No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

Hillstone CloudEdge vs Sophos UTM comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Hillstone CloudEdge
Average Rating
10.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.8
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
Firewalls (47th)
Sophos UTM
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
119
Ranking in other categories
Unified Threat Management (UTM) (5th)
 

Featured Reviews

Albert-Wang - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Consultant at SiS Technologies
Comprehensive cloud security with robust threat protection and VPN capabilities
Hillstone CloudEdge is compatible with all the mainstream public cloud providers, such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Alibaba Cloud. This solution has a unified OS system for security products, ensuring that the virtual firewall has similar features to the on-premise solutions. Important features include a VPN, VTech VPN, SSL VPN, QoS, antivirus, threat protection, and sandbox capabilities.
Bashir Bashir - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager at Vegol
Firewall management has become simpler and now provides real-time visibility and bandwidth control
The features I have found most valuable in Sophos UTM are that it is much easier to configure, I appreciate the reporting side of it, and the rules are very straightforward to work with. Sophos UTM's real-time insights into network health help my organization because I get real-time reports on what is happening on my network, what is trying to access me, the destination, and all that. I can then be reactive or proactive, and for zero-day, I think it is beneficial because it can learn what my network does. If anything goes outside what it expects, it sends a report on Sophos Central, so I find zero-day makes my work a bit easier. The use of Sophos UTM's intuitive management console has impacted my security policy enforcement in that it is much easier to configure; I configure with information rather than with presumptions.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"I'd rate the solution nine out of ten."
"The solution is very easy to download and configure. The initial setup was very easy. The technical support is very good."
"I would recommend this product to any business that wants to protect its cloud environment, cloud server, or on-premises virtual servers."
"Hillstone CloudEdge is compatible with all the mainstream public cloud providers, such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Alibaba Cloud."
"It meets our compliance needs in an elastic computer environment."
"The solution has email firewall built in with all sorts of functionality, it is an absolutely excellent firewall, the logging is really good, you get great information about what's going on."
"The Sophos solution provides a branch to head office distributed network for a construction company across New Zealand, and the reliability of the equipment makes it possible to provide stable connections and is easy to implement and support."
"For the features, how well it works, and how easy it is to use, I would give Sophos a ten out of ten."
"The initial setup is pretty easy."
"The solution's sandboxing, application center, and database engine are good."
"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."
"Less and faster administration, full control of traffic, and a lot of futures included in the base price."
 

Cons

"The solution needs more granular level reporting on system usage."
"There is room for improvement in AI features, particularly for zero-day attacks and providing maintenance guidance."
"Enhancing the user interface to achieve the same level of flexibility as the older UTM interface could improve the product."
"With artificial intelligence, there is room for improvement in all antivirus and security software."
"The memory and processing were problematic. The interface could be better."
"While the product was originally with Astaro the low end (1xx) units had serious reliability issues and support was extremely challenging to engage with."
"There is absolutely no support when using AWS. If you buy the on-premise Sophos solution, you get support."
"I wish the internet failover worked better."
"Its identification of users without the need of setting up Proxies or Identity software could be better, that is probably the trickiest section to setup."
"It is a pretty straightforward setup, but it should be some sort of documentation that takes you step-by-step to help set it up for your VPC."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"The problem with the Sophos is not the cost of the hardware but the cost of the modules, packages, and the subscription."
"The AWS Marketplace product should be a better fit, but it is a little pricier."
"I think the pricing of Sophos is very fair."
"The price is comparable to other products of this kind."
"We originally purchased the solution through the AWS Marketplace. I started my proof of concept doing pay-as-you-go, then moved to a VAR for a 'Bring Your Own Licence' (BYOL) licensing model. The BYOL license still requires you to accept the terms of the AWS Marketplace to deploy."
"The prices can be better, they could make it a lot cheaper."
"I would recommend to follow Sophos’ sizing guidelines for choosing which license and model to use. Sophos has their own way of going about this and supplies partners with all the information required. If you follow their documentation and guidelines, there should be zero questions about licensing and sizing."
"This solution is less expensive than FortiGate."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Firewalls solutions are best for your needs.
902,894 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Comparison Review

it_user216600 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Technical Consultant with 51-200 employees
Jan 3, 2016
Sophos UTM vs. Fortinet FortiGate
I have used both Sophos and Fortinet products in production and I have found the Sophos UTM appliances (hardware and virtual) to be a better fit most of the time -- with a few caveats which I will touch on below. In both instances, the transition from TMG will be mostly straightforward. The main…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Construction Company
12%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business75
Midsize Enterprise28
Large Enterprise27
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Hillstone CloudEdge?
There is room for improvement in AI features, particularly for zero-day attacks and providing maintenance guidance. More AI features would be beneficial.
What is your primary use case for Hillstone CloudEdge?
Our primary use case is to provide cloud-based security solutions for customers using public cloud platforms. We distribute Hillstone CloudEdge and work with its various solutions to ensure securit...
What are the biggest technical differences between Sophos UTM and Fortinet FortiGate?
As a solution, Sophos UTM offers a lot of functionality, it scales well, and the stability and performance are quite good. The most valuable features for me are their web and email filtering. I wou...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Sophos UTM?
The pricing for Sophos UTM is reasonable; I do not have an issue with it, though I was considering RED because I have different sites I wanted to connect, and instead of doing site-to-site, the RED...
What needs improvement with Sophos UTM?
I would like to improve Sophos UTM in that there is software I use that goes deeper in the reporting on usage. There is software called Fastvue that breaks down everything in the firewall and whate...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Astaro
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

LinkTime
One Housing Group
Find out what your peers are saying about Fortinet, Netgate, Cisco and others in Firewalls. Updated: May 2026.
902,894 professionals have used our research since 2012.