pfSense is a firewall and load management product available through the open source pfSense Community Edition, as well as a the licensed edition, pfSense Plus (formerly known as pfSense Enterprise). The solution provides combined firewall, VPN, and router functionality, and can be deployed through the cloud (AWS or Azure), or on-premises with a Netgate appliance. It as scalable capacities, with functionality for SMBs. As a firewall, pfSense offers Stateful packet inspection, concurrent…
$179
per appliance
Sophos Intercept X
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
Sophos Endpoint Protection (Sophos EPP) with Intercept X is an endpoint security product providing an antivirus / antimalware solution that when upgraded with Intercept X or Intercept X Advanced provides advanced threat detection and EDR capabilities.
$28
per year per user
Pricing
pfSense
Sophos Intercept X
Editions & Modules
SG-1100
$179
per appliance
SG-2100
$229
per appliance
SG-3100
$399
per appliance
SG-5100
$699
per appliance
XG-7100-DT
$899
per appliance
XG-7100-1U
$999
per appliance
XG-1537
$1,949
per appliance
XG-1541
$2,649
per appliance
Intercept X Advanced
$28
per year per user
Intercept X Advanced with XDR
$48
per year per user
Sophos Managed Threat Response
$79
per year per user
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
pfSense
Sophos Intercept X
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
—
Pricing is for a 3-year commitment. Government and Education pricing available.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
pfSense
Sophos Intercept X
Considered Both Products
pfSense
No answer on this topic
Sophos Intercept X
Verified User
Team Lead
Chose Sophos Intercept X
Sophos is much more user friendly and scalable for partners who wish to [centralize] all security across the IT industry, from email security, server security, phish threat management and more.
For fast-growing or SME companies, pfSense is quite suitable because pfSense already had many advanced features such as VPN and multiple WAN / LAN. As a result, we just need to pay for expensive router frequently to upgrade our infrastructure.
To be frank, this product is fairly expensive. So I would recommend this to companies that are mid-sized or larger to condone the cost of the purchase. It does save me a significant amount of time in my day - being able to glance at the dashboard and see if there are any outstanding issues that require my attention, as not much digging must be done to accomplish this. So for our company, with a short-staffed IT department, it's incredibly helpful to us. We also qualify for Educational pricing which brings the cost down - which helps tremendously
pfSense is an excellent firewall - It logs all of your traffic. It has packages you can install to snort bad traffic.
pfSense has a tool called "p0f" which allows you to see what type of OS is trying to connect to you. You can filter these results and you can also block a specific OS from connecting to you.
pfSense is an excellent load-balancer: (Multi-WAN and Server Load Balancing) The fail-over/aggregation works very well. This is perfect if your business uses multiple ISP's to ensure your customers are always able to access their data. Also helps with bandwidth distribution as well.
VPN's - I am not entirely sure if this package was free with pfSense, but it does offer the ability to use OpenVPN which is what I am familiar with.
They also have IPsec in the settings as well, but I am not familiar with that enough to go into any detail with it.
As I mentioned I do use OpenVPN the only thing I don't care for with it is I can create OpenVPN configs for each user I want to be able to VPN into the network and I assumed each one would be "unique" but this does not seem to be the case. I could be doing it wrong, but if I create a config for a specific employee I would expect only that employee should be able to use that config, but I have been able to login to everyone that I made using my credentials.
I mentioned earlier that pfSense had a GUI.
I personally really think it is cool because it has a bunch of reporting graphs for monitoring your networks. I think when I become the full-time admin at the company I am going to try to talk them into getting me a TV I can mount on the wall and display all the graphs and real-time info pfSense shows so I can monitor what is going on with the network(s) at all times. Plus I think it would look rad.
Sophos Intercept X is great at preventing malware infections and rolling back their effects. I have seen this happen hundreds of times since we installed it
When combined with Sophos Central, you have an easy to use dashboard where you can manage all installations from a single pane of glass.
It's easy to deploy on machines and stays updated.
Good reporting features including alerts sent to the admin if there's ever something wrong with it.
There is no API for making changes. This can be a hindrance in environments where auto-deploying something needs firewall rules or HAProxy configs updated. Since all settings are stored in an XML file and then configs are generated from that, even manually updating config files cannot be done.
Beware that some network cards can have issues. pfSense is based on FreeBSD, so it's best to look on their compatibility list before deploying.
Sophos OOTB policies are very strict and they don't offer anything less strict without you creating new custom policies. I'm sure this is deliberate because the product starts you out in the safest way possible but it means that you will have lots of calls to your tech support desk when you first deploy it unless you do somewhat extensive testing beforehand.
Sophos Intercept X is currently broken (at least the DLP component) by having secure boot turned on in the UEFI/BIOS. If any user wants to be able to write data to a USB drive or floppy from their PC (yes we still have a couple users who need to use floppies) we have to turn off secure boot on their PC, even if the DLP policy for that user/PC combination specifies that the user and PC are allowed to write to USB/floppy. This would be a very serious problem if it weren't for the fact that we have very few users who need to write files to USB. For us it's OK but I bet it would be a deal-breaker for others.
I don't see a whole lot of evidence that Intercept X is any different than any other anti-virus, so maybe their admin alerts just don't clearly identify when they have identified a zero-day threat or maybe we just haven't had any zero-day threats.
Most of the support reps are fantastic. There have been a few though that have had to be escalated via Account Manager when they haven't followed up but this is a rare instance, and often followed up by the Support Manager for APAC.
Before pfSense we were using consumer and small business rated network appliances from Linksys, Cisco, Buffalo and Netgear. We were replacing them on average of every 6-12 months because they'd fail or would offer poor wifi availability. Switching to pfSense allowed us to use professional grade switches and wifi access points, offloading all of the services that the consumer grade products took care of, onto pfSense (DHCP, DNS, routing, firewall, VPN, etc).
Webroot Endpoint Protection is not even in the same league as Sophos Intercept-X. I have tested and compared both sides by side, run simulations and it's not even close. Plus the Sophos central management is so much better. Easier to view user activities and apply policies and remediate threats. Sophos is the clear winner between these two products.
Moving to a FWaaS solution installed on a decent computer the initial investment was moderate to cover 50 to 250 users, but still being cheaper that a Fortinet, Cisco ASA, or a Sophos UTM.
Paying only for support can be a double edge knife, cause you need to identify what's the goal of the request, or your drown into a an endless list of requirements.
To stay in the top with the half of a regular investment pFSense gives a wide variety of plugins that will give you a deep knowledge of your security flaws and strong points.
Once our technical and commercial areas got certified, the ROI over the time spent, is great. Actual customers, and/or new ones with other tools, feel safe and advised, once they get in touch with us.
When Sophos EndPoint is being compared against Web Management Tools (competitors), we have failed to deliver, nevertheless, there is a version of Sophos Central (Cloud) which achieves this requirement at 100% and more, since is Cloud Based (on AWS).
We are grateful to be on Sophos "Radar" as a Platinum Partner, and "The Americas" valued partner, we have seen our business grow, thanks to this kind of technology, throughout the years.
