We performed a comparison between Fortinet FortiOS 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."The SD-WAN feature is the most valuable. This feature evolved from link load balancing. It has helped us in terms of our uptime and privatizing applications whenever we experience an outage. The SD-WAN feature has been a plus for us. Two-factor authentication has allowed us to add more users in terms of remote working. We have two-factor authentication for remote workers to authenticate them before they get on the network."
"The features that I have found most valuable are the SD-WAN and their IP4 policy."
"The network security and cloud security are most valuable."
"The feature I like most is the SD-WAN. It allows you to manage more than one ISP at the same time. And there is a high-availability mode, so if one of your ISPs is down, you still have a backup."
"FortiGate is very simple to manage and easy to use."
"Initial setup is straightforward. There weren't too many issues with setting it up. It takes one hour or so."
"FortiGate firewalls are user-friendly, and I like the security profiling features."
"It is a safe product."
"The SSL VPN is fee for use is most attractive."
"The VDOM (Virtual DOM) is a virtualized firewall that has some opportunities for flexibility that are an advantage in certain configurations."
"FortiOS allows us to set up alarms for blocked websites and SSL verifications. When someone tries to access a blocked site, the solution sends a notification to the IT manager's mailbox."
"This is an easy means of setting up high-availabilty firewall protection."
"Compared to other firewalls, the segmentation is much easier in FortiGate."
"All of the features in this solution are effective and efficient."
"A good network security system for medium-sized businesses with an excellent GUI interface that gives a graphic view of network status."
"FortiOS' most valuable features are management, security, and easy updates with no downtime."
"The solution is easy to handle and configure."
"The initial setup is pretty straightforward."
"Monitoring and reporting are areas that need improvement."
"The initial setup is pretty easy."
"Sophos SG UTM had all the basic functionality that you needed. It is user-friendly and easy to manage for any integrator."
"Scaling out cannot be easier, as there are many migration paths."
"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 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 Wi-Fi controller needs a lot of improvement."
"There is a lot of improvement needed with SSL-VPN."
"It does not have key authentication for admin access."
"I'm not sure if it's something that they already have or are developing something, however, we need some dedicated features for container security."
"Quality control on their firmware versions needs improvement. When they introduce new firmware, there tend to be bugs."
"Tunnel flapping was one of the major things I had seen wherein your internet link remains but your VPN tunnel is down. However, since I got a fix from the TAC team, I have not noticed it, but the customer complained a few times that they couldn't access the internet because of this problem."
"The support structure needs to be improved because every time we contact them, there is a delay in the response."
"Palo Alto has a feature called WildFire Analysis that is unavailable in FortiGate. WildFire is better than a sandbox because it can address zero-day threats and vulnerabilities. It can immediately identify zero-day threats from the cloud."
"I would like to see smaller and more frequent updates."
"I want to see a better integration or a better integration with the endpoint protection or with EDR with the security life cycle."
"The technical support is good. However, during the holidays they can get a little slow to respond."
"You can enable and disable certain modules in it. However, with disabling, nobody can really tell us if that module is disabled."
"The pricing of the product is too high."
"The support could be improved, Fortinet's response time is very slow. Setting up the VPN could be made much easier, especially when deployed with Azure."
"A switch should be introduced."
"There is room for improvement in the reporting part. The reporting is only for logging data, and it's just a tabulation of the log in the report. I would like to be able to take down more information in the event of an incident."
"I would like some features that are available in other brands. For example, I sometimes a person is using too much bandwidth, and it isn't easy to find this information in Sophos. Also, we have to switch connections manually when we are using a VPN and lose the MPLS connection. It isn't automatic."
"The application control is really bad. It needs a lot of enhancements. The traffic shaping and bandwidth control, and application control need a lot of work."
"Sophos UTM could improve the way the configuration has to be done. I have to do the configuration through the command line interface but if it could be done through the graphical user interface it would be much better."
"There were a lot of features and functionality in Sophos SG UTM but nothing was state of the art in terms of technology. You did not get the latest functions. It was very monolithic as it was based on an old Linux PuTTY system."
"Sophos UTM sometimes falls short in high-availability environments. They used to launch firmware that didn't work very well in a high-availability environment."
"Sophos should improve its ability to check something like bandwidth consumption for users or something more real-time."
"I didn't like it much. It suits only small businesses. It isn't scalable and reliable. There is a very critical issue with the power supply."
"There is still room for improvement in wireless protection. I don't mean their WiFi device is bad, but there are still things to improve on, such as WiFi roaming."
Fortinet FortiOS is ranked 15th in Firewalls with 73 reviews while Sophos UTM is ranked 1st in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 110 reviews. Fortinet FortiOS is rated 8.4, while Sophos UTM is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Fortinet FortiOS writes "Provides effective filtering features, good stability but initial setup is moderately challenging". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sophos UTM writes "It's a highly stable platform with very few hardware issues". Fortinet FortiOS is most compared with Fortinet FortiManager, Fortinet FortiWeb, Fortinet FortiGate-VM, Infoblox Advanced DNS Protection and Darktrace, whereas Sophos UTM is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Sophos XG, OPNsense, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls and Cisco Secure Firewall. See our Fortinet FortiOS vs. Sophos UTM report.
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