We performed a comparison between Check Point NGFW and Sophos UTM based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Unified Threat Management (UTM) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."We purchased Fortinet because of the pricing, its functionality, because it met our requirements, and the total cost of ownership over five years was quite reasonable. In the market, Fortinet is rated quite well."
"One of the valuable features is a standardized OS."
"The performance is good."
"The pricing is excellent. It's much less expensive than Cisco."
"Its user interface is good, and it is always working fine."
"The notable features that I have found most valuable are that it includes the antivirus, and also IPS, and even SD-WAN."
"The wireless control is helpful."
"The most valuable features are the policies, filtering, and configuration."
"If there is a critical issue observed, the Check Point support team can create a custom package that we can deploy on the gateway to mitigate critical issues/bug fixes."
"Everything can be managed from a single dashboard nowadays."
"The most valuable feature is the IPsec VPN."
"Its auditing features are good for checking who did what changes and when."
"The support offers the best services I have experienced. It's better than any other IT vendor."
"It's quite a stable solution."
"The Check Point appliances are considered NGFW devices and can process both the ASA and FTD requirements on a single instance, removing the requirement for an expansion SSD module and/or additional hardware."
"I was impressed by how easy it was to activate blades and implement them on a security gateway, with the process taking less than five minutes."
"I have no problem with the cost or licensing of this solution. This is a primary reason whay I wanted this solution. It does the same thing cheaper than other name brands."
"It is not an easy task to protect your web servers from the big bad internet. The Web Server Protection in this solution does it elegantly and, if configured correctly, even hides the server's base system from prying eyes."
"Has great security features and does a good job of protecting the network."
"Brings greater visibility into the network traffic coming inside and passing away from the company."
"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."
"UTM 9 brings along IPSec as well as iPhone and iPad support. This seems small but it’s useful."
"Sophos UTM's best feature is SIM in the cloud, which combines the gateway solution and endpoint solution to send telemetry data to the cloud and provides full contact visibility regarding security."
"The initial setup is pretty straightforward."
"The reporting in Fortinet FortiGate could improve. Customers are having to purchase additional reporting components. When I have used the Sophos solution it is a complete solution, in Fortinet FortiGate you have to use additional tools to have the features needed."
"Monitoring and reporting could be better."
"I would like to see improvements in the support from Fortinet. Here in the Philippines, whenever we have problems with a Fortinet product, we mostly ask for support from distributors and resellers and not directly from Fortinet."
"The support structure needs to be improved because every time we contact them, there is a delay in the response."
"The visibility of the network can be better. The GUI can be improved for better visibility of the network flow. Other solutions have better GUI in terms of network visibility."
"Currently, without the additional reporting module, we only have access to basic reporting."
"In terms of what could be improved, the SD-WAN is quite difficult, because if you install the new box, 15 is okay, but if you change from an old configuration, if there is already configuration and a policy when you change to SD-WAN, you must change the whole policy that you see in the interface."
"FortiGate support could do some improvements on their IPv6 configuration. Right now it's still in the very early stage for utilizing in an enterprise level network environment."
"Management: Check Point should move away from its current architecture wherein it mandatorily requires a management server to manage the gateways. They should develop A feature in the gateway itself so that no management server is needed for policy and gateway management."
"Unfortunately, as is the case with many big companies, new features seem to always be more important than fixing the last little bugs that affect only a minor customer base."
"Timely updates to security databases, firmware, and software are crucial for addressing new threats."
"The antivirus is less effective than its competitors' antivirus. The antivirus is good, but in other firewalls, such as Palo Alto, it's quite effective. Check Point should provide more output. Sometimes it provides comprehensive information and sometimes it doesn't."
"Potential improvements could be made around simplifying VPN functionality and configuration."
"The naming in the inline layers and ordered layers needs improvement. It makes things very complicated. I've seen quite a lot of people saying that. For audit policies, it is okay since it's very simple to see. However, this area is for very large organizations, which have too many policies, and they need to share all these policies. For small to medium-sized businesses, they don't need it. Even if somebody has 500 rules, if they try to use it, it can be very confusing."
"The distributor support capability is quite lacking as the problem/incident is rarely solved on the distributor level and instead escalated to the principal."
"Pricing needs to be lowered from start, this would be more effective than lowering it during negotiations."
"Last year, Sophos had some major internal management changes that negatively impacted their support."
"The only time we face a problem or issues is when we place a ticket. We have found that response is very slow."
"In short, the UI and UX are the areas of improvement in Sophos UTM and similar solutions compared to Palo Alto."
"We didn’t find any issues but I know there have been some in the last few years."
"The technical support team’s response time could be improved."
"An area for improvement in Sophos UTM is load balancing because my company cannot use it currently. If Sophos could release a new configuration for the load balancing feature to work for my company, that would be great."
"I would like to see the SD-WAN feature improved."
"They could reduce the price."
Check Point NGFW doesn't meet the minimum requirements to be ranked in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 277 reviews while Sophos UTM is ranked 1st in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 110 reviews. Check Point NGFW is rated 8.8, while Sophos UTM is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Check Point NGFW writes "Good antivirus protection and URL filtering with very good user identification capabilities". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sophos UTM writes "It's a highly stable platform with very few hardware issues". Check Point NGFW is most compared with Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Sophos XG, Cisco Secure Firewall, Netgate pfSense and Azure Firewall, whereas Sophos UTM is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Sophos XG, OPNsense, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls and Cisco Secure Firewall. See our Check Point NGFW vs. Sophos UTM report.
See our list of best Unified Threat Management (UTM) vendors and best Firewalls vendors.
We monitor all Unified Threat Management (UTM) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.