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Best UTM for home use

Looking for some opinions on what people are doing for UTM at home. Trying to figure out what's effective at home without the enterprise costs or administration. I currently use pfsense. Looking for something https://nox.tips/ with better features and reporting.

thanks!



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  • Hello ,

    Thank you for reaching out to the community, all the overview, features & limitations are mentioned here: https://www.sophos.com/en-us/free-tools/sophos-xg-firewall-home-edition

    Thanks & Regards,
    _______________________________________________________________

    Vivek Jagad | Team Lead, Technical Support, Global Customer Experience

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  • Hi and welcome to the UTM Community!

    Vivek gave you a link to the Home Edition for the Sophos Firewall (XG).  His link gives you the limitations on what you can buy to run the XG Home Edition.

    For home use, you will not want to buy a Sophos appliance for either XG or UTM.

    For the UTM Home Edition, the limitation is the number of IPs, 50.  The faster your internet connection, the faster you will want your CPU to be. Depending on the number of simultaneous users, a very fast dual-core might be a better choice than a not-as-fast quad-core.  A good reference would be the more-recent posts in the *Unofficial* Hardware Compatibility List (HCL).

    Cheers - Bob

     
    Sophos UTM Community Moderator
    Sophos Certified Architect - UTM
    Sophos Certified Engineer - XG
    Gold Solution Partner since 2005
    MediaSoft, Inc. USA
  • One device that is quite popular with the router/firewalls is the Qotom fanless PCs with the Intel I211-AT Gigabit NIC network. These devices are ready to go and require no additional hardware unless you get one barebones. www.amazon.com/.../B01N0H62A1

    Others use embedded SoC motherboards like what you'd get from mini-box.com/Jetwaycomputer.com

    Still others like me are using the UTM home edition with a full size PC with older dual/quad core CPUs that function well as a firewall as long as it is using a "server grade" Intel NIC.

    I run the Sophos UTM with a Sophos access point that integrates right into the firewall and can be setup and administered from within the UTM. Most home users still recommend the Sophos UTM over the XG due to ease of use but the XG is in active development while the UTM's future is uncertain.

    The UTM/XG have what pfsense doesn't and that is a fully functional web filter and antivirus scanning with AVIRA, and a biult-in IPS. Logging is also comprehensive especially on the UTM. The administration guides, at least for the UTM is incredible.

  • I started out back in 2017 with UTM home on a qotom box with a i5 5250u cpu, 8gb ram. Performance was adequate at best. Took some real optimizing (not all traffic needs full scanning) to get decent performance.  In 2019 upgraded to a proper pc (i5 6600k, 32gb ram). UTM was installed under esxi with the wan nic passed through directly (intel quad port pcie card). There were a few other vm's such as asterisk server (freepbx), small cloud (nextcloud), and a few others. Performance was much better especially the web protection (https scanning). My ISP also changed from ~300 mbps cable to symmetrical gig fiber.

    File server needs grew so upgraded everything to new hardware last year. Ryzen 5800x cpu w/ 64gb ram, now under proxmox. Plenty of capacity for everything for years to come. Got rid of the quad port nic as the board has dual nics embedded. Also no need for the sas card with 8 sata ports. The price is higher electrical draw. This box consumes ~80-90W at idle.

    Re UTM vs XG. If/when UTM goes EOL, I'll be switching to some flavor of pfsense. XG just seems like garbage to me. The UI makes little sense and layout is beyond wasteful with tons of whitespace.  Test it out for yourself.

  • I would try pfsense since it looks like a polished firewall, but I would really miss the web filtering of the UTM. Before Untangle stripped the free version of most of the features I wanted to use their NGfirewall instead. I stayed with Sophos because of it being free and easy enough for a home user to learn and the access points being avaialble.

  • You know, in the 5 years of using utm with web filtering/scanning on, the only hits ever received were false positives. At this point the only filtering in effect is url scanning, not actual content. IPS still enabled.

    I haven't decided which product i'll use yet. I have att fiber and have bypass in place.  Any platform used needs to have wpa_supplicant wired support as that's what handles the 802.1x auth.