We performed a comparison between Check Point NGFW and Sophos XG based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Features: Check Point NGFW is praised for its extensive security features, centralized management, and virtualization capabilities. It is highly regarded in terms of comprehensive protection and adaptability. Sophos XG is known for its usability, user-friendly interface, and straightforward installation process. Both options provide robust threat defense and the ability to expand as needed.
Check Point NGFW, needs to improve various aspects, including integration with other infrastructures, hardware upgrades, cost and pricing, stability and security, UI, complexity issues, redundancy options, and memory management. Sophos XG needs improvements in antivirus features, graphical interface and performance, bandwidth management and VPN capabilities, reporting and user management, support and response time, and specific issues and feature requests.
Service and Support: Some customers have found Check Point NGFW's customer service to be helpful and responsive, while others believe there is room for improvement. Sophos XG's support has received both positive and negative feedback. Some customers have found it to be good and helpful, while others have been dissatisfied with unhelpful and unresponsive support.
Ease of Deployment: The initial setup for Check Point NGFW can range in difficulty, with some users finding it simple while others find it more challenging. Knowledge and experience may be required for certain configurations and migrations. The initial setup for Sophos XG is generally seen as uncomplicated and straightforward, although some users may struggle if they are unfamiliar with the product.
Pricing: Check Point NGFW is known for its high setup cost, particularly when compared to other products. Users find it challenging to add new licensing to existing devices, especially for larger enterprise-level devices. Sophos XG provides flexible pricing options based on the required functionality, offering reasonable and competitive pricing, particularly for educational institutions.
ROI: Check Point NGFW stands out for its cost savings, simplicity, and effective security enforcement. Sophos XG offers a high ROI by reducing support expenses and enhancing security practices.
Comparison Results: Sophos XG is the favored product when compared to Check Point NGFW. Users find the initial setup of Sophos XG to be simple. They appreciate the functionality and user interface of Sophos XG, as well as its extensive protection against threats. The pricing for Sophos XG is considered fair and the technical support is satisfactory.
"The security features that they have are quite good. On top of that, their licensing model is quite nice where they don't charge you anything for the SD-WAN functionality for the firewall."
"The solution is stable."
"I'm pretty happy with its reliability. It is also very scalable."
"The wireless control is helpful."
"It has very easy management and an amazing ETM configuration."
"FortiGate firewalls are user-friendly, and I like the security profiling features."
"Initial setup is easy to configure."
"The integration with Active Directory is one of the good features. Most of the customers are now looking for the Single Sign-on feature. So, being able to integrate Active Directory with the firewall is useful. It is also easy."
"The most valuable feature is the highly integrated NGFW features such as the IPS or Check Point Identity Awareness, which makes Check Point the best choice on the market."
"The scalability is very good."
"It is always on the top of the list of best firewall solutions."
"From the logs, you can trace back to the rule with a click, which makes it easy to investigate cases."
"The Check Point API let me make 100 net rules in just 10 minutes, which saved us time."
"Its greatest asset lies in its user-friendly interface, making it exceptionally suitable and reliable for managing gateways."
"The level of security is excellent. It protects our organization well."
"We can define security policies based on a variety of criteria, including user identity, application, and content type."
"The firewall provides network visibility and reporting capabilities, constantly improving over time. It can be integrated with the cloud console, allowing centralized management of multiple firewalls. integration with endpoint security products ensures seamless traffic flow and rule enforcement, even when endpoints are not directly connected to the firewall."
"We have found that the simplicity of the XG 210 is its most valuable feature."
"The most valuable feature is the Intercept X. It is the advanced features that are used for malware detection, and antivirus."
"Price-wise the solution offers acceptable rates. You can find cheaper solutions on the market but when you go cheaper you have fewer features. Today, based on iQuate market the price is very reasonable and affordable, and it's good if you get a good discount. Discounts can be offered by the vendor. If it's a competitive upgrade which means the customer is upgrading from another vendor, Sophos provides extra discount so they can win the deal. In general, it is a good price."
