We performed a comparison between Fortinet FortiGate, Netgate pfSense, and Sophos UTM based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Netgate, Fortinet, OPNsense and others in Firewalls.
"The Intrusion Prevention System and the web filtering are both working well."
"The security on offer is very good."
"The Fortinet FortiGate local partners were good. I did not have direct contact with Fortinet support."
"FortiGate firewalls are user-friendly, and I like the security profiling features."
"The initial installation is very straightforward."
"UTM/NGFW features and FortiCloud for logs and backups are awesome."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the analytics."
"It's a firewall that secures our internal network. I have been using it since 2013, and I find that most of the features are advanced, and very user friendly."
"The initial setup is easy."
"The initial setup was straightforward, therefore I wanted to continue using the product."
"This solution has increased the level of security, given us more control, provided a deep insight into network traffic, and is a great VPN solution."
"It is very easy to use. The interface is quite understandable. There is a good community, and I can take over at any time I want. If there is anything wrong with it, I could just reinstall the whole thing and start all over again, and I'll be up again in less than a few minutes"
"The firewall sensor is highly effective, and it's easy to deploy. You can deploy pfSense with limited hardware resources. It's not necessary to have an appliance with much RAM to make it work. It's cost-effective and performs well."
"I like pfSense's security features."
"The ability to create a VPN allows me to monitor branch offices from a central location."
"Routing, load balancing, Traffic Limiter and queues. Since this company relies on an Internet connection, having these features is a must."
"It helps us with protection, with concurrent use of the VPN."
"The stability of Sophos UTM is very good. The solution has been stable since Sophos took over Cyberoam which was the original company providing this solution."
"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."
"The most valuable feature of Sophos UTM is reporting, it is flexible. I can monitor the end user's devices, even when they are not on my network. It has good drill-down capabilities."
"The initial setup is pretty easy."
"Technical support is very responsive."
"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."
"They are all good, but most-used are Network Protection and Web Filtering."
"Fortinet FortiGate needs to improve to be on par with its competitors, such as Palo Alto and Sophos. They are the market leaders. Fortinet FortiGate needs to improve its capabilities. However, we are happy with Fortinet FortiGate."
"It would be nice if backups could more easily migrate between different models."
"The performance could be a bit better. Right now, I find it to be lacking. Having good performance is very important for our work."
"Fortinet FortiGate can be integrated with different platforms. They have integrations in place, but I can't say they're 100%."
"A couple of things I've seen that need improvement, especially in terms of a hard coding. The driver-level active moment really is out-of-the-box and we have to have contact the customer support and sometimes it is difficult to resolve."
"FortiGate support could do some improvements on their IPv6 configuration. Right now it's still in the very early stage for utilizing in an enterprise level network environment."
"The visibility of the network can be better. The GUI can be improved for better visibility of the network flow. Other solutions have better GUI in terms of network visibility."
"The central management for the FortiGate Fortinet Firewall needs improvement. They have the manager to do the essential management for both SD-WAN and for the security policy. They should also improve the SD-WAN function."
"Ultimately, we'd like something stronger, and something that can handle threats better in real-time."
"I'd like to find something in pfSense that is more specific to URL filtering. We have customers who would like to filter their web traffic. They would like to be able to say to their employees, "You can surf the web, but you cannot get access to Facebook or other social media," or "You can surf the web, but you're not allowed to gamble or watch porn on the web." My technicians say that doing this kind of stuff with pfSense nowadays is not easy. They can implement some filters using IP addresses but not by using the names of the domains and categories. So, we are not able to exclude some categories from the allowed traffic, such as porn, gambling, etc. To do that, we have to use another product and another web filter that uses DNS. I know that there are some third-party products that could work with pfSense, but I'd like the native pfSense solution to do that."
"More documentation would be great, especially on new features because sometimes, when new features come out, you don't get to understand them right off the bat. You have to really spend a lot of time understanding them. So, more documentation would be awesome."
"We would like to see ready-made profiles to cover most users' needs."
"As an open-source solution, there are so many loopholes happening within the product. By design, no one is taking ownership of it, and that is worrisome to me."
"There are some bias issues and some intrusions in our network that have to be addressed. So, we're thinking of changing this firewall to something like a professional hardware-enabled firewall."
"It needs to be more secure."
"A way to clean squid cache from the GUI."
"In Sophos UTM there is always a problem with the routing tables. If you want to see the routing table, you have to use the UI. You can't do it via a web browser. The routing table is better in Fortinet."
"Last year, Sophos had some major internal management changes that negatively impacted their support."
"It is a little too CPU resource intensive, so we would like to see improvements there."
"The solution needs to do better at covering mobile devices, although they may have an integrated solution for that purpose."
"There is absolutely no support when using AWS. If you buy the on-premise Sophos solution, you get support."
"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."
"Monitoring and reporting are areas that need improvement."
