Sophos XG Reviews

I implemented this firewall for my clients. They're small offices. One has got half a dozen computers, and the other one has about 30 computers on the network. Both utilize VPN to remotely access their workstations in the office.

It is sized based on the client. So, there are actually two different versions that I've utilized.

VPN setup is great and easy to implement for outside users to access data or workstations in the network.  Easy to manage and set up.  No major glitches.  Runs reliably.   Setting up iPhones and Macs is a bit more involved since you have to use VPN apps that are compatible with Apple for VPN and remote desktop.

Compared to other firewalls that I had looked at, I thought Sophos was the better solution. It just seems to be easier to manage versus Cisco, Fortinet, or one of the other options I was looking at.

I'm not going to say that it's easy to configure, but I can understand how to configure it. There is a certain amount of support available to do the configurations. 

I'm just a sole proprietor for IT support, and from my perspective, there could be better ways to educate a proprietor, such as myself, on how to set it up, program it, and manage it. They do tend to have support, but a lot of times, it is for larger networks. I need something simpler and more rudimentary to set up and configure the firewall, set up the rules, and that type of thing. So, if there is a missing component there, that would be it. 

Any firewall will need rules for how it protects the network against a variety of threats or various degrees of protection.  My comments are not aimed at Sophos specifically.  As a new person just learning about firewall protection, it would be helpful for any vendor to have an education area that runs through various scenarios and implements them in the firewall.  Videos would be helpful.  From my initial research on which firewall to choose,  Sophos appeared to have the most straightforward interface. 

I purchased the units from www.firewalls.com, and they worked with me to do the initial setup.  That was very helpful to get started

I have been using Sophos XG for 4 years.

It is very stable.

It is scalable. There are different models, and you really need to choose a model that is appropriate for your current situation. You can buy something with a certain degree of scalability. Because I purchased it through firewalls.com, I was able to have that discussion, describe the application, and then choose a model that would suit that particular client with a degree of scalability. Now, for instance, if they went from 20 employees to 500 employees, then it is not scalable to that degree, but if they went from 20 employees to 50 employees, then it would be scalable. So, you've got to define the criteria in terms of what you're trying to protect, the number of users, the bandwidth that is going through it, the speed, etc. When I purchased them through firewalls.com, they explained and helped me choose the most appropriate appliance for what I'm doing.

I did have a circumstance where the firewall had been damaged during a lightning storm or something like that, and I called them to help me diagnose what the issue was. They were good about the diagnostic. They were good about spending the time with me to figure out what was wrong. In the particular case that I was researching, it turned out that one of the ports was bad for some reason. It was either because of the lightning storm or some other reason. It was under warranty, and they replaced it with a new unit. So, I'm satisfied with Sophos' support.

Previously used a small $100 cisco unit.  Not easy to implement VPN.  They may have an app, now, but at the time it was problematic and way too  complicated. 

I purchased it through firewalls.com. They're an online vendor, and they did the initial setup and configuration on both firewalls. My experience with them was good.

I used firewalls.com and they were excellent

Fewer management headaches

The pricing was reasonable.  VPN licensing is included.

I looked at Cisco, Fortinet, and one of the others, and compared to them, I thought Sophos was the better solution. It seemed to be easier to manage. After the implementation, I could figure out what to do with a Sophos interface. If it was something like Cisco or other vendors, it would be far more complicated to deal with. So, that's one of the reasons why I chose Sophos.

For someone who is not acquainted with firewalls, whether it is Sophos or anything else, dealing with a third party for the implementation is kind of a must. 

I am satisfied with this solution. I don't really have any hands-on experience with other firewalls that I can compare it against, but I'm satisfied with it. I like it, and I'd buy it again.

I would rate Sophos XG a 10 out of 10.

We primarily use the solution for gateway purposes, in order to provide us with gateway security.

The product is good in terms of routing multiple ISP Internet and also it's good in internet traffic control.

The updates are helpful and add to the solution in a positive way.

The initial setup is simple.

The solution is stable.

For the most part, you can easily scale the solution.

I'm not seeing any such things that require any improvement. It's good. From time to time, some updates will come through. It's meeting our requirements right now.

The pricing has gotten much higher. 

We've been using the solution for three years. It's been a while now. 

The stability and performance are excellent. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's very reliable. 

We have 50 users spread across three devices. 

The solution, in terms of scalability, has its limitations, of course. Scalability in the sense of if I want to add more ISPs all depends upon my port availability. Transitions and migrations are fine and doable. I don't find any challenges there.  

Technical support from Sophos has been brilliant. We deal with them on any L3 issues and they are always helpful. 

The initial setup is very straightforward and simple. it's not overly complex or difficult. 

The deployment was quick and took maybe one day.

In terms of maintenance requirements, We have an L1 technical person who will take care of all the routine maintenance of the firewall, and we also have L2 support with the vendor. We have an L3 support from the Sophos team itself. 

We did the implementation with the assistance of a vendor. We did not completely handle it ourselves. 

While, at first, the pricing was very good, it's since crept up. Now, upon renewal, it's pretty high. They've increased the costs. 

