We performed a comparison between KerioControl 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."The payment function for applications is good."
"Offers good security and filtering."
"I like that you are able to manage FortiGate from the FortiManager to create a more centralized environment."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiGate are the APIs. They are the most widely known."
"A strong point of FortiGate is that the graphical interface is complete and easy to use, especially if we think there is a list of operations that we are able to perform inside."
"It enables our organization to become more productive. Also, it protects our NEtWare from viruses and malware."
"The main reason why I purchased the particular unit was that it had good reviews and what other people were saying as far as its completeness and its leading capabilities in terms of endpoint security was very good."
"The CLI and GUI do a good job of putting a lot at your fingertips."
"I like intrusion detection and prevention and bandwidth management. The routing part is also awesome. It is a good firewall. We never had a major breach from outside. We've never been impacted by ransomware, and our systems have never been infiltrated."
"Instead of using a cloud-based product for accessing information, and putting my data at risk in the cloud and in someone else's hands, it has allowed me to use a VPN and access my data directly from a laptop when I am out in the field. That has made my life a lot easier, where I'm able to access any information I need to be able access, basically on demand, with an Internet connection. That alone has been great."
"The solution is user-friendly."
"It is very comprehensive and simple. It has all the active protections. It's updated. We love that you can set how often it is updated so you can work what is right for you. A large company with a lot of bandwidth can update the virus definitions and security definitions hourly, if they want. A smaller site that's remote, where maybe updating the definitions will eat into the bandwidth, we can schedule those more to go later at night. It's very flexible and works for us in all types of situations. This is great because then we don't have to learn seven different products to be able to work with seven different scenarios."
"The installation is straightforward."
"Its support is very good, and it is stable product."
"I have found the most valuable features of Kerio Control to be the IPS and firewall."
"The initial setup is a breeze."
"It helped to connect our satellite offices to the main Amazon infrastructure in a circular way."
"It allows me to easily connect with more than forty-five remote sites and more than fifty remote users between IPsec and SSL VPN, applying the web filter and application filter to ensure a secure connection."
"We use Sophos UTM as our main firewall with all its features included. Mainly, it controls all of our network perimeter security: firewall, IDS/IPS, and web application firewall (including VoIP)."
"The most valuable feature is the IPS. It also protects us from malware."
"Stability-wise, I rate this solution a ten out of ten...Scalability-wise, I rate this solution a ten out of ten."
"If a computer does get infected the Sophos appliance lets us know via it's Advanced Threat Protection so we can get a much faster response time."
"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."
"It helps us with protection, with concurrent use of the VPN."
"The solution lacks multi-language support."
"The biggest "gotcha" is that if the client purchases what they call the UTM shared bundle, which has unified threat management on both, it's not as easy to manage if you have more than one firewall."
"With the addition of some features, it is possible that FortiGate can be used in all verticals."
"I haven't had a single issue since using Fortinet."
"I would like Fortinet to add more automation to FortiGate."
"The price of FortiGate should be reduced because there are some other leading products that are cheaper."
"With the reports, you can see it, and you can get good feelings so upper management can go, "Oh, wow. That looks pretty." However, it's very basic."
"It would be nice if FortiGate incorporated some built-in endpoint protection features. I would also like a built-in SOC dashboard for managing multiple Fortinet firewalls."
"The security part of the software, like virus scanning, website, traffic monitoring, things like that, can take a beating on the appliance. And when there's a lot of things going on, the system can get bogged down. The actual security functionality of it needs a little bit more work, which I believe they are remedying or attempting to remedy at this time, but that's the downfall at this time."
"One area that confused me a bit when I was building my current network. I use VLANs to have separate functionality on the network, and the appliance I got was the WiFi model, but I discovered that you can't assign WiFi channels to the VLAN. So, you can have WiFi, but its own subnet. You can't run that over the VLAN. Effectively, I can't use the WiFi facility in the appliance and had to purchase a separate web that supports VLANs. In the end, I had to go to GFI support. They confirmed this is just a limited functionality of that device, as it is a low-end device. I don't know if any of their high-end models have a better facility or not."
"After the takeover by GFI, one of the things that Kerio built was MyKerio environment. This has not been very reliable because I get many messages that MyKerio is not functioning. For some reason, there are things that they changed and it is not very reliable at this moment, instead I have to connect to the firewall to see what is happening."
"If you have to dive deeper into the firewall or any other features, then you really have to read up a bit about how to set it up properly. Some of my colleagues, in the beginning, jumped in and made a bunch of rules but then it got really messy. If Kerio had a template or guidelines for best practices, at the beginning, that would really help. With Kerio Control it's basically 'find out for yourself.'"
"They don't provide content filtering when it comes to search engine results. We had an incident on the network where a blocked site was showing up in search results. We are in a school environment, so we have blocked a site with some of the explicit content so that kids wouldn't see it. When one of them did a search, the results came on the search engine part. When you try to drill down to the website, it blocks, but when you search by image, it brings up all the images. That's one of the reasons why we are looking at Juniper."
"The GUI should be changed because it remains the same consistency across versions. However, those who have been using KerioControl for a long time may be accustomed to the current interface. Installing a new version in the same location makes it easy to find, but overall, there are no notable changes between versions."
"Support responses need improvement."
"When it comes to dealing with updates, there are often bugs on the solution. They should do a lot more testing before they release new versions."
"In Sophos UTM there is always a problem with the routing tables. If you want to see the routing table, you have to use the UI. You can't do it via a web browser. The routing table is better in Fortinet."
"The solution's technical support for India needs to be improved."
"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 think that additional metrics features are needed to be able to monitor other areas or to monitor as much as you can, at a fine-grain resolution."
"Sophos UTM could improve the way the configuration has to be done. I have to do the configuration through the command line interface but if it could be done through the graphical user interface it would be much better."
"Sophos UTM could be simplified, and they can improve on the many other features, like SD-WAN and load balancing. Sophos UTM is missing a few features that their competitors have. For example, if you have multiple branches you would like to connect, the load balancing features aren't available on multilink. If we create a VPM for multiple LAN links, we cannot load balance the traffic."
"Last year, Sophos had some major internal management changes that negatively impacted their support."
"The solution needs to do better at covering mobile devices, although they may have an integrated solution for that purpose."
KerioControl doesn't meet the minimum requirements to be ranked in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 54 reviews while Sophos UTM is ranked 1st in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 110 reviews. KerioControl is rated 8.0, while Sophos UTM is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of KerioControl writes "With VPN, any of our guys can log in to the system and effectively be on board; helps with our customers all over the world". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sophos UTM writes "It's a highly stable platform with very few hardware issues". KerioControl is most compared with Netgate pfSense, OPNsense, Sophos XG, Cisco Secure Firewall and Fortinet FortiGate-VM, whereas Sophos UTM is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Sophos XG, OPNsense, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls and Sophos XGS. See our KerioControl vs. Sophos UTM report.
See our list of best Unified Threat Management (UTM) vendors and best Firewalls vendors.
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