Palo Alto Networks K2-Series vs Sophos XG comparison

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123,063 views|89,961 comparisons
90% willing to recommend
Palo Alto Networks Logo
1,031 views|140 comparisons
96% willing to recommend
Sophos Logo
60,004 views|43,112 comparisons
93% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Palo Alto Networks K2-Series and Sophos XG 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.
To learn more, read our detailed Palo Alto Networks K2-Series vs. Sophos XG Report (Updated: March 2024).
768,415 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"Using this product makes the VPN seamless and almost invisible to me in the sense that I don't have to think about it.""Customers want to load balance more than eight lines or six internet lines. FortiGate is the only solution that can accomplish this.""I really like the captive portal feature for our guest network. It has nice VLAN features in terms of separating our network. The anti-virus is also good.""The CLI and GUI do a good job of putting a lot at your fingertips.""The wireless control is helpful.""The email protection and VPN features are the most valuable.""Easy to use support and licensing portal as well as activation process.""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."

More Fortinet FortiGate Pros →

"K2-Series' best features include its scalability, which is the best on the market.""Palo Alto has a unique solution for DNS security, which is very good.""It caters to typical use cases across various technologies. MDR and XDR, for example, focus on user and endpoint protection. It's pretty straightforward.""I have found that Palo Alto Networks K2-Series has the best security. They are more user-friendly, older firewalls used to have to be configured using the command-line interface, but in this solution, it can be done in the GUI.""As long as the solution is kept updated, it's pretty stable.""The scalability of the product is quite high.""The most valuable feature is availability.""The most valuable features are the virtualization of the firewall and the antivirus."

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"The most significant aspect is the protection it offers.""Sophos firewalls are scalable. They are pretty strong in security. So, when they provide any kind of firewall, they provide all the features such as anti-spam, antivirus, etc.""Everything is consolidated into a single box, offering comprehensive functionality, including Wi-Fi access and other features.""The stability of Sophos XG is good, it has good performance.""Sophos XG has cybersecurity. It integrates with the antivirus software.""Great reporting feature and great customer support.""The web application firewall reverse proxy is very good.""The performance is good."

More Sophos XG Pros →

Cons
"It could use better throughput on some of the smaller boxes for the branch offices.""Fortinet FortiGate can improve the integration with Active Directory. Additionally, I would like to have a Cloud Controller, such as they do in the Cisco Meraki solution.""It is very expensive, and their support is not very good. I hope that their technical support will be better in the future.""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.""A lack of integration between our data centers.""I need user-behavior analytics, to find threat scenarios from inside the organization, insider attacks. That would be very helpful for us. In addition, I would like next-generation features for small and medium businesses. These businesses require UTM, all in one product. Fortinet must include it.""Quality control on their firmware versions needs improvement. When they introduce new firmware, there tend to be bugs.""The UI could be improved."

More Fortinet FortiGate Cons →

"There are a lot of bugs in this solution.""The ease of management and configuration should be improved.""The scalability of Palo Alto Networks K2-Series is good. It is good for larger environments over smaller ones.""It would be really helpful to have dashboards that provide information on IOC blockings such as where and how many. It will also be good to know how many hashing files have been reported. It would also be nice to have easy access to this information. Otherwise, it's a painful, manual task.""The password function of the solution could be improved. Additionally, some of the processes take too long to complete.""Higher levels of support are excellent but new users may need additional options.""The technical support, and how they provide it to the client, needs to be improved.""We had some issues with upgrading in the past. They could make the process easier."

More Palo Alto Networks K2-Series Cons →

"The initial setup, specifically when activating the license, is a nightmare and is quite difficult.""While it is a secure solution, I believe it could be improved.""Recently, I've had a problem with updating things.""It is already secure but it could be better in terms of other breaches that may occur.""It is complicated to get the reports if you are not experienced with Sophos.""The solution should have the ability to be up to date with the most recent threats.""We recently did an upgrade on the Sophos XG firmware and we were surprised that after the upgrade, the automatic switch actually we were using did not work anymore.""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."