Currently, we have three devices that are similar. Only the capacity varies.

I'm a customer and an end-user. I don't have a business relationship with Sophos. 

I'd recommend the solution to other users and organizations. I'd rate it at a ten out of ten. it's the best. 

I've tried out Sophos XG a little. It has a good interface that's very user-friendly, but I haven't used all of its functions because I'm only configuring and running the system.

I've been working with Sophos XG for six months. I am not an end-user. I only provide the solution and implementation.

I think Sophos XG is very stable because the users who have installed it never mention any issues. It's very stable and scalable. 

Sophos XG is a scalable solution. Our clients who use Sophos are not big companies. 

I haven't dealt with Sophos support because I'm just doing the basic implementation for the Sophos. But I Sophos support is very experienced and helpful. Sophos has a team for administration and implementation—a good team to improve the application. 

It depends on the implementation and the deployment of systems. In my small company, I have four people on my technical team. Two of them specialize in firewall and security. They're working on Fortinet. They deal with antivirus and security implementation as well as Veeam Backup. The other two handle the administration implementation, including Active Directory and other administration solutions.

I would prefer if Sophos XG were cheaper. A lower price would benefit me as a system provider for the end customer. The cost of the license and renewal for all the software and devices is somewhat high. 

I rate Sophos XG nine out of 10. I am a Fortinet partner. If a user asks me which solution to buy, I'll tell them Fortinet. But if the customer needs Sophos, I will implement it for him. However, if I had a Sophos partnership, I would recommend it every time.

Sophos XG is very good.

It's very friendly.

The performance is good.

The reporting could be improved.

Many other firewalls give you the option to disconnect a user. For example, if an end-user is using too much bandwidth, you could right-click to disconnect this user, but Sophos XG does not support this feature.

Sophos XG does not have the ability to disconnect a user.

I have been using Sophos XG for one and a half years.

We are using the latest version.

The stability of Sophos XG is great!

Sophos XG is scalable.

We have approximately 120 users in our organization who are using this solution.

We have never contacted the technical support for Sophos. Once or twice we called the local support but not for Sophos.

Previously we used Cyberoam. When they announced the end of life we switched to Sophos XG.

It was upgraded because it had reached the end of its life. We only had one option for upgrading to Sophos XG. They gave us the option to upgrade and provided us with the hardware for free.

We migrated from Cyberoam. The migration went very well.

The migration process did not require a lot of configuration.

It took a few days to complete the migration and the testing.

This solution is being managed by myself and a colleague. We are a team of two.

We were able to complete the migration ourselves.

They have different options for the license.

We paid for three years which included the migration and the free hardware.

In most cases, I believe that the licensing is paid yearly.

I don't have any issues with this solution. I would recommend this solution for others who are interested in using it.

I would rate Sophos XG an eight out of ten.

I primarily use the solution as a firewall. It's running on our data centers and all of our offices.

It has a simple GUI, which is good. 

The initial setup is pretty simple.

Unfortunately, there are quite a few negatives with them.

Their tech support is not great. 

The features on offer are lacking.

Basically what they don't have is proper bandwidth management for multiple WAN ports and multiple WAN ports to multiple VPN WANs. Meaning, if I have it on both sides on both the main side and on the secondary side, two internet connections, I can't bond the two of them together into a single VPN and have bandwidth managed between the two of them.

If I want to go ahead and make a VPN, right now, I have two internet connections on each side. I have to make a failover a group of four VPNs for it to go ahead and failover between them.

You're getting into a lot of rules. It's a lot of extra rules, et cetera, that has to be done. They don't have simple pointing systems where you could go ahead and make rules saying, "Hey, here's the route". They're not fully route-based VPN rules yet. You literally have to take down all the routes all over the place in order to make updates. It's tedious. 

Basically, we had the problem where we moved certain ranges from one data center to another data center. It took us about an hour of downtime to do that. We had to go ahead and we had to reset VLANs and we had re-setup all the VPNs in all the different places we reconnected. We don't have two sites, we have 25 sites. It was a lot of work.

I've used the solution for about three years at this point. 

It has its bugs and we can't get answers due to the fact that technical support is outsourced. There are some bugs that we keep running into that tech support can't figure out what to do. The bigger problem is the log systems aren't big enough for them to actually capture all the logs that happen.

Technical support is an issue. About six months after we bought it to a year after we bought it, they outsourced all their tech support to India. Literally beforehand, they were an American-based tech support company and they actually had full product knowledge. The Indian-based tech support doesn't have the product knowledge and there was a language barrier. They could speak English, however, they didn't understand us very well.

We were told that they stopped doing outsource and they are rehiring their own internal staff again for tech support. We're hoping that we're going to be able to get better tech support again.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward and simple. It's not overly difficult. I don't consider it to be complex. 

We bought it as is. We bought it with four years of support. However, I can't speak to how much it costs. 

I'd advise users considering the solution that, if you have quite a bit of sites, it's going to get a lot of work to do, to fix things up. It makes more sense if you have minimal sites. 

I'd rate the solution at a six out of ten.

