We performed a comparison between OPNsense and Sophos XG based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Sophos XG’s single pane of glass makes it easy for users to manage the entire solution from anywhere. The solution is very light, stable, and provides excellent real-time control. Users feel OPNsense is not a good product for medium to large businesses, as it has some very limited features and needs better reporting and documentation.
"The usage in general is pretty good."
"The reporting and monitoring are very good."
"The multi-tenancy feature is most valuable. It integrates very well with FortiManager and FortiAnalyzer."
"I appreciate FortiGate's flexibility, which allows for centralized management through FortiManager."
"The solution is very, very easy to use."
"Their interface is very easy to use, it is without bugs."
"It does a lot for you for intrusion protection and as an antivirus. The threat management bundle is worth the money. You don't need another company to monitor your web traffic for you. You can do everything yourself on the firewall. You restrict your own black list for people on the firewall. You don't need to pay some other company for another product to do that for you. The firewall can do that for you. So, it's an easy-to-use product for people to be independent. They don't need to rely on other vendors to do what the firewall can do. They can do everything."
"Its stability is the most valuable."
"The solution is user-friendly and easy to configure."
"I find the solution to be user-friendly. It has a lot of reports and easy settings."
"The DNS-level filtering is impressive for thwarting time scanners."
"OPNsense is easy to scale when running on the hardware."
"We have found pretty much all the features of the solution to be valuable."
"We have been operating here in our lab for several months, and everything appears to be extremely stable."
"It's more secure and more reliable."
"OPNsense is easy to use and open source."
"Everything is consolidated into a single box, offering comprehensive functionality, including Wi-Fi access and other features."
"One feature of Sophos XG that I found incredibly beneficial for threat prevention is its endpoint protection."
"The most valuable features are its nice interfaces and configuration. The endpoint is also very good."
"We can configure rules with the user, traffic, etc., making it a very versatile solution for our network."
"The VPN is easy and has good logging, monitoring and notifications."
"it's user-friendly, not complex."
"The product has a console that is based in the cloud for all their products. In this console, they have email security, firewall security, endpoint security, et cetera. All of the products on offer in the console are very useful for us."
"The performance of Sophos XG is generally good and it is stable."
"The stability could be a bit better."
"When we cluster the two Fortinet FortiGate boxes together we have some issues."
"I would like to see improvements made to the dashboard and UI, as well as to the reporting."
"The monitor and the visibility, in this proxy, is very weak."
"Fortinet should focus on enhancing the capabilities of FortiGate by consolidating its various products, such as FortiGate Cloud, FortiManager, and FortiAnalyzer."
"Fortinet FortiGate could improve by having more capabilities for troubleshooting VPN connections. For example, I do get some feedback about the current status, but I could use some history and logging of important events. The information is logged in our Syslog server, but I could use that information from the device. If they could provide a GUI to have some more insight on what's going with my VPN would be useful."
"With FortiGate, the main complaint that I have heard is about the technical support."
"Tunnel flapping was one of the major things I had seen wherein your internet link remains but your VPN tunnel is down. However, since I got a fix from the TAC team, I have not noticed it, but the customer complained a few times that they couldn't access the internet because of this problem."
"There are some add-ons that need enhancements to make management easier for users, especially the reporting features. Some reports don't show the level of detail I'm looking for, and I've had trouble installing certain add-ons, especially for Internet bandwidth shaping within my company."
"The interface needs to be simplified. It is not user-friendly."
"In terms of improvement, the performance could be enhanced."
"The interface isn't so friendly user. But we have some technicians here who are quite confident with this tool. OPNSense could maybe add sets of rules so it's simpler to manage different groups with particular needs."
"There is room for improvement in SSL inspection."
"OPNsense showed me some problems when using it in different environments. The problem is integration with a virtual server."
"The logging could improve in OPNsense."
"The support for OPNsense is good because we have documents available on the internet. The support could improve a little."
"The support engineers of the product are not very tech-savvy, making it an area where improvements are required."
"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."
"Better instructions should be provided as part of the technical support so that we can understand the functionalities. This will help us to troubleshoot faster."
"I would like to have a more efficient login process."
"We recently did an upgrade on the Sophos XG firmware and we were surprised that after the upgrade, the automatic switch actually we were using did not work anymore."
"There have been some issues when upgrading. For some reason, parts of the configuration become unconfigured, I then have to reconfigure it. I should not need to keep reconfiguring it after upgrades."
"Sophos XG could improve the policies, they are a bit confusing when creating them. There are many options that make it confusing and it could be simplified."
"The user interface could be better."
OPNsense is ranked 3rd in Firewalls with 36 reviews while Sophos XG is ranked 7th in Firewalls with 192 reviews. OPNsense is rated 8.4, while Sophos XG is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of OPNsense writes "Robust network security and management offering a user-friendly interface, open-source flexibility, and cost-effectiveness, with challenges regarding initial setup and the absence of official support". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sophos XG writes "Easy to use and deploy with an improved pricing structure in place". OPNsense is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Untangle NG Firewall, Sophos UTM, IPFire and WatchGuard Firebox, whereas Sophos XG is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Sophos XGS, SonicWall TZ, Meraki MX and Sophos UTM. See our OPNsense vs. Sophos XG report.
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