More Sophos XG Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "Fortinet has one or two license types, and the VPN numbers are only limited by the hardware chassis make."
  • "These boxes are not that expensive compared to what they can do, their functionality, and the reporting you receive. Fortinet licensing is straightforward and less confusing compared to Cisco."
  • "Go for long term pricing negotiated at the time of purchase."
  • "Work through partners for the best pricing."
  • "The value is the capability of having multiple services with one unique license, not having the limitation per user licensing schema, like other vendors."
  • "Easy to understand licensing requirements."
  • "​We saved a bundle by not needing all the past appliances from an NGFW.​"
  • "The cost is too high... They have to focus on more features with less cost for the customer. If you see the market, where it's going, there are a lot of players offering more features for less cost."
  • More Fortinet FortiGate Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "Products by the leader in the field are justifiably a bit more expensive compared to other vendors."
  • "The price of this solution is too high."
  • "This solution is expensive compared to other, similar products."
  • "This is an expensive solution, although you will get value for the price."
  • "Pricing is a sensitive issue because the cost is high in this market."
  • "Palo Alto firewalls are very expensive."
  • "It would be nice if they lowered their prices for small businesses."
  • "The price of the solution is expensive."
  • More Palo Alto Networks K2-Series Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "For licensing the XG 210, we paid approximately $3000 for three years. There are no additional fees on top of this."
  • "It's a suitable price and license."
  • "We are paying about $1,500 yearly for the Enterprise Plus. As far as I know, there aren't costs above this standard fee."
  • "The Sophos pricing, in general, is better than SonicWall, Fortinet, WatchGuard, or anybody else."
  • "We paid for our licensing for three years, upfront, and there are no costs in addition to the standard fees."
  • "The price is cheaper than that of some competing vendors."
  • "The pricing is flexible. Sophos looks at a country's economy and offers flexible pricing. This is how they have managed to penetrate the market."
  • "It's approximately $6,000 for each device."
  • More Sophos XG Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer: When you compare these firewalls you can identify them with different features, advantages, practices and usage at… more »
    Top Answer:From my experience regarding both the Sophos and FortiGate firewalls, I personally would rather use FortiGate. I know… more »
    Top Answer:As a solution, Sophos UTM offers a lot of functionality, it scales well, and the stability and performance are quite… more »
    Top Answer:In the best tradition of these questions, Feature-wise both are quite similar, but each has things it's better at, it… more »
    Top Answer:It caters to typical use cases across various technologies. MDR and XDR, for example, focus on user and endpoint… more »
    Top Answer:Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls have both great features and performance. I like that Palo Alto has regular threat… more »
    Top Answer:Hi Arvind P ,  The Sophos XG firewall has a number of models right from XG86 to XG135w under the 1U Desktop Form… more »
    Top Answer:The Sophos UTM is a UTM and Sophos XG is the NGFW. First, you must know about the difference between a UTM and NGFW… more »
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    FortiGate 60b, FortiGate 60c, FortiGate 80c, FortiGate 50b, FortiGate 200b, FortiGate 110c, FortiGate
    Learn More
    Overview

    Fortinet FortiGate enhances network security, prevents unauthorized access, and offers robust firewall protection. Valued features include advanced threat protection, reliable performance, and a user-friendly interface. It improves efficiency, streamlines processes, and boosts collaboration, providing valuable insights for informed decision-making and growth.

    Designed to handle growing throughput needs due to increasing amounts of application-, user-, and device-generated data, the K2-Series offers amazing performance and threat prevention capabilities to stop advanced cyberattacks and secure mobile network infrastructure, subscribers, and services.

    Sophos XG Firewall is a complete firewall solution that provides all the real-time security and insights you need to protect your network from ransomware and advanced threats. Sophos XG Firewall provides visibility into suspicious users, unknown and unwanted apps, encrypted traffic, and other threats. With its advanced artificial intelligence capabilities, Sophos XG Firewall immediately identifies potential risks and intrusions on web servers and networks.

    Sophos XG Firewall Features

    Sophos XG Firewall offers a wide range of security features, including:

    • Application control: Prevent widespread infections with XG’s Security Heartbeat. XG Firewall automatically identifies the source of an infection on a network and automatically prevents it from accessing other network resources.

    • Synchronized user ID: Eliminate the need for client or server authentication agents by sharing user identification between the endpoint and the firewall through Security Heartbeat.

    • Centralized management: Easily manage all activities with Sophos Central. The XG cloud management platform allows users to easily set up, manage, and monitor XG firewalls along with other Sophos products. Some of Sophos Central’s features include alerting, backup management, one-click firmware updates, and rapid deployments of new firewalls.

    • Lateral movement protection: Automatically isolate compromised systems at every point in the network to stop attacks dead in their tracks.

