Fortinet FortiGate vs. Sophos UTM

Fortinet FortiGate and Sophos Unified Threat Management (UTM) are both Next Generation Firewall products. Beyond core firewall capabilities, they each offered extended features like VPN support and web filtering. 

FortiGate is known for delivering a very cost-effective next generation firewall. Unique configurability and licensing flexibility makes FortiGate well suited for growing or scaling companies with changing security needs. Sophos is more focused on the midsized company to small enterprise range with additional UTM security features.

Features

Fortinet FortiGate and Sophos UTM both have some unique features or structures to serve their respective audiences. 

FortiGate stands out for its cost effectiveness among leading NGFW products. Users can tailor which capabilities and features they purchase at a very granular level, which helps companies only pay for exactly what security features they’re using. This allows companies to select from Fortigate’s advanced NGFW features, like intrusion prevention and VPN enablement. 

Sophos excels at making extended capabilities more accessible and easy to use. For instance, Sophos UTM offers sandboxing and email protection, among other more specialized security features. Sophos also provides excellent VPN tunnel capabilities for encrypted site-to-site connections. Reviewers claim these features are relatively easy to deploy and implement as well. 

Limitations

There are also drawbacks or limitations to FortiGate and Sophos UTM worth considering. 

FortiGate’s customizability comes with a greater learning burden. Reviewers frequently point it a steeper learning curve, partially due to less automated configuration. This requires more manual actions and change management in order to make use of FortiGate’s superior flexibility and configurability. Customer support is also not consistent, as the vendor has been known to deflect to other channel partners, whose customer support can vary case-by-case. 

On the other hand, while Sophos makes advanced capabilities more accessible, its baseline policy management is not as simple as FortiGate allows. Some analyses have found Sophos to be less effective at threat prevention, and there are some compatibility issues with Sophos’s cloud offerings. 

Pricing

Fortinet FortiGate is available by quote from the vendor, with a customized package for each business’s needs. 

Sophos UTM is also priced by quote, with pricing impacted by deployment model, licensed modules, and additional add-ons for management or reporting options.