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."The interface is very user-friendly and I like it very much."
"There are lots of features and most of them are deployed for internet security. Users are protected if they accidentally go to some malicious sites."
"The simplicity of the configuration and the stability of the product are most valuable. The VPN concentrator is very useful."
"The IPS is good. It protect my network from attackers."
"The most valuable features are the policies, filtering, and configuration."
"The pipe filter application is an outstanding feature."
"A strong point of FortiGate is that the graphical interface is complete and easy to use, especially if we think there is a list of operations that we are able to perform inside."
"The features that prevent internet connections, the filtering are the most valuable because we did not have any internet protection before."
"The tool's most valuable feature is its scalability. You will only have to pay less for scaling up. Its notable benefit is deployment complexity. Regional deployment is simpler compared to on-premise setup."
"We are using gateways, and I appreciate the high-availability gateways they have. They stand out more than the competitors."
"The product has allowed us to develop applications from the cloud - even with large environments and well-segmented security lines."
"Now, we can filter which websites users can access and block categories that are a risk. For example, we can block social media and gambling sites. This has helped to decrease the risk of access to malicious content on the internet."
"It improves the availability of engineers to carry out projects."
"The visibility is most valuable. It allows us to see all of our devices from one place, and it gives us the ability to manage push updates and things like that from one place."
"Auto-scaling and zero touch are valuable features."
"The most valuable feature is the monitoring. We can easily monitor what kind of stuff comes over to our network and we can then check the dashboard and work accordingly."
"Stability-wise, I rate this solution a ten out of ten...Scalability-wise, I rate this solution a ten out of ten."
"I have no problem with the cost or licensing of this solution. This is a primary reason whay I wanted this solution. It does the same thing cheaper than other name brands."
"The initial setup is pretty easy."
"The most valuable feature is the price. I've been requesting prices all over these years between different solutions like Fortinet, Palo Alto, and Check Point and Sophos has been the cheapest and the best of all of them that I have tried. I have been working with Fortinet, it's a fact that the price is surprisingly better."
"The most valuable feature of Sophos UTM is the simple-to-use interface."
"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."
"Sophos UTM's best feature is SIM in the cloud, which combines the gateway solution and endpoint solution to send telemetry data to the cloud and provides full contact visibility regarding security."
"The most valuable features of Sophos UTM are the ease of use, it is very user-friendly. You can understand what they implement in the new firmware, and it's easy to manage the firewalls."
"The support from Fortinet FortiGate could improve. They are not easily accessible when we need them. They could improve their response time."
"They have to just improve its performance when we enable all UTM features. When you enable all the features, the performance of FortiGate, as well as of Sophos and SonicWall, goes down."
"The cloud features can be improved."
"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."
"FortiLink is the interface on the firewall that allows you to extend switch management across all of your switches in the network. The problem with it is that you can't use multiple interfaces unless you set them up in a lag. Only then you can run them. So, it forces you to use a core type of switch to propagate that management out to the rest of the switches, and then it is running the case at 200. It leaves you with 18 ports on the firewall because it is also a layer-three router that could also be used as a switch, but as soon as you do that, you can't really use them. They could do a little bit more clean up in the way the stacking interface works. Some use cases and the documentation on the FortiLink checking interface are a little outdated. I can find stuff on version 5 or more, but it is hard to find information on some of the newer firmware. The biggest thing I would like to see is some improvement in the switch management feature. I would like to be able to relegate some of the ports, which are on the firewall itself, to act as a switch to take advantage of those ports. Some of these firewalls have clarity ports on them. If I can use those, it would mean that I need to buy two less switches, which saves time. I get why they don't, but I would still like to see it because it would save a little bit of space in the server rack."
"They should offer special pricing to premium partners and customers."
"With FortiGate, the main complaint that I have heard is about the technical support."
"The user interface could be improved."
"It's meeting our needs at this time. If I could make it better, it would be by making it more standalone. That would be beneficial to us. I say that because our current platform for virtualization is VMware. The issue isn't any fault of Check Point, it's more how the virtualization platform partners allow for that partnership and integration. There has to be close ties and partnerships between the vendors to ensure interoperability and sup-portability. There is only so far that Check Point, or any security vendor technology can go without the partnership and enablement of the virtualization platform vendor as it relies on "Service Insertion" to maintain optimal performance."
"The biggest room for improvement is that, for a long time now, they've moved everything over to R80 but they still maintain some of the stuff in the old dashboard. They need to "buy in" and move everything to the modern dashboard so that you don't have to go to one place and to another place, at times, to configure the environment. It's time they just finish what they started and put everything in the new, modern dashboard."
"The initial setup is complex and could be made simpler."
"The solution’s technical support, DNS security and training could be improved."
"The operations require skilled manpower with extended experience of working with networking systems for better results."
"In the next release, including VRF support would be highly beneficial."
"From the policy optimization point of view, they can do better. This is not just for CloudGuard. CloudGuard is one little piece managed by Check Point. They can also integrate a third-party policy management solution to improve that. For example, Tufin is focused on policy optimization and management."
"Check Point has a history of moving fast with software release and upgrade cycles which are difficult to keep up with at times."
"Sophos UTM could improve if there was no limitation on users."
"The five-factor authentication needs improvement."
"Updates come out agonizingly slowly, a trickle."
"They could definitely improve on the support, especially in other countries."
"It is a little too CPU resource intensive, so we would like to see improvements there."
"When we call support, we get put on hold for a long time."
"There is absolutely no support when using AWS. If you buy the on-premise Sophos solution, you get support."
"During initial configuration, I encountered a few issues."
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Check Point CloudGuard Network Security is ranked 5th in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 119 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 "The solution has good threat emulation, threat extraction, and reporting features". 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, Cisco Secure Firewall, Akamai Guardicore Segmentation and Palo Alto Networks VM-Series, 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.
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