    • Network protection: Protect networks from attacks and threats while providing secure network access.

    • Web protection: Gain clear visibility and control over all users’ web and application activity.

    • Web server protection: Solidify web servers and applications against hacking attacks while providing secure web access.

    • Email protection: Consolidate email protection with anti-spam, DLP, and encryption. XG’s Live Anti-Spam provides protection from the most recent spam campaigns, phishing attacks, and malicious attachments. Data Loss Prevention automatically triggers encryption on sensitive data in outgoing emails.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Sophos XG Firewall stands out among its competitors, among other reasons, for its intrusion detection capabilities, its user-friendly management platform, and in general, for being a complete and robust firewall solution.

    Niranjan P., a network & system support engineer, writes, “Sophos is a comprehensive solution which allows me to configure all the attendant products, such as Sophos's firewall, endpoint, and encryption features. A nice feature of Sophos is that it offers in sync and heartbeat security. When my clients have a perimeter involving Sophos firewall and endpoints with Sophos Endpoint, they can communicate with each other.”

    Antonio D., sales manager at INFOSEC, notes, “The product has a console that is based in the cloud for all their products. In this console, they have email security, firewall security, endpoint security, et cetera. All of the products on offer in the console are very useful for us. The solution is stable. The solution works well for enterprises and large-scale organizations.”

    Antony M., ICT/HMIS supervisor at a healthcare company, writes, “The VPN feature is the most valuable. It has come in handy during this period when people are working from home. The filtering feature is also valuable because you can easily filter the sites that you don't want to visit. You can also set timely surfing quotas”

    Sample Customers
    1. Amazon Web Services 2. Microsoft 3. IBM 4. Cisco 5. Dell 6. HP 7. Oracle 8. Verizon 9. AT&T 10. T-Mobile 11. Sprint 12. Vodafone 13. Orange 14. BT Group 15. Telstra 16. Deutsche Telekom 17. Comcast 18. Time Warner Cable 19. CenturyLink 20. NTT Communications 21. Tata Communications 22. SoftBank 23. China Mobile 24. Singtel 25. Telus 26. Rogers Communications 27. Bell Canada 28. Telkom Indonesia 29. Telkom South Africa 30. Telmex 31. Telia Company 32. Telkom Kenya
    State of North Dakota, SEGA, Alameda County Office of Education, Temple University, VERGE, CAME
    Information Not Available
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Comms Service Provider16%
    Computer Software Company9%
    Financial Services Firm8%
    Manufacturing Company7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization20%
    Computer Software Company15%
    Comms Service Provider8%
    Manufacturing Company6%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm36%
    Comms Service Provider21%
    Computer Software Company21%
    Transportation Company7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company25%
    Energy/Utilities Company10%
    Real Estate/Law Firm8%
    Healthcare Company8%
    REVIEWERS
    Manufacturing Company11%
    Financial Services Firm9%
    Comms Service Provider8%
    Healthcare Company8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company17%
    Comms Service Provider12%
    Government6%
    Manufacturing Company6%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business48%
    Midsize Enterprise23%
    Large Enterprise30%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business27%
    Midsize Enterprise32%
    Large Enterprise41%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business41%
    Midsize Enterprise17%
    Large Enterprise41%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business27%
    Midsize Enterprise22%
    Large Enterprise52%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business61%
    Midsize Enterprise24%
    Large Enterprise15%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business38%
    Midsize Enterprise19%
    Large Enterprise43%
    Buyer's Guide
    Palo Alto Networks K2-Series vs. Sophos XG
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Palo Alto Networks K2-Series vs. Sophos XG and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    768,415 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Palo Alto Networks K2-Series is ranked 27th in Firewalls with 29 reviews while Sophos XG is ranked 7th in Firewalls with 192 reviews. Palo Alto Networks K2-Series is rated 8.4, while Sophos XG is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Palo Alto Networks K2-Series writes "Easy to implement and manage, and the documentation is good". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sophos XG writes "Easy to use and deploy with an improved pricing structure in place". Palo Alto Networks K2-Series is most compared with Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, whereas Sophos XG is most compared with Netgate pfSense, OPNsense, Sophos XGS, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls and SonicWall TZ. See our Palo Alto Networks K2-Series vs. Sophos XG report.

    See our list of best Firewalls vendors.

    We monitor all Firewalls reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.