We performed a comparison between Check Point CloudGuard Network Security 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."LinkGreat firewall capabilities"
"Initial setup is straightforward. There weren't too many issues with setting it up. It takes one hour or so."
"The FortiGate controls the user's activities and maximizes my bandwidth use overall."
"The web tutor and automatic rules by schedule are good features."
"The solution is very user-friendly."
"The IPS is good. It protect my network from attackers."
"The most valuable feature is the VDOM, which allows the customer to have multiple firewalls in a single campus."
"FortiGate has a strong security topic which allows all of the Fortinet devices to communicate and share information which makes their security more powerful."
"The tool's deployment is rapid. Its dashboard is also useful. It's easy to deploy both on-premises and in Azure. In an office with VMware running, deployment is a simple process. Similarly, in Azure, deployment is easy and scalable. Adding more CPUs is a straightforward task – just shut it down, modify the security, and restart. This ease of use translates into cost and resource savings, and faster deployment times."
"Its integration and use of features, such as advanced threat prevention, have helped us a lot with malware prevention and also with avoiding exposure to false positives."
"The tool's most valuable features are firewalls and IPS."
"The most valuable features are the VPN Blade, IPS Blade, the URL filtering, and the Applications Control Blade."
"The ease of administration with the cloud management extension and the cloud licensing model is valuable."
"The features of the solution which I have found most valuable are its flexibility and agility. It's a fully scalable solution, from our perspective. We can define scaling groups and, based on the load, it will create new instances. It's truly a product which is oriented toward the cloud mindset, cloud agility, and this is a great feature."
"Security effectiveness is the most valuable feature. Operational efficiency, reporting, and support are also good."
"The most valuable feature is threat prevention."
"The initial setup is pretty straightforward."
"Sophos integrates seamlessly, and we don't even feel it is running in the background."
"Configuration troubleshooting is eased by the use of the color-coded, live firewall log."
"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 has made our organization more secure, because we are using a VPN. We are not accessing services directly. It allows us to segregate some of the traffic for individuals which may be more of a developer role rather than an operational role needing access to developer resources, but not necessarily production operational resources."
"The most valuable features of the solution are application filtering and web filtering."
"The intrusion prevention is great, and I like dual virus scanning on the network layer because we scan it through Avira and Sophos. Web filtering is also a fantastic option for clients who want to really lock down internet access."
"It's a stable solution."
"They sometimes hide some features and if you want to enable them, you have to go in the CLI, enable the feature and configure it through the CLI. Customers, typically, like everything to be done by the GUI."
"There are a lot of bugs I have found in the solution and it is difficult to upgrade. These areas need improvement."
"One area for improvement is the performance on bandwidth demands for smaller devices, as well as better web filtering."
"Web security solutions can be improved."
"The way everything is set up could be easier. Currently, people need a lot of experience and knowledge to administer it and to link it to devices."
"Some features of Fortinet FortiGate are actually fee enabled that are inconvenient for deploying in production. Other issues relate to isolation with Cisco products and your server."
"Fortinet FortiGate could improve by having a frequent ask questions(FAQ) area for people to receive quick answers to popular questions. Additionally, it would be beneficial to have an SMS notification feature. For example, if you cannot access your email you could receive an SMS message."
"Lacks training for new features."
"If you compare the GUI with the Palo Alto and Forcepoint in the Cisco, they're very easy. Check Point, due to its design, is a little bit complex. They should make the GUI easy to use so that anyone can understand it easily, like Fortinet's GUI. Many companies end up using Fortinet because the GUI is very easy, and there's no need for training. They just deploy the box and do the configuration."
"The SD-WAN could be better."
"Its price is fair, but it can be more favorable."
"Check Point CloudGuard is not a feature-centric product because Check Point concentrates on security."
"CloudGuard functions just like any other firewall. It functions very well. The only thing that could maybe be improved would be to integrate some tools that are not integrated with the SmartConsole, like the SmartView Monitor that we need to open on a different application to access."
"I want the upgrades of their CloudGuard solution to major versions to be easier. We have had a few small hiccups. They have different types of cloud clusters called Geo Clusters, and those just cannot be upgraded past a certain point, which is a hurdle that we are currently experiencing."
"I haven't used CloudGuard Network Security in the past couple of years as I moved out of the network security role. However, based on my previous experience, there were improvements, especially in in-place upgrades. Regarding cost, it might be potentially cheaper considering resource utilization in Azure and VM costs, but licensing could be improved, possibly moving towards a simpler model."
"The challenge mainly revolves around the slower functionality of virtual IP switching in Azure Virtual Network compared to on-premise solutions. On-premise, switching between clusters is faster, taking only a few seconds, while in Azure, it can extend up to five minutes. The downtime is a concern for us."
"I don't really have any notes for improvements."
"Reporting: We have had to work manually in many of our reports."
"An area for improvement in Sophos UTM is load balancing because my company cannot use it currently. If Sophos could release a new configuration for the load balancing feature to work for my company, that would be great."
"Anti-phishing functionality should be improved."
"It needs a better user interface. The one they have is not so good."
"In short, the UI and UX are the areas of improvement in Sophos UTM and similar solutions compared to Palo Alto."
"The technical support only communicates via email. I would prefer to communicate directly with someone."
"There's an issue that when we deploy UTM on fiber, it automatically upgrades to the latest version without giving an option to stay on the current one."
More Check Point CloudGuard Network Security Pricing and Cost Advice →
Check Point CloudGuard Network Security is ranked 5th in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 121 reviews while Sophos UTM is ranked 1st in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 110 reviews. Check Point CloudGuard Network Security is rated 8.6, while Sophos UTM is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Check Point CloudGuard Network Security writes "Highly reliable, great visibility, and centralized management". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sophos UTM writes "It's a highly stable platform with very few hardware issues". Check Point CloudGuard Network Security is most compared with Azure Firewall, VMware NSX, Akamai Guardicore Segmentation, Cisco Secure Firewall and Fortinet FortiGate-VM, whereas Sophos UTM is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Sophos XG, OPNsense, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls and Cisco Secure Firewall. See our Check Point CloudGuard Network Security vs. Sophos UTM report.
See our list of best Unified Threat Management (UTM) vendors and best Firewalls vendors.
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