to each other, and that really annoys me."
"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 solution needs to do better at covering mobile devices, although they may have an integrated solution for that purpose."
"Email spam filtering only works if you have an on-prem Exchange server. It doesn't interface with Office 365 like the XG model. That would be one feature that they could improve. They're not going to do it because they're trying to push us all to XG."
"I didn't like it much. It suits only small businesses. It isn't scalable and reliable. There is a very critical issue with the power supply."
"Monitoring and reporting are areas that need improvement."
"We need to speed up the support."
"It's stable, but the reaction time of the GUI is terrible."
"During initial configuration, I encountered a few issues."
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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