The Pros of SOPHOS
- Easy to set up and configure
- Very stable solution
- Good reporting
- Scalable
If your organization is searching for firewalls, you have probably already heard about Sophos and Cisco products. The question remains: which one is better for your needs? We have consolidated real customer reviews in this blog to give a quick overview of both products.
Quick Reference
During a customer survey, users were asked to rate each product in different categories. The chart below is an overview of which product rated higher in each category.
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| Meets Requirements |  |
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| Ease of Setup | |
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| Quality of Support | |
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| Best for Enterprise Deployments | |
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| Product Direction | |
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| Ease of Doing Business With | |
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The Pros of Sophos and Meraki
“Despite its low price, it is a UTM product with a variety of capabilities. The UTM has a robust filtering function, but the price may appear to be prohibitively expensive; nonetheless, this device may be purchased in the same price range as the router. Of course, as a UTM, you may use virus scanning, filtering, remote access VPN, inter-site VPN, and other services. Furthermore, most of the capabilities can be simply configured and managed via a web browser, so basic operations will be no problem if you have any experience with routers. ” – Infrastructure Specialist, Services Industry
The Pros of Meraki
- Great security capabilities
- Adversity Malware Protection features
- Easy to apply rules without a command line
- Can integrate with other systems for incident response
“We have been using the Cisco Secure Firewall in our company for quite a long time now. It is a proactive threat defense tool that [s]tops all attacks even before they spread through our network. This tool has solved many of our business problems such as it provides VPN remote access allowing employees to work at the home office and be able to even access the intranet. It would not be wrong to say that the customer support of Cisco Secure Firewall is just spectacular and absolutely top-notch. We are highly satisfied with the quality of support it provides us as their team is filled with a pool of gems who are always there to tackle our problems in the calmest and smoothest manner.” – Project Director, Services Industry
The Cons of SOPHOS and Meraki
The Cons of SOPHOS
- Data traffic analysis is not ideal
- Steep learning curve without tutorial videos
- Users have encountered bugs in the backend
- Integrations can be improved
“Takes days or weeks to get a response to support tickets not marked Emergency. Have to continuously keep re-explaining issues or request escalation to higher-level support. Complexity of the configuration steps to connect users to group to policies to rules. Diagnostic tools are lacking and some are not implemented in the web interface/require command line access.”
– Network Administrator, Education
– Network Administrator, Education
The Cons of Meraki
- Limited data storage on the appliances themselves
- Deployments can take 7-10 minutes
- Solution could offer more control and restrictions
“There are a few minor limitations for VPNs, site to site with other brands can be a problem. It doesn’t have the ability to handle a few of the esoteric protocols. I, at the moment, can’t remember which protocol we had a problem with, but we were able to work around the issue with Meraki’s help. The reporting isn’t all it could be, but it has come a long way and they continue to improve it.” – Server Architect, Services Industry
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