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Sophos Firewall pros and cons

Vendor: Sophos

4.1 out of 5

304 reviews
93% willing to recommend

Pros & Cons summary

Sophos Firewall offers strong VPN capabilities essential for remote work but has complex configuration issues. While it provides comprehensive security features like intrusion detection and malware prevention that many value, scalability makes it suitable for various organizations. Despite its cost-effectiveness compared to competitors, pricing is sometimes seen as high. Technical support is reliable yet criticized for slow responses. SD-WAN functionality and frequent updates need quality assurance improvements for better performance.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

Sophos Firewall offers robust VPN capabilities, which have been particularly beneficial during periods when remote work is essential.

Many customers find value in its comprehensive security features, including intrusion detection and malware prevention.

The scalability of Sophos Firewall is highly regarded, allowing it to be effectively applied in various organizational sizes and configurations.

Sophos Firewall is cost-effective, providing numerous security features and capabilities at an affordable price point compared to many competitors.

Technical support for Sophos Firewall receives high praise, ensuring users have access to reliable assistance when needed.

CONS

Sophos Firewall experiences difficulties with SD-WAN functionality, requiring improvements for enhanced performance.

Technical support for Sophos Firewall is frequently criticized for slow responses and requires significant improvements.

Frequent updates to Sophos Firewall can introduce issues, necessitating better quality assurance before releases.

Sophos Firewall's pricing is often considered too high, with many recommending a reduction in costs.

Sophos Firewall's VPN configuration is complex and problematic, demanding enhancements for better usability.

Sophos Firewall Pros review quotes

CEO at Makros SPA

Mar 20, 2016

Mostly it's related to visibility as this platform allows us to see literally everything when it comes to traffic in a very easy and intuitive way.

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System Engineer with 51-200 employees

Jul 18, 2017

With its central management console, it implements an intuitive management console with change tracking, so it’s easy to see who has made changes and to keep track of changes.

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IT Project Consultant at a tech services company

Jul 29, 2017

With a very intuitive and easy-to-use interface, it made it much easier to setup access and business rules, VPNs and to identify issues like Internet link outages and security issues.

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Sophos Firewall

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SG

Lead NOC Engineer at a energy/utilities company with 51-200 employees

Jul 29, 2017

Get the professional support contract; it is well-worth it and those guys know their product very very well.

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Director at Eon Networks

Oct 16, 2017

Internet security, where we have one single point of console; where I can manage my endpoint and my gateway, any messages coming in I am getting the intermission immediately, and if my endpoint or file is getting infected I get to know from a single pane point of view.

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Consultant Information Technology at a tech company with 51-200 employees

Dec 24, 2017

My clients gain efficiency in protecting against attacks from malware such as ransomware and hacker attacks. It also provides them efficient internet access control, and full visibility of ports, applications, and websites.

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HS

IT Infrastructure & Security Manager at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees

Mar 15, 2018

The most valuable feature, according to the setup we have at our work place here, is the flexibility of the system or the firmware that's running the appliance. It's so flexible, performing multiple rules with different configurations. According to the set up here, we need to implement several firewalls with different access levels, because we have a variety of users. For this requirement, it's very flexible and very easy to use.

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Senior IT Infrastructure Solutions Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Apr 1, 2018

Valuable features include: the ease of setting up the VPN connection; the fact they have the cloud management option, so I can manage the firewall on a cloud platform from anywhere I am; the user interface is very user-friendly, so it's very easy for the administrator to make any policy changes.

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Group ICT Manager at a mining and metals company with 501-1,000 employees

Jun 21, 2018

It has a very friendly interface like the Cyberoam iNG units, it has customizable policies, it has proper templates that you can even modify, and you can customize the rules, down to each single user.

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KS

Kolanji Selvaraj

IT Consultant at Crotus

Apr 18, 2019

We have found that the simplicity of the XG 210 is its most valuable feature.

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Sophos Firewall Cons review quotes

CEO at Makros SPA

Mar 20, 2016

I would like to see the possibility to add or block some content directly from the log interface or the live view of the interface so that if I see that an IP address is consuming a lot of bandwidth, I can right click on it and set some kind of policy.

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System Engineer with 51-200 employees

Jul 18, 2017

Email Protection has room for improvement. It doesn’t have an intuitive rule base.

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IT Project Consultant at a tech services company

Jul 29, 2017

Sophos XG lacks link load balancing options like ratio and spill over, both useful in some scenarios.

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Sophos Firewall

Free Report: Sophos Firewall Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about Sophos Firewall. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2026.

885,880 professionals have used our research since 2012.

SG

Lead NOC Engineer at a energy/utilities company with 51-200 employees

Jul 29, 2017

The IPsec VPNs are a little on the buggy side and you sometimes have to jump through hoops to get it to work.

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Director at Eon Networks

Oct 16, 2017

Scalability is one issue with the hardware device and hardware files.

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Consultant Information Technology at a tech company with 51-200 employees

Dec 24, 2017

It could offer a DNS Filter for blocking botnet networks.

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HS

IT Infrastructure & Security Manager at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees

Mar 15, 2018

It is performing well. However, the only challenges that we are facing are the effectiveness with blocking the proxy and tuneling applications, aside from proxy and similar applications. So the application filter on the product is not really performing 100%. Every now and then there are some updates that are happening on such applications, and it takes time until it gets the appropriate updates and becomes capable of capturing such applications and blocking them. A new feature I would really like to see would be some sort of an enhanced application filter with greater efficiency when it comes to the applications that can bypass firewall policies. These applications are really a nightmare. Once they are on the network and not detected, or the appliance is not really successful in capturing them and unblocking them, the bandwidth gets wasted all the time.

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Senior IT Infrastructure Solutions Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Apr 1, 2018

I would like the update process to be easier, to update the firmware of the boxes. I think it's much better automatically than having to do it manually: Download the file, do network discovery. I they can make the update process much more automatic that would help.

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Group ICT Manager at a mining and metals company with 501-1,000 employees

Jun 21, 2018

Let's say I set up a rule to block users from accessing YouTube or Facebook. The rule will only block the HTTP traffic, which is non-secure traffic... The problem comes when you are trying to block, or allow, similar traffic that uses HTTPS. You have to create a certificate and import it into the users' web browsers, whatever they are using... The problem occurs when you're dealing with roaming users who use laptops and have to move between different sites that have different types of policies applied to them. You have to import all sorts of certificates from each site into their browser. Doing so will most probably conflict with something else that is totally irrelevant and cause a problem.

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KS

Kolanji Selvaraj

IT Consultant at Crotus

Apr 18, 2019

When I call, I have to wait at least one to two hours to reach them.

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Popular Comparisons

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Fortinet FortiGate vs Sophos Firewall

Netgate pfSense vs Sophos Firewall

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