"I have integrated it for incidence response. If there is a security event, the Cisco firewall will automatically block the traffic, which is valuable."
"It is one of the fastest solutions, if not the fastest, in the security technology space. This gives us peace of mind knowing that as soon as a new attack comes online that we will be protected in short order. From that perspective, no one really comes close now to Firepower, which is hugely valuable to us from an upcoming new attack prevention perspective."
"The feature set is fine and is rarely a problem."
"I like that Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall is reliable. Support is also good."
"Feature-wise, we mostly use IPS because it is a security requirement to protect against attacks from outside and inside. This is where IPS helps us out a bunch."
"The customer service/technical support is very good with this solution."
"Firepower has reduced our firewall operational costs by about 25 percent."
"The most valuable feature would be ASDM. The ability to go in, visualize and see the world base in a clear and consistent manner is very powerful."
"It is a very good solution for enterprises that need a VPN for their employees. It is the best way to provide a remote work facility to employees at a very low cost. Other solutions that I have had in the past were very expensive. Enterprises don't always have that kind of money to invest."
"The initial setup was simple and fast."
"Is good at blocking IP addresses."
"The solution is fairly scalable when it comes to integrating with other applications and data sets."
"The most valuable features of pfSense are the reports, monitoring, filtration, and blocking incoming and outgoing traffic."
"Great extensibility of the platform."
"The GUI is easy to understand."
"Good basic firewall features."
"Sophos UTM provides security for our network here and access through a VPN connection for our remote users. It also offers the flexibility to create different tools for accessibility."
"The solution is easy to handle and configure."
"The initial setup is pretty easy."
"Sophos SG UTM had all the basic functionality that you needed. It is user-friendly and easy to manage for any integrator."
"We've found the technical support to be helpful."
"Sophos UTM has a good user interface and granular security controls."
"The cost of the solution is very reasonable."
"So far, the solution has been problem-free."
"Most of the features don't work well, and some features are missing as well."
"We only have an issue with time sync with Cisco ASA and NTP. If the time is out of sync, it will be a disaster for the failover."
"The maturity needs to be better."
"The performance should be improved."
"This product is managed using the Firepower Management Center (FMC), but it would be better if it also supported the command-line interface (CLI)."
"One of my colleagues is using the firewall as an IPS, but he is worried about Firepower's performance... With the 10 Gb devices, when it gets to 5 Gbps, the CPU usage goes up a lot and he cannot manage the IPS."
"Implementations require the use of a console. It would help if the console was embedded."
"FirePOWER does a good job when it comes to providing us with visibility into threats, but I would like to see a more proactive stance to it."
"The solution could use better reporting. They need to offer more of it in general. Right now, the graphics aren't the best. If you need to provide a report to a manager, for example, it doesn't look great. They need to make it easier to understand and give users the ability to customize them."
"The integration should be improved."
"The solution could always work at being more secure. It's a good idea to continue to work on security features and capabilities in order to ensure they can keep clients safe."
"This solution is good for small businesses but it is not as stable as other competitors such as Fortinet."
"I tried pfSense, and it has a big issue with file system consistency, and this is what drove me to OPNsense. The file system stability is quite a big issue for us. We have a lot of outages related to power issues, and OPNsense is much more stable on this side."
"The main problem with pfSense is that it lacks adequate ransomware protection."
"The integration could be improved."
"I'd like to find something in pfSense that is more specific to URL filtering. We have customers who would like to filter their web traffic. They would like to be able to say to their employees, "You can surf the web, but you cannot get access to Facebook or other social media," or "You can surf the web, but you're not allowed to gamble or watch porn on the web." My technicians say that doing this kind of stuff with pfSense nowadays is not easy. They can implement some filters using IP addresses but not by using the names of the domains and categories. So, we are not able to exclude some categories from the allowed traffic, such as porn, gambling, etc. To do that, we have to use another product and another web filter that uses DNS. I know that there are some third-party products that could work with pfSense, but I'd like the native pfSense solution to do that."
"I would like to see Sophos UTM add support for all the new threat-detection technologies and the ability to respond to novel security threats that come along every day."
"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."
"The solution is not scalable."
"Sophos customer support could use some improvement."
"There were a lot of features and functionality in Sophos SG UTM but nothing was state of the art in terms of technology. You did not get the latest functions. It was very monolithic as it was based on an old Linux PuTTY system."
"We'd like to see them offer their services on mobile devices like tablets. I'm not sure if that's an option or not."
"The solution needs to do better at covering mobile devices, although they may have an integrated solution for that purpose."
"The five-factor authentication needs improvement."
More Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall Pricing and Cost Advice →
pfSense is ranked 3rd in Firewalls with 61 reviews while Sophos UTM is ranked 2nd in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 32 reviews. pfSense is rated 8.4, while Sophos UTM is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of pfSense writes "Feature-rich, well documented, and there is good support available online". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sophos UTM writes "Great web and email filtering with reasonable pricing". pfSense is most compared with OPNsense, Fortinet FortiGate, Sophos XG, Untangle NG Firewall and Zyxel Unified Security Gateway, whereas Sophos UTM is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate, Untangle NG Firewall, Sophos XG, OPNsense and Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls. See our Sophos UTM vs. pfSense report.
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