"The most valuable is the synchronized security between Sophos XG and Sophos endpoint because it provides a lot of visibility about unknown applications. The endpoint shares the information of unknown applications, and you can learn about those applications and create policies to allow or block those applications."
"Sophos began with a basic version and evolved into something more efficient in terms of performance."
"The product has all the latest features."
"I've tried out Sophos XG a little. It has a good interface that's very user-friendly, but I haven't used all of its functions because I'm only configuring and running the system."
"The pricing could be reduced or include the first year warranty."
"Improvement is needed in the Web Filter quotas to restrict users with allocated quotas."
"Lacks sufficient security options."
"I would like to see improvements in the product's application rules."
"This product needs to have an analysis feature, rather than having the analysis done through the integration of a different product."
"There are some license issues. Not every feature must have a separate license. There must be some of kind synergy between the license so we don't have to pay for every individual license that we would like to have."
"The security of Fortinet FortiGate could improve."
"The improvement is related to logs. Instead of the CLI, we should be able to have more insights into the logs of the firewall in the GUI."
"There is nothing more that I need in terms of improvement."
"Lacks some integration with other solutions."
"They should integrate all blades to use a single policy rather than multiple."
"IoT should be considered in future development."
"Stability issues. I built out this firewall in a cluster, and I had stability issues day one. Needs to be rebooted frequently. Tunnels need to be bounced frequently. Their hardware compatibility guide, when I built out the servers to host them on, was not accurate."
"It's expensive, but its price is reasonable looking at its functionality and power"
"Hopefully, in the future, these will be much more plug-and-play and orchestrated from a single administration console."
"One of the most complicated aspects is the VPN Configuration, which should be simplified in future releases."
"Their support is fairly good, and they come back to me. I've had an issue once or twice where I couldn't understand what the support person was saying because those calls were probably routed to India. They were a bit difficult to understand, but it is generally not an issue."
"Everything is working as expected at this moment, but the anti-spam solution in Sophos XG needs to be improved. It needs more granular features and more stability. The anti-spam solution currently doesn't have many features, and we would like to have more features. At this moment, there is no expression filter for anti-spam. We need something to be able to filter subjects or attachments in emails based on the keyword. Sometimes, there is an issue with anti-spam, and Sophos XG suddenly stops processing incoming or outgoing emails. The only solution for this issue is to restart the appliance. Their support should be improved. It takes a long time to escalate a support case from level one to level two."
"The product's user interface has certain shortcomings where improvements are required."
"Scalability could be improved. It could be better."
"I used to work with Fortinet, and sometimes I see that the SD-WAN feature could be better because it's much easier in Fortinet."
"There could be some room for improvement in its pricing since my clients usually feel like the product is on the expensive side."
"Sophos needs improvements made to the console, such as host entry or defining rules directly from it."
"I've had experience with Sophos XG's threat intelligence features, and they provide good coverage, although I wouldn't say they're the best in the industry. The sandbox feature is available with top-tier subscriptions, allowing you to test content in a cloud sandbox. One improvement I'd suggest for Sophos XG is to make certain functionalities, like CR functionality, part of the default firewalling rather than exclusive to premium subscriptions. Enhancing DLP capabilities at the gateway level could significantly boost security for organizations."
Check Point NGFW is ranked 5th in Firewalls with 276 reviews while Sophos XG is ranked 7th in Firewalls with 192 reviews. Check Point NGFW is rated 8.8, while Sophos XG is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Check Point NGFW writes "Good antivirus protection and URL filtering with very good user identification capabilities". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sophos XG writes "Easy to use and deploy with an improved pricing structure in place". Check Point NGFW is most compared with Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Cisco Secure Firewall, Netgate pfSense, Azure Firewall and OPNsense, whereas Sophos XG is most compared with Netgate pfSense, OPNsense, Sophos XGS, SonicWall TZ and Cisco Secure Firewall. See our Check Point NGFW vs. Sophos XG report.
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