We performed a comparison between Palo Alto Networks VM-Series 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."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."
"FortiGate has a very strong unified threat management system."
"I like several features that this product has, such as antivirus and internet navigation inspection. It is also simple to use."
"Fortinet FortiGate is stable. It's used across all the countries, this is the way most multinationals run their system."
"The multi-tenancy feature is most valuable. It integrates very well with FortiManager and FortiAnalyzer."
"Fortinet FortiGate is user-friendly and affordable."
"It's very fast and easy to configure."
"It is very flexible to use."
"The main advantage of Palo Alto Networks VM-Series stems from the fact that you can access it with the help of cloud services."
"The solution enables organizations to enforce policies."
"Centralized management is valuable because it allows us to configure settings in one location and apply them across all three locations."
"In Palo Alto the most important feature is the App-ID."
"The most valuable features of the solution are its stability, ease of implementation, ease of operation, and security."
"The tool's cloud version makes application migration easy."
"Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is easy to maintain...From a security point of view, I find Palo Alto Networks VM-Series to be a better product compared to the other solutions in the market."
"The initial setup was straightforward."
"The product is extremely intuitive."
"Brings greater visibility into the network traffic coming inside and passing away from the company."
"It works well without any maintenance. So far, it has worked pretty well regardless of the traffic."
"The scalability is good."
"The packet filtering's great. You get out what you put into it. It works great as long as you know your security and configure everything adequately. If you just pop one in and it's not configured, then it's basically wide open. It kind of depends on the admin skill, but it's an excellent product."
"It is easy to manage."
"What I like about the solution is the ease of use."
"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."
"The main aspect of FortiGate that could be improved is load balancing. Our management team does not want to buy another appliance for only load balancing."
"Some of the software stability could improve."
"The performance could be a bit better. Right now, I find it to be lacking. Having good performance is very important for our work."
"There is one big configuration file with no separations for the unique VDOMs. Maybe they could separate individual VDOM configuration files with the root VDOM configuration file referencing the individual VDOM config files."
"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."
"The pricing could always be better."
"It needs more available central management."
"NGN, reporting and controls."
"It has to be more scalable for the deployment of VMs on the cloud."
"The solution must improve Zero Trust integration and use cases."
"There are various reports that come with the box or with the VMware, but you can only run them daily."
"I would like a way to do everything programmatically, or be able to copy the configs from different prices at different levels."
"It would be good if the common features work consistently in physical and virtual environments. There was an integration issue in the virtual deployment where it didn't report the interface counters, and we had to upgrade to the latest version, whereas the same thing has been working in the physical deployment for ages now. It seems that it was because of Azure. We were using VMware before, and we didn't have any such issues. We do see such small issues where we expect things to work, but they don't because of some incompatibilities. There also seems to be a limitation on how to do high availability in a virtualized environment. All features should be consistently available in physical and virtual environments. It is not always easy to integrate Palo Alto in the network management system. We would like to be able to compare two network management systems. They can maybe allow monitoring an interface through the GUI to create a reference or do a baseline check about whether your network monitoring system is actually giving you the correct traffic figures. You need traffic figures to be able to recognize the trends and plan the capacity."
"The web interface is very slow, and it needs to be faster."
"Palo Alto is that it is really bad when it comes to technical support."
"The current licensing model can be a sore point as we're paying for features we're not fully utilizing."
"Sophos UTM sometimes falls short in high-availability environments. They used to launch firmware that didn't work very well in a high-availability environment."
"The solution is not scalable."
"As it stands right now, when we have an internet failure on WAN1, it takes several minutes before our WAN2 connection picks up the traffic"
"Monitoring and reporting are areas that need improvement."
"It is a pretty straightforward setup, but it should be some sort of documentation that takes you step-by-step to help set it up for your VPC."
"The integration capabilities could be better."
"The scalability of the product is an area with certain shortcomings where improvements are required."
"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."
Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is ranked 10th in Firewalls with 52 reviews while Sophos UTM is ranked 1st in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 110 reviews. Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is rated 8.6, while Sophos UTM is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Palo Alto Networks VM-Series writes "Many features are optimized for troubleshooting real-time scenarios, saving a lot of time". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sophos UTM writes "It's a highly stable platform with very few hardware issues". Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is most compared with Azure Firewall, Fortinet FortiGate-VM, Cisco Secure Firewall, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls and Meraki MX, whereas Sophos UTM is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Sophos XG, OPNsense, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls and Cisco Secure Firewall. See our Palo Alto Networks VM-Series vs. Sophos UTM report.
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