Firewall is not our expertise, but we do sell it as per the requirement of the customer or if they ask for it. 

Most of the firewalls are on-prem. What we deliver is the hardware. It is appliance-based.

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.

Its price should be improved. Its features are pretty okay, but the price is the area where we have to fight more. They should do something about the price structure.

It has been a couple of years.

It is stable. Its performance is very good. They have now stopped calling it a firewall. They're calling it a Unified Threat Management (UTM) solution.

It is scalable in the sense that if they are using a small model or a small box of firewall and there is an increase in their network and the number of users, they can move that small box to a bigger model. So, if they are using a firewall and they want to scale it up, they can go to the next model.

Sophos has more than 1,000 customers.

Our clients have a good system of support over here. They have full support. They get support from the distributors, from the partners, and then directly from Sophos.

We are a partner of Sophos and Fortinet. We work with Sophos much more than we work with Fortinet.

If it is a small model and a small network, it takes about two days. You need at least two people for its deployment and maintenance.

Its price should be better. Initially, the clients have to pay for the appliance. Then, they have to pay for the software that is installed on the appliance. Depending on whether they have a one-year, two-year, or three-year license, they just have to renew the license of the software after it expires. They don't have to renew the appliance license. So, they have to pay for the appliance only once, and after that, they just renew the software license. That's all.

I would definitely recommend Sophos to others. I would rate it a nine out of 10.

We primarily use the solution for a firewall. We use it as a security device.

The product is very easy to use. We enjoy the ability for it to fit into our high-level security framework. 

It gives us some separation from being on Microsoft tasks. We've got multiple levels of security. We're government contractors. It's great that it's been a separate product that gives us the ability to do the security to a high level without having to resort to needing a big team.

The solution is stable. I've had very few problems with it.

We have found the solution to be scalable. 

We're always looking for the best products and the best pricing. Pricing is always a concern for us.

When they do updates, they could handle them a little bit better. We've only had one problem, however, I do prefer when updates come out a bit quicker. We do the patching and updates and different things, however, in terms of the patch and timing and the criticality of it, it could always be better.

We've been using the solution for five or more years at this point. We've used it for a while. 

The product is reliable and stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

The product has proven to be scalable. If a company needs to expand it, it can do so.

We have 430 end-users on the product.

We're mostly happy with the technical support. It's better than Microsoft. Any issues we have may simply come down to the SLA. 

The initial setup is pretty straightforward, and, over the last six years, it's gotten simpler, especially when it comes to cloud products.  A company shouldn't have any issues with the process. 

The deployment was very quick. It does not take long. 

My team is quite small internally. I have five to seven IT staff.  I have many service providers that I outsource a lot of the day-to-day management of the infrastructure to.

Sophos assisted us with training at the outset, which we really appreciated. 

We pay annually for the licensing for the overall on-prem solution, however, we also have some Sophos access points at permanent IT sites and different things. I have different Sophos products I may pay a monthly fee for.

We're just customers and end-users.

While this deployment is on-premises, for the cloud, we use Sophos Central.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. We're pretty pleased with its protection capabilities. 

The solution is mostly used for setting up a firewall and policies. 

The solution is very easy to understand. 

It's simple to set up the firewall and policies. Setting rules is very easy on Sophos as compared to other solutions. 

The product offers many great features. 

Technical support is very good. 

The initial setup is easy.

We have found the solution to be very stable.

A company can easily scale the product if they need to. 

When upgrading the firewalls, the process could be easier. 

While we do have network control, we don't have network monitoring. If I have 200 nodes and I want to see what's happening, I don't have visibility, especially if people are working remotely. 

If we could control roaming users through the firewalls and make it so that it's more of a  complete security solution, which we prefer, that would be ideal. If we have to install some clients on these machines, that's fine. The only concern is the DLP. We want to protect our data from being stolen. We'd also like to monitor activities from the perspective of productivity. We want to be able to track and calculate what users are doing on their machines.

I've been using the solution for more than ten years. 

Earlier, Sophos was known as Cyberoam, Before that, I use Cyberoam and now this has turned into Sophos.

The stability is very good. It does not crash or freeze. There are no bugs or glitches. the solution is reliable. 

The level of scalability depends on the box. We do have the option to scale if we need to.

I have found the technical support to be very helpful and responsive. I am pleased with the level of support I can get. They always provide proper solutions to all issues, whatever we face.

It is not difficult to set up the solution. One ISP, internet service provider, is required, and that is sufficient. If you do have a landline, some switches are available, and we can add to that a firewall. That is secondary. However, the initial requirement is nothing. It is just a plug-and-play setup that is very straightforward.

We had a vendor assist us with the installation. 

There's no additional cost for installation. The provider from which we purchased, the vendor, himself arranged all installation and configuration. They helped us. However, even through customer care, a company can ask for assistance. 

I'm not providing any services. I'm using the product as a customer only. The company, one day, would like to become a partner, however. 

I would recommend the solution to other companies. 

I would rate the solution at a seven out of ten, specifically if I compare it to other options on the market. It's pretty good.