We performed a comparison between Palo Alto Networks VM-Series 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 IPS is good. It protect my network from attackers."
"It is quite easy to handle."
"The most valuable feature is the VDOM, which allows the customer to have multiple firewalls in a single campus."
"FortiGate Secure SD-WAN includes best-of-breed next-generation firewall (NGFW) security, SD-WAN, advanced routing, and WAN optimization capabilities, delivering a security-driven networking WAN edge transformation in a unified offering."
"It works very well. It has a lot of different functionalities. Its cost is also fine for our customers."
"It does a lot for you for intrusion protection and as an antivirus. The threat management bundle is worth the money. You don't need another company to monitor your web traffic for you. You can do everything yourself on the firewall. You restrict your own black list for people on the firewall. You don't need to pay some other company for another product to do that for you. The firewall can do that for you. So, it's an easy-to-use product for people to be independent. They don't need to rely on other vendors to do what the firewall can do. They can do everything."
"Fortinet FortiGate has many valuable features, such as IDS, and intrusion detection. It has security features that are in part with the technologies that are available in the market."
"Fortinet offers the latest versions to cater to the needs of enterprises."
"The most valuable features of the solution are its stability, ease of implementation, ease of operation, and security."
"The initial setup was straightforward."
"In terms of security breaches, the product aids in categorizing and monitoring traffic, allowing for the identification of potentially malicisous or incorrectly formatted applications."
"It provides complete security posture from end-to-end. This has given us better visibility into what our security aspects are."
"It has the ability to create Palo Alto VM-series using software."
"What I like about the VM-Series is that you can launch them in a very short time."
"It has excellent scalability."
"The main advantage of Palo Alto Networks VM-Series stems from the fact that you can access it with the help of cloud services."
"Sophos UTM's best feature is synchronized security."
"The initial setup has been fine."
"It's a stable solution."
"Sophos is a unified solution. We have anti-virus protection, firewall rules, knotting, and DACC all in one box."
"Brings greater visibility into the network traffic coming inside and passing away from the company."
"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 initial setup is pretty straightforward."
"With Sophos, we have not had any incidents this year. The security provided has been good. It has proven to be okay for our needs."
"Price, of course, can always be more competitive or better."
"It could use more templates for third-party site-to-site VPN setups other than FortiGate and Cisco."
"One area for improvement is the performance on the bandwidth demands for smaller devices, as well as better web filtering."
"Security is a continuous process. In every product, there is a requirement for improvement. Its pricing should also be improved according to Indian market requirements. They must also improve on the reporting part. Its reporting can be more precise. If we can get a real-time report in a specific format, it will be helpful for customers to know about the current status of their security."
"Fortinet FortiGate is not very easy to use. The navigation could be improved to make it easier to use."
"They should make the rule sets more understandable for the end user. When you're trying to explain to somebody how a computer network is secured, sometimes it's difficult for an end user or customer to understand. If there was a way to make the terminology more accessible to the end user, the set up could be easier. They should translate the technical jargon to an easily relatable and understandable conversation for the end user, the customer, that would be brilliant. Particularly in an environment where the IT structure is audited regularly, there's always pressure from the auditor to up the standards and up the security and you get your USCERT's that come out and there's a warning about this and the customer will want to lock out so much and when you apply it they run into issue where they can't search the internet or print to their remote office. Of course they can't print to your remote office, they just locked it up. They should make the language more understandable for the customer. If there's a product out there that made the jargon understandable to John Q. Public, I would buy that."
"I think there could be more QoS features"
"We'd like more management across other integrations."
"In the next release, I would like to see better integration of multi-factor authentication vendors."
"Integrative capabilities with other solutions should be addressed."
"The product could be better in terms of performance than one of its competitors."
"It'll help if Palo Alto Networks provided better documentation."
"It would be good if the common features work consistently in physical and virtual environments. There was an integration issue in the virtual deployment where it didn't report the interface counters, and we had to upgrade to the latest version, whereas the same thing has been working in the physical deployment for ages now. It seems that it was because of Azure. We were using VMware before, and we didn't have any such issues. We do see such small issues where we expect things to work, but they don't because of some incompatibilities. There also seems to be a limitation on how to do high availability in a virtualized environment. All features should be consistently available in physical and virtual environments. It is not always easy to integrate Palo Alto in the network management system. We would like to be able to compare two network management systems. They can maybe allow monitoring an interface through the GUI to create a reference or do a baseline check about whether your network monitoring system is actually giving you the correct traffic figures. You need traffic figures to be able to recognize the trends and plan the capacity."
"The one issue that I didn't like is that the SNMP integration with interfaces didn't record the interface counters."
"The implementation should be simplified."
"On the cloud side, they need to come up with more HA solutions to support the multi-region."
"The pricing is an issue."
"Finding information about Sophos’ sizing guidelines can actually be difficult. Also, Sophos does not make it clear what they mean by “users” when you are sizing a firewall, which then leads to undersized implementations."
"I would like to see the SD-WAN feature improved."
"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 be more user-friendly, have more dashboards, and an easier implementation."
"The reporting system needs to allow for customizations because many reports do not include details that we expect."
"It does have built-in policies, which enable you to disable USB devices, etc. It would be nice if they had more policies because there are not that many of them."
"There's an issue that when we deploy UTM on fiber, it automatically upgrades to the latest version without giving an option to stay on the current one."
Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is ranked 10th in Firewalls with 52 reviews while Sophos UTM is ranked 1st in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 110 reviews. Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is rated 8.6, while Sophos UTM is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Palo Alto Networks VM-Series writes "Many features are optimized for troubleshooting real-time scenarios, saving a lot of time". 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 VM-Series is most compared with Azure Firewall, Fortinet FortiGate-VM, Cisco Secure Firewall, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls and Meraki MX, whereas Sophos UTM is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Sophos XG, OPNsense, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls and Cisco Secure Firewall. See our Palo Alto Networks VM-Series vs. Sophos UTM report.
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