We performed a comparison between Check Point NGFW and Sophos XG based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Features: Check Point NGFW is praised for its extensive security features, centralized management, and virtualization capabilities. It is highly regarded in terms of comprehensive protection and adaptability. Sophos XG is known for its usability, user-friendly interface, and straightforward installation process. Both options provide robust threat defense and the ability to expand as needed.
Check Point NGFW, needs to improve various aspects, including integration with other infrastructures, hardware upgrades, cost and pricing, stability and security, UI, complexity issues, redundancy options, and memory management. Sophos XG needs improvements in antivirus features, graphical interface and performance, bandwidth management and VPN capabilities, reporting and user management, support and response time, and specific issues and feature requests.
Service and Support: Some customers have found Check Point NGFW's customer service to be helpful and responsive, while others believe there is room for improvement. Sophos XG's support has received both positive and negative feedback. Some customers have found it to be good and helpful, while others have been dissatisfied with unhelpful and unresponsive support.
Ease of Deployment: The initial setup for Check Point NGFW can range in difficulty, with some users finding it simple while others find it more challenging. Knowledge and experience may be required for certain configurations and migrations. The initial setup for Sophos XG is generally seen as uncomplicated and straightforward, although some users may struggle if they are unfamiliar with the product.
Pricing: Check Point NGFW is known for its high setup cost, particularly when compared to other products. Users find it challenging to add new licensing to existing devices, especially for larger enterprise-level devices. Sophos XG provides flexible pricing options based on the required functionality, offering reasonable and competitive pricing, particularly for educational institutions.
ROI: Check Point NGFW stands out for its cost savings, simplicity, and effective security enforcement. Sophos XG offers a high ROI by reducing support expenses and enhancing security practices.
Comparison Results: Sophos XG is the favored product when compared to Check Point NGFW. Users find the initial setup of Sophos XG to be simple. They appreciate the functionality and user interface of Sophos XG, as well as its extensive protection against threats. The pricing for Sophos XG is considered fair and the technical support is satisfactory.
"Fortinet FortiGate has many valuable features, such as IDS, and intrusion detection. It has security features that are in part with the technologies that are available in the market."
"Whenever we raise a complaint with FortiGate, their response and resolution times are minimal."
"The integration with Active Directory is one of the good features. Most of the customers are now looking for the Single Sign-on feature. So, being able to integrate Active Directory with the firewall is useful. It is also easy."
"I think that the UTM features are the most value, as it truly protects my infrastructure."
"The interface is very good."
"The most valuable features are the possibility of having one fabric for switching on security."
"Initial setup is easy to configure."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiGate are the rules and quality of service."
"The most valuable feature is the highly integrated NGFW features such as the IPS or Check Point Identity Awareness, which makes Check Point the best choice on the market."
"The centrally managed firewalls are great."
"The central management console has helped with segregation, where planned interventions with management consoles do not have any impact on production or critical business traffic."
"The threat emulation blade and user identity awareness feature has helped us a lot in terms of perimeter security and have given us granular visibility of user access."
"Check Point's most useful feature is threat prevention and extraction. It was tough to manage seven firewalls and a perimeter solution for IPS, anti-malware, anti-bot, and sandboxing."
"The information stored in the logs is very descriptive and includes a lot of details."
"The Blades work fine and the performance optimization is great."
"Making configuring numerous layers of security policies easy to use was always one of the things I liked most about their firewall solution."
"Sophos XG has cybersecurity. It integrates with the antivirus software."
"The stability of Sophos XG is very good. However, there have been some issues with other weaker models because they are limited in hardware in resources."
"I like how you can integrate with other endpoints and Intercept X in one central management platform. I think it's a perfect solution. Sophos will manage everything in one container. You can manage many firewalls or endpoints within one panel."
"The most valuable features of Sophos XG are user-friendliness and it is highly secure."
"The stability has been excellent."
"The most valuable feature is that it scans all of the data for any kind of malware."
"We get good usage out of the features. It has enabled us to gain popularity. It has great features."
"We recommend Sophos XG as a priority as it is much more reliable and has efficient technical assistance."
"I'm not sure if it's something that they already have or are developing something, however, we need some dedicated features for container security."
"Fortinet already improved FortiGate, but in the current market, many brands of security devices have improved together. Fortinet still needs to catch up with market standards. Fortinet is lacking in features in comparison to competitors."
"The security of Fortinet FortiGate could improve."
"The central management for the FortiGate Fortinet Firewall needs improvement. They have the manager to do the essential management for both SD-WAN and for the security policy. They should also improve the SD-WAN function."
"The price of FortiGate should be reduced because there are some other leading products that are cheaper."
"I would prefer to have more detailed logs within the FortiGate products themselves rather than relying on a separate tool."
"The firewall engine is not so strong as of now, in my opinion... My second concern is that, while they have Zero-day vulnerability and anti-malware features, the threat engine needs to be strengthened, its efficiency can be increased."
"Their software support needs improvement. I would prefer to have better support for bug fixes. Sometimes, we open a ticket, and it is very difficult to get a solution. Specifically, we are not at all happy with their support for load balancing."
"In terms of new features, maybe it would help if we could start to manage all the stuff in the cloud and not in the on-prem servers. The management side could also be faster when you install policies. But other than that, I'm satisfied."
"Check Point NGFW Firewall requires frequent updates to build more user-friendly dashboards."
"Our SAM rule is also not working to block the IP address which we don't allow in our organization so we have to create a traditional rule base block which is a time-consuming job for me and my team."
"The tool’s architecture could be improved a bit."
"The Check Point TAC support has, in recent years, deteriorated."
"The technical support is really poor. We have to wait for approximately 48 hours sometimes for a simple solution."
"The whole solution has room for improvement."
"Complex and not very easy to use."
"Their support is fairly good, and they come back to me. I've had an issue once or twice where I couldn't understand what the support person was saying because those calls were probably routed to India. They were a bit difficult to understand, but it is generally not an issue."
"I would like to have better SSL decryption and HTTP decryption. There should be filtering of SSL and HTTP traffic. Sophos XG consumes a lot of endpoint resources. It consumes a lot of RAM and CPU resources, and they should look into this."
"I wish to see an antivirus feature added to the solution."
"The support engineers of the product are not very tech-savvy, making it an area where improvements are required."
"The logging side of it could definitely be better. Some of the logging lacks, and the information that they provide you, especially in the spam filtering section, could be better."
"It would be helpful if the solution offered some tutorial videos to help new users learn the system quickly."
"Their technical support needs improvement. I've been on hold with them for hours waiting for their support."
"Technical support is difficult to access."
Check Point NGFW is ranked 5th in Firewalls with 277 reviews while Sophos XG is ranked 7th in Firewalls with 192 reviews. Check Point NGFW is rated 8.8, while Sophos XG is rated 8.2. 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 XG writes "Easy to use and deploy with an improved pricing structure in place". Check Point NGFW is most compared with Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Cisco Secure Firewall, Netgate pfSense, Azure Firewall and OPNsense, whereas Sophos XG is most compared with Netgate pfSense, OPNsense, Sophos XGS, SonicWall TZ and Cisco Secure Firewall. See our Check Point NGFW vs. Sophos XG report.
See our list of best Firewalls vendors.
We monitor all Firewalls 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.