We performed a comparison between Check Point NGFW and Palo Alto Networks VM-Series based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Firewalls solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."From the firewall perspective, the rules and policies are very sufficient and easy to use."
"It has very easy management and an amazing ETM configuration."
"Fortinet FortiGate is easy to use."
"The initial setup of Fortinet FortiGate was straightforward."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiGate are the ease of use and the UI. It has always provided me with what I needed. I have no need for additional costs that other solutions have, such as Sophos."
"The secure web gateway module and the application control module are valuable. HA operations are very easy."
"The stability of the solution is excellent, as it is with other Fortinet products."
"Fortigate's most valuable feature is that it doesn't need a push policy when writing rules."
"One of the most valuable features is the data center object integration with Azure. We are using Azure a lot and there is very nice synchronization between the objects in Azure, and it's very easy to implement rules using this feature."
"I like the GUI."
"The characteristics on offer have come to give an added value under a single investment, thus offering many advantages."
"Check Point has given us the ability to comply with regulations and with capacities in a way that we never could before."
"As with any firewall, IPSEC VPN is the critical functionality. Not every organization has the budget to implement MPLS or SD-WAN, which makes IPSEC the go-to for site-to-site connectivity."
"Apart from it having very good features, I personally like the vulnerability assistance via report management which detects host and network vulnerability."
"The most valuable features are application control, regulation, and threat prevention."
"The Threat Management feature makes it very easy to detect the vulnerabilities and other factors. We can make new policy according to it. Policy creation is very simple in Check Point. Because the logs are very good in Check Point Firewall, this reduces our work with the reports that we are getting from the Threat Management. It is very convenient for us to use the reports to make new policies for security and other things."
"The most valuable feature is that you can launch it in a very short time. You don't have to wait for the hardware to arrive and get it staged and installed. From that perspective, it is easy to launch. It is also scalable."
"The main advantage of Palo Alto Networks VM-Series stems from the fact that you can access it with the help of cloud services."
"The feature that I have found the most useful is that it meets all our requirements technically."
"In AWS, Palo Alto provides us a better view than flow logs for network traffic."
"It scales linearly with load and no issues."
"I like the UI. Most things are accessible from the user interface and it is quite user-friendly. With respect to both VM-based firewalls and physical firewalls, it's easy to create updates."
"We can monitor the traffic manually and detect threats. Additionally, we can block different IP addresses and URLs."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the zero-trust security architecture."
"Their software support needs improvement. I would prefer to have better support for bug fixes. Sometimes, we open a ticket, and it is very difficult to get a solution. Specifically, we are not at all happy with their support for load balancing."
"Fortinet FortiGate can be integrated with different platforms. They have integrations in place, but I can't say they're 100%."
"I would like to see improvements made to the dashboard and UI, as well as to the reporting."
"I would prefer to have more detailed logs within the FortiGate products themselves rather than relying on a separate tool."
"In the balance between links feature normally you can just choose one option to balance. It would be better for the solution to have more than one option, preferably three."
"Lacks sufficient security options."
"I think they need to improve more in order to be a competitor with the leaders of the field."
"One issue that I have had is that sometimes I need to monitor the traffic, so I need to filter it according to the user and which user is using it the most. I experience a bottleneck most of the time, particularly at the peak time when the number of contracts and users are at maximum."
"While the solution is good, we wish to have something that is a bit better, as the threats have evolved over time."
"I primarily work on the network side, so my expertise lies in configuring and working with firewalls. I have experience in firewall policies and know how to configure them within CheckPoint, including blocking URLs and specific website categories. However, I acknowledge that there's room for improvement, particularly in areas related to application-level control within the firewall. While I can't pinpoint a specific area for improvement, I am trying open to enhancing my skills and knowledge in various aspects of firewall management."
"The firewall can improved to make it more user-friendly."
"Lately, Check Point seems to be pushing new products too early."
"My customers complain that the interface isn't user-friendly."
"The policy installation length is still too long. It was promised that the time would be severely reduced in newer versions, but it is still too long."
"They need to offer quicker resolution and maintenance during downtime."
"Lacks some integration with other solutions."
"It would be good if the common features work consistently in physical and virtual environments. There was an integration issue in the virtual deployment where it didn't report the interface counters, and we had to upgrade to the latest version, whereas the same thing has been working in the physical deployment for ages now. It seems that it was because of Azure. We were using VMware before, and we didn't have any such issues. We do see such small issues where we expect things to work, but they don't because of some incompatibilities. There also seems to be a limitation on how to do high availability in a virtualized environment. All features should be consistently available in physical and virtual environments. It is not always easy to integrate Palo Alto in the network management system. We would like to be able to compare two network management systems. They can maybe allow monitoring an interface through the GUI to create a reference or do a baseline check about whether your network monitoring system is actually giving you the correct traffic figures. You need traffic figures to be able to recognize the trends and plan the capacity."
"It has to be more scalable for the deployment of VMs on the cloud."
"The utilization monitoring and GUI have room for improvement."
"Just sometimes it can be a bit sluggish navigating through pages. That is just purely because of Java."
"The user-friendliness of the UI could be improved."
"Palo Alto Networks VM-Series needs to improve its order process."
"We don't know how it will scale once we start putting more load on it."
"There are some delays that I have observed when my company communicates with Palo Alto's support engineers."
Check Point NGFW is ranked 5th in Firewalls with 278 reviews while Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is ranked 10th in Firewalls with 53 reviews. Check Point NGFW is rated 8.8, while Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Check Point NGFW writes "Good antivirus protection and URL filtering with very good user identification capabilities". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Palo Alto Networks VM-Series writes "Many features are optimized for troubleshooting real-time scenarios, saving a lot of time". Check Point NGFW is most compared with Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Sophos XG, Cisco Secure Firewall, Netgate pfSense and Azure Firewall, whereas Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is most compared with Azure Firewall, Fortinet FortiGate-VM, Cisco Secure Firewall, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls and Check Point CloudGuard Network Security. See our Check Point NGFW vs. Palo Alto Networks VM-Series report.
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