We performed a comparison between Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls 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."It is a safe product."
"We've found the solution to be pretty stable."
"It has improved our security capabilities."
"Easy to use support and licensing portal as well as activation process."
"The most important features of Fortinet FortiGate are the Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) and firewall control applications."
"Fortinet FortiGate's reliability is valuable."
"Customers want to load balance more than eight lines or six internet lines. FortiGate is the only solution that can accomplish this."
"It's great for capturing the traffic and troubleshooting it."
"Flexible and integrates well with apps and other security tools."
"The application awareness feature that recognizes application IDs and vulnerability protection are Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls' most valuable features."
"The App-ID feature is the coolest feature because you don't need to open a new port. Apps are directly linked to the port. It provides one of the best ways to lock down the additional port switch."
"There are many valuable features, such as wireless cloud features."
"A feature introduced by Palo Alto with the version 10-OS is embedded machine learning in the core of the firewall to provide inline, real-time attack prevention. Machine learning analyzes the network traffic and detects if there is any usual traffic coming from outside to inside. Because of Palo Alto, organizations detect around 91% of malicious attacks using machine learning. The machine learning helps customers by implementing firewalls in critical and air gap areas so there is no need to integrate with the cloud sandbox."
"This is arguably the best security protection that you can buy."
"The solution's most valuable feature is the robust firewall, which we can also use as a UTM device."
"I can enable the features I want and configure the policies based on the user and not all users and network traffic, making firewall management much easier."
"The features that I've known to be most valuable are both the web security features as well as the web firewall capabilities. As a partner of Sophos firewall, we have some clients and they are using Sophos firewall UTM and we are using it as well."
"It's a stable solution."
"I like the web filtering options."
"Sophos UTM has a good user interface and granular security controls."
"I would recommend UTM over XG because it's easier to manage."
"Sophos UTM is the simplest of these products to setup."
"The stability, overall, is excellent. I haven't had a problem in the last two years."
"So far, the solution has been problem-free."
"One area for improvement is the performance on the bandwidth demands for smaller devices, as well as better web filtering."
"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."
"WAN load-balancing could be a lot better at detecting when a link is poor or inconsistent, and not just flat out dead."
"It claims it does DLP, but the degree and level of controls are very basic."
"One of the problems I was having was with user mapping, and it is an issue for which I have escalated tickets with Fortinet support."
"There are a lot of bugs I have found in the solution and it is difficult to upgrade. These areas need improvement."
"The updates Fortinet provides are sometimes unstable."
"I would like to see a more intuitive dashboard."
"The machine learning in Palo Alto NG Firewalls for securing networks against threats that are able to evolve and morph rapidly is good, in general. But there have been some cases where we get false positives and Palo Alto has denied traffic when there have been new updates and signature releases. Valid traffic gets blocked. We have had some bad experiences with this. If there were an ability, before it denies traffic, to get some kind of notification that some traffic is going to be blocked, that would be good."
"PA-220 Next-Generation Firewall would be perfect if it has spam filtering."
"I would like to see it provide us with intelligent information from the data that it captures, within the same cost."
"I would like the option to be able to block the traffic from a specific country in a few clicks."
"When you delete and add a new rule, because of the one hundred rule limit, if the new rule has an ID that is greater than one hundred, even though you have fewer than that, it will not work."
"The support could be improved."
"The configuration part could be improved. It's very difficult to configure. It doesn't have a user-friendly interface. You have to know Palo Alto deeply to use it."
"Enhancements could potentially be made to the firmware to improve its inspectability."
"The classification segregation of applications lacks sufficient definition."
"It's stable, but the reaction time of the GUI is terrible."
"Sophos customer support could use some improvement."
"It needs a better user interface. The one they have is not so good."
"The solution's technical support for India needs to be improved."
"The virus updates will always depend on new viruses that are discovered. Maybe they can send a notification or a reminder for update time."
"Stay away from the wireless models, since you cannot put them in HA. They start to give you some weird issues once you start getting into multiple SSIDs and networks."
"The technical support team’s response time could be improved."
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Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is ranked 6th in Firewalls with 162 reviews while Sophos UTM is ranked 1st in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 110 reviews. Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is rated 8.6, while Sophos UTM is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls writes "We get reports back from WildFire on a minute-by-minute basis". 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 NG Firewalls is most compared with Check Point NGFW, Azure Firewall, Meraki MX, Sophos XG and Juniper SRX Series Firewall, whereas Sophos UTM is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Sophos XG, OPNsense, Cisco Secure Firewall and Untangle NG Firewall. See our Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls vs. Sophos UTM report.
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