We performed a comparison between Meraki MX and Sophos UTM based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Unified Threat Management (UTM) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."I love the simplicity of Meraki MX — specifically, the simplicity of the dashboard."
"It prevents us from being hacked and delivers information about who and where the attack came from."
"In a week, we can make new policy and view what all our users did."
"I think cloud management is key. The cloud management and support are the two things that make the product great."
"The cloud management system is really valuable."
"Since it has an integrated dashboard for all the products, customers can get complete network analytics regarding what the user is doing, monitoring, and observing."
"What I like best about Meraki MX is that it's easy to deploy remotely. The product works. It has automatic updates. I also like that Meraki MX is a brilliant device. You turn it on, stick the key in there, activate it, and then you're done. Meraki MX does what my customers need at the end of the day, so I also like that."
"The solution is good for load balancing."
"It allows our developers to be able to securely log into servers to deploy and manage software."
"It helps us with protection, with concurrent use of the VPN."
"The product is extremely intuitive."
"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."
"It's a stable solution."
"The stability of Sophos UTM is very good. The solution has been stable since Sophos took over Cyberoam which was the original company providing this solution."
"The most valuable feature of Sophos UTM is the endpoint protection feature."
"It is a very good product. The threat monitoring process is the most valuable feature."
"MX can only be managed via a web interface, but I'm accustomed to using a CLI or a graphical interface. I would also like to see more reporting features. It doesn't provide enough information for me to know precisely about some clients."
"Expensive licensing and firewall stops immediately working if the license is not renewed at expiration date."
"It would be nice to get detailed logging information without third-party software."
"In the next release, because the security is pretty basic, I think they could include additional security features."
"We have been having a problem with the VPN. When the energy goes down and is back again, the VPN link doesn't get established. We have to manually turn off the modems and other pieces of equipment and manually establish the VPN. It has been around one month since we have been having this problem, and we don't have enough support from Meraki to solve the problem."
"The solution's pricing should be reduced."
"I do not have the kind of feature I need for SSL decryption in Meraki MX. It would be great to see the SSL decryption feature in Meraki MX."
"Pricing is an area where the solution lacks since it is an expensive tool."
"The reporting could be a lot better."
"In short, the UI and UX are the areas of improvement in Sophos UTM and similar solutions compared to Palo Alto."
"The solution needs to do better at covering mobile devices, although they may have an integrated solution for that purpose."
"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."
"The solution needs better integration with captive portals and XGs."
"I would like to see Sophos UTM add support for all the new threat-detection technologies and the ability to respond to novel security threats that come along every day."
"I would like them to move from the Classic Load Balancer to the Network Load Balancer. This would make it easier to do certain things with Amazon. They are able to do some enhancements with Network Load Balancer that they are unable to do with Classic Load Balancer."
"The solution is not scalable."
Meraki MX is ranked 2nd in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 57 reviews while Sophos UTM is ranked 1st in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 110 reviews. Meraki MX is rated 8.2, while Sophos UTM is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Meraki MX writes "Cost-effective, simplified, easy to manage, and reliable with advanced security features and granular visibility". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sophos UTM writes "It's a highly stable platform with very few hardware issues". Meraki MX is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Cisco Secure Firewall, Sophos XG and Zyxel Unified Security Gateway, whereas Sophos UTM is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Fortinet FortiGate, Sophos XG, OPNsense and Juniper SRX Series Firewall. See our Meraki MX vs. Sophos UTM report.
See our list of best Unified Threat Management (UTM) vendors.
We monitor all Unified Threat Management (UTM) 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.
To be honest, if you are still buying firewall appliances and UTM licenses you are already behind a very obvious requirement to move to Cloud security. Buying UTM does not solve the growing risk of mobility and cloud application delivery. It would be worthwhile reading Gartner's SASE paper on security transformation. Or research Zscaler, who has been delivering this model for 10 years.
If a user is in your network behind your UTM, what stops him from connecting to his mobile phone Hotspot and bypassing all UTM, DLP, etc. Security has to move from the network to the endpoint. Protection regardless of location, device or network. Anything less is a massive compromise and a false sense of actual security.
Sophos gives on-premise UTM functionalities that work like traditional UTMs (such as FortiGate, Firepower and the likes). Meraki MX devices are managed from the cloud and are subscription-based but also extremely easy to configure.
If you want a very easy to configure solution with a minimum IT staff and prefer OPEX over CAPEX, go with Meraki.
If you want on-premise control, and prefer CAPEX over OPEX, go with Sophos.
I haven't had any experience with Sophos, but in small business environments I've found the Meraki devices to be needlessly complex. As one who has worked quite a bit with enterprise Cisco devices, I can't say I'm surprised. In my opinion, complexity doesn't necessarily denote better functionality.
Most concerning to me, though, the Meraki devices also stop functioning entirely if you don't renew. their licenses, and it's some $500 per year *per device.* Any situation where a license not being reactivated can shut down your entire network is a huge concern, particularly at such high cost. We aren't talking Karen not being able to use Acrobat or something here... we're talking entire site outage. That is enough to make any technician worth their salt have a mild seizure.
When it comes to Security, I have very good experiences with Sophos, I can say the security solution is absolutely great in Sophos. Whereas I have never used Meraki, so I can't comment anything on it.
SD-WAN; no experience on any of the requested products, so better not to make any false comment/advice.