We performed a comparison between OPNsense and Sophos XG based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Sophos XG’s single pane of glass makes it easy for users to manage the entire solution from anywhere. The solution is very light, stable, and provides excellent real-time control. Users feel OPNsense is not a good product for medium to large businesses, as it has some very limited features and needs better reporting and documentation.
"You can create multiple Virtual Domains (VDOMs), which are treated as separate firewall instances."
"The features that we have found most valuable are the SSL VPN and the User Portal."
"The technical support is great."
"It is a good source for firewall protection."
"This solution made it very easy to manage our bandwidth."
"The stability and scalability of this solution are satisfactory. Its SD-WAN, VPN, and URL filtering features are very useful."
"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."
"The main reason why I purchased the particular unit was that it had good reviews and what other people were saying as far as its completeness and its leading capabilities in terms of endpoint security was very good."
"The solution is good for a basic firewall for a small business or for home use."
"I find the solution to be user-friendly. It has a lot of reports and easy settings."
"The technical support is very good."
"The initial setup is easy. It only takes 15-30 minutes to deploy."
"It has firewall and VPN capabilities, which are very valuable features."
"The feature I find most valuable, is that the program helped me to realize all the requested functionality that was needed."
"The solution has high availability."
"OPNsense is easy to use and open source."
"The stability of Sophos XG is good, it has good performance."
"IPS and advanced threat protection (ATP) are the most valuable features. I am able to segment my network traffic and block incoming connections. It is also easy to use."
"Sophos is easy to use."
"The solution is stable. I've had very few problems with it."
"I have found the feature allowing you to manage everything from a centralized location beneficial."
"I like the functionality and the user interface."
"It is easy to implement."
"The solution has good performance and is easy to use."
"I think that the infrastructure for the VPN could be improved. The way that it is bundled also made it difficult to use and sell as it is too expensive."
"Fortinet FortiGate needs to improve the logging and reporting. Additionally, the next-generation application's policies should be improved. When they were released they had bugs."
"It would be a benefit if Fortinet would release a one-stop solution that is better integrated with other products and an automated emergency response system."
"There are a lot of bugs I have found in the solution and it is difficult to upgrade. These areas need improvement."
"I would like to have logs, monitoring, and reporting for a month without extra fees."
"There are some cloud-based features that could be much more flexible than they currently are."
"One area for improvement is the performance on the bandwidth demands for smaller devices, as well as better web filtering."
"The product does need better support in the cloud environment. It's not exactly cloud-native right now."
"The IPS solution could be more reliable."
"There should be more technical documentation."
"We did not like the fact that you have to configure everything with the graphic user interface. We have used other firewalls, such as FortiGate, that you can configure via code. OPNsense is not easy to integrate. When you are deploying via GitHub or another source repository, this is not possible. That's one thing we didn't like much."
"I think the most important thing is that it should be easily accessible, but currently, that doesn't seem to be the case. We need a hardware platform that's based on common standards and open computing principles, which would be like a commodity and benefit us greatly."
"I would like better documentation concerning the provided packages and their integration."
"The logging could improve in OPNsense."
"An area for improvement in OPNsense is the hardware, which needs to be updated more frequently. DNS blocking is another good feature I want to be added to the solution. pfSense has a peer-blocking feature that I also want to see in OPNsense."
"There are some add-ons that need enhancements to make management easier for users, especially the reporting features. Some reports don't show the level of detail I'm looking for, and I've had trouble installing certain add-ons, especially for Internet bandwidth shaping within my company."
"In the next release, I would like to see improvements made to the policy and simplify the policy-making, as the complexity of it makes it really tough."
"We are facing some technical issues with Sophos XG right now. We have already escalated this issue with the Sophos technical support. They seem to be working on it. We are satisfied with the technical support. They reply quickly to our queries, but sometimes take time upgrading their systems."
"Sophos can improve the debugging of the WAPS function."
"XG is at its end of life. People are moving to XGS."
"Support for this product is something that is really important, and it needs to improve."
"The main problem with Sophos XG today is that it doesn't have a feature where you actually know the quality of an international link, which would allow us to we know if the link is operational or not. We need more information. It's losing packets on the network. It's high latency. So, we need more information to know if the link is really bad or really good, and today, we will only know if it's working and this just isn't enough."
"When it comes to improvements that the vendor can make, we see that the cloud integration for managing all the firewalls is essentially a replacement of the on-prem version we had and is not sufficiently mature."
"It is complicated to get the reports if you are not experienced with Sophos."
OPNsense is ranked 3rd in Firewalls with 36 reviews while Sophos XG is ranked 7th in Firewalls with 192 reviews. OPNsense is rated 8.4, while Sophos XG is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of OPNsense writes "Robust network security and management offering a user-friendly interface, open-source flexibility, and cost-effectiveness, with challenges regarding initial setup and the absence of official support". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sophos XG writes "Easy to use and deploy with an improved pricing structure in place". OPNsense is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Untangle NG Firewall, Sophos UTM, IPFire and Cisco Secure Firewall, whereas Sophos XG is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Sophos XGS, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, SonicWall TZ and Meraki MX. See our OPNsense vs. Sophos XG report.
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