We performed a comparison between Azure Firewall and Sophos UTM based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Firewalls solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."I think that the UTM features are the most value, as it truly protects my infrastructure."
"The most important feature, normally for small business customers, is link load balancing."
"I like Fortinet's cloud management. It allows me to manage all my devices in different branches for three cloud accounts. Even though I use on-prem devices, I can manage everything on the cloud."
"I really like the captive portal feature for our guest network. It has nice VLAN features in terms of separating our network. The anti-virus is also good."
"Overall, the pricing of the solution is very good. The product offers good value."
"The payment function for applications is good."
"The most valuable feature of Fortinet FortiGate is security. They are known for efficiency and are on the top of Gartner Quadrant reviews. Fortinet FortiGate has an easy-to-use platform with a good graphical interface. The configuration is simple and the solution provides an overall good layer of security."
"The features that we have found most valuable are the SSL VPN and the User Portal."
"The solution should be capable of self-scaling, which is one of the features we like about it."
"Azure's cost-effectiveness is its major advantage."
"Microsoft's technical support is very good. They're quite knowledgable and responsive."
"The most valuable feature is threat intelligence. It is based on filtering and can identify multiple threats."
"It is easy for me to protect certain ports or even the IP addresses, as well as do whitelisting, blacklisting, and the FQDN when we want virtual machines connected and to protect certain websites."
"The firewall policy control, URL content control, and antivirus are all the most valuable aspects. Threat prevention is as well quite good."
"One of the notable advantages of Azure Firewall is its user-friendly interface, which closely resembles or shares similarities with other Azure components."
"It's helped us improve our security posture."
"The most valuable feature of Sophos UTM is the efficiency and mail filtering module."
"The three most important features for us are web protection, web server protection, and network protection."
"The solution is scalable."
"The solution can scale."
"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 allows our developers to be able to securely log into servers to deploy and manage software."
"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 implementation with the AWS environment was good."
"There could be more integration between the logging and analytical platforms to make it more seamless and integrated."
"The renewal price and the availability could be improved."
"I would like some automated custom reporting."
"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."
"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."
"The user interface could be improved to make it less confusing and easier to set up."
"It needs more available central management."
"There are some problems that support cannot give you a logical reason as to why it happened. For example, I had a case where I was dealing with a WhatsApp application that was giving issues. Technical support gave more than one reason it could be giving issues, but none of them solved the problem. Eventually I solved the problem, but it was far from the solutions that support had given."
"We find it's different implementing it region-to-region. It might help if it was universal across all regions."
"An Azure firewall is not a real firewall."
"The threat intelligence part could be better. I don't see why our customers have to get an additional solution with Azure Firewall. It would be great if they made it on par with Palo Alto."
"There are a number of things that need to be simplified, but it's mostly costs. It needs to be simplified because it's pretty expensive."
"They can improve the pricing of Azure Firewall."
"It would be much easier if the on-premises, firewall rules, had some kind of export-import possibility in place, which is not the case right now."
"The solution should incorporate features similar to competitors like split tunneling."
"It is a cloud service, but the lending speed for each region is not always the same. For example, in China, the speed is slow. They need to think about how to make sure that the service pace or speed is always the same in all regions. It would be a great improvement if they can provide the same pace worldwide."
"Sophos UTM's firewall is a bit weak, and some of its features lack depth compared to other products like F5."
"We need to speed up the support."
"They could reduce the price."
"Support for IKEv2 is needed in this solution."
"The scalability of the product is an area with certain shortcomings where improvements are required."
"The solution is not scalable."
"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."
"The UI can be cumbersome and, sometimes, features are not where you think they should be."
Azure Firewall is ranked 21st in Firewalls with 33 reviews while Sophos UTM is ranked 1st in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 110 reviews. Azure Firewall is rated 7.2, while Sophos UTM is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Azure Firewall writes "Easy to use and configure but could be more robust". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sophos UTM writes "It's a highly stable platform with very few hardware issues". Azure Firewall is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate-VM, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Palo Alto Networks VM-Series and Check Point NGFW, whereas Sophos UTM is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Sophos XG, OPNsense, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls and Cisco Secure Firewall. See our Azure Firewall vs. Sophos UTM report.
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