We performed a comparison between Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls 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 dashboard I have found the most valuable in Fortinet FortiGate."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the analytics."
"Mainly the FortiGate reporting system is very good. It guides us through all the expectations of security. Fortinet provides us all that we need for security. Also, Fortinet FortiGate is a next-generation firewall. It is much more advanced than others."
"The solution is highly scalable because they have devices that can handle a large amount of traffic."
"Fortinet FortiGate's most valuable features are ease of use, flexibility, and most of the configuration we can be done using the GUI. When we compare Fortinet FortiGate with other solutions the firewall policy are very easy to understand."
"The user interface (UI) is very, very good."
"Fortinet FortiGate is easy to use. Anyone can easily maintain it."
"SSL-VPN is very useful for us and has been very reliable."
"The most valuable aspect of this solution is pre-sales and post-sales because of the support and relationship building."
"The stability of the product has been good over the years."
"GlobalProtect and App-ID features are very good."
"The sandboxing is valuable and they are frequently updating their signature database. We get new updates every five minutes. That makes it easy to detect new and unknown attacks."
"The configuration is quite simple to understand."
"I found Palo Alto NG firewalls more intuitive compared to other products. I value the capability to identify a cloud solution."
"The solution's most valuable feature is the robust firewall, which we can also use as a UTM device."
"The configuration is very simple."
"It does not take much effort or thinking to understand how it works."
"Sophos integrates seamlessly, and we don't even feel it is running in the background."
"Scaling out cannot be easier, as there are many migration paths."
"Sophos UTM has improved the porting section. It has improved security by seeing the gaps. For example, when you discover that an entry has been using a certain application, with Sophos UTM acting as a Layer 7 firewall, you can block the application, not the port."
"We use Sophos UTM as our main firewall with all its features included. Mainly, it controls all of our network perimeter security: firewall, IDS/IPS, and web application firewall (including VoIP)."
"The initial setup has been fine."
"This is a very stable product."
"The most valuable feature of Sophos UTM is the endpoint protection feature."
"It should be more stable. There should be full integration within Fortinet products themselves as well as with other third-party products. Especially when you're not dealing with SIEM and the correlation of the security box, we want Fortinet to be able to share that information with as many other products as it can."
"Technical support could be better. You don't always get the level of help you need right away."
"The routing capability on the FortiGate devices has room for improvement."
"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."
"The main aspect of FortiGate that could be improved is load balancing. Our management team does not want to buy another appliance for only load balancing."
"There are some complex administration tasks in their administration portal. That needs to be improved."
"Improvement is needed in the Web Filter quotas to restrict users with allocated quotas."
"I would prefer to have more detailed logs within the FortiGate products themselves rather than relying on a separate tool."
"The only problem that I see with the Palo Alto NGFW being an all-in-one appliance is that because of the different features that are being put into a single appliance, the OS tends to be beefier. Over the eight years, we have seen that the number of features or analyses being put into the appliance itself has a tendency to slow down the appliance, especially at the time of bootup. So, any time we are doing maintenance work, the time required for the appliance to boot up and be fully functional again is significantly longer than eight years ago. They could find a way to make this all-in-one appliance faster."
"Technical support is an area that could be improved."
"Need improvement with their logs, especially the command line interface."
"Currently, they don't have email protection. They can maybe add it in the future. Currently, if you want to do so, you need to go with another solution."
"We need better affiliations for profiling the user."
"When you delete and add a new rule, because of the one hundred rule limit, if the new rule has an ID that is greater than one hundred, even though you have fewer than that, it will not work."
"The first level of support will usually do nothing for you. If you're an IT company, you're not looking for level one support. You need to escalate. Other vendors have a direct support line for enterprise clients, but not Palo Alto."
"I think visibility can be improved."
"The only time we face a problem or issues is when we place a ticket. We have found that response is very slow."
"The integration capabilities could be better."
"It needs a better user interface. The one they have is not so good."
"Sophos UTM could be simplified, and they can improve on the many other features, like SD-WAN and load balancing. Sophos UTM is missing a few features that their competitors have. For example, if you have multiple branches you would like to connect, the load balancing features aren't available on multilink. If we create a VPM for multiple LAN links, we cannot load balance the traffic."
"I would like this solution to support ICAP. Also, they no longer support on-premises management, and are forcing clients to use centralized management via the cloud, which I don't agree with."
"Email spam filtering only works if you have an on-prem Exchange server. It doesn't interface with Office 365 like the XG model. That would be one feature that they could improve. They're not going to do it because they're trying to push us all to XG."
"The management suite is easy and the agent is easy to develop."
"Needs to improve the certificate management (ex. Let's Encrypt support)."
More Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls Pricing and Cost Advice →
Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is ranked 6th in Firewalls with 161 reviews while Sophos UTM is ranked 1st in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 110 reviews. Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is rated 8.6, while Sophos UTM is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls writes "We get reports back from WildFire on a minute-by-minute basis". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sophos UTM writes "It's a highly stable platform with very few hardware issues". Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is most compared with Check Point NGFW, Azure Firewall, Meraki MX, Sophos XG and Juniper SRX Series Firewall, whereas Sophos UTM is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Sophos XG, OPNsense, Cisco Secure Firewall and Untangle NG Firewall. See our Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls vs. Sophos UTM report.
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