We performed a comparison between Azure Firewall and Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Based on the parameters we compared, while Azure Firewall is certainly a solid option, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is equally good. Users of both products have been happy with the ROI results. What differentiates the two products is the stark difference in pricing, which may ultimately sway an organization’s purchasing decision.
"It does a lot for you for intrusion protection and as an antivirus. The threat management bundle is worth the money. You don't need another company to monitor your web traffic for you. You can do everything yourself on the firewall. You restrict your own black list for people on the firewall. You don't need to pay some other company for another product to do that for you. The firewall can do that for you. So, it's an easy-to-use product for people to be independent. They don't need to rely on other vendors to do what the firewall can do. They can do everything."
"The solution is easy to configure and maintain remotely."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiGate are the ability to work in proxy mode, which other solutions, such as Palo Alto cannot. There are some features that are better that come at no extra license or subscriptions cost, such as basic SD-WAN. The DLT is useful, other solutions have the same feature too, such as Palo Alto."
"The user interface (UI) is very, very good."
"The most valuable feature of Fortinet FortiGate is load balancing. It can provide central management and VPNA. Additionally, it has enhanced our security environment."
"The ability to set up remote systems is the most valuable feature."
"Fortinet has a very good solution for Secure SD-WAN. One very good feature is that they have robust and simple FortiOS through which they provide all solutions. That's their strength. There's not much complexity involved with the Secure SD-WAN solution of Fortinet as compared to Cisco's solution, which has a lot of flexibility but complexity also comes with that flexibility."
"Fortinet FortiGate is easy to use."
"The Layer four features are okay and meet my business needs."
"One of the notable advantages of Azure Firewall is its user-friendly interface, which closely resembles or shares similarities with other Azure components."
"Azure Firewall is a cloud-native solution that removes the pain of load balancers."
"The most valuable feature is the integration into the overall cloud platform."
"The SIEM that Azure Firewall provides us is very robust."
"The most valuable feature is threat intelligence. It is based on filtering and can identify multiple threats."
"We use the solution for application and server deployment."
"The solution is very stable. When comparing it to other environments, it's actually quite impressive."
"Innovative, advanced threat protection is the most valuable feature."
"They have a good system operator in the firewalls and it provides many tools that they can use to protect their networks."
"Identifying applications is very easy with this solution."
"The DNS sync code in your filtering is the most valuable feature of the Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls."
"The technical support is great."
"Security is the biggest thing nowadays, including threat response, incident response, and root cause. We found that a lot of the logging and dashboard capabilities offered by Palo Alto fill the missing skill gap that you run up against. It makes it easier for our tier-two staff to get involved in some of the deeper root cause analysis. The dashboards, logs, and reports make it easier for our staff to dive right in and not get lost in what tools they should use. It's easy because they're all right there."
"A feature introduced by Palo Alto with the version 10-OS is embedded machine learning in the core of the firewall to provide inline, real-time attack prevention. Machine learning analyzes the network traffic and detects if there is any usual traffic coming from outside to inside. Because of Palo Alto, organizations detect around 91% of malicious attacks using machine learning. The machine learning helps customers by implementing firewalls in critical and air gap areas so there is no need to integrate with the cloud sandbox."
"The solution is user-friendly. It's secure and easy to understand your network visibility, control the network, and prevent attacks."
"The performance and speed are aspects of the solution that could always be improved upon."
"The stability could be a bit better."
"Technical support could be better. You don't always get the level of help you need right away."
"The updates Fortinet provides are sometimes unstable."
"I would like to have logs, monitoring, and reporting for a month without extra fees."
"In the next release, maybe the documentation on how to use this solution could be improved."
"Scalability for Fortinet FortiGate needs to be improved. SD-WAN security for this solution also needs some improvement."
"The cloud features can be improved."
"The solution doesn't offer the same capabilities of Fortinet. It should offer intrusion prevention and advance filtering. These are two very useful features offered on Fortinet that Azure lacks."
"It would be nice to be able to create groupings for servers and offer groups of IP addresses."
"They can improve the pricing of Azure Firewall."
"It would be much easier if the on-premises, firewall rules, had some kind of export-import possibility in place, which is not the case right now."
"The solution lacks artificial intelligence and machine learning. It might be in the roadmap. However, currently, it's not available."
"The interface could be improved, it's not very user friendly."
"The threat intelligence aspect of this particular firewall is not at par with other providers."
"The threat intelligence part could be better. I don't see why our customers have to get an additional solution with Azure Firewall. It would be great if they made it on par with Palo Alto."
"Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls do not provide a unified platform that natively integrates all security capabilities."
"We have not taken Palo Alto's firewall management solution because it's too expensive and we don't feel it delivers significant value."
"Personally, I feel that their dashboards for reporting and things like that need some improvement."
"Technical support could be faster."
"I would like to see more in terms of reporting tools and the threat analysis capabilities."
"We are not happy with Palo Alto at all. It would be better if they provided more support for the firewall. We have a few pending issues with the configuration for each application. We cannot deploy them yet due to some support-related problems in the firewall. We have deployed a few policies for DNS spoofing and DNS attacks, but we could only block a few IP addresses through the policy. That's DNS security, and we have configured a few policies for DNS spoofing and more. URL categorization and URL filtering are not yet adequately maintained. For example, if you created a few rules in the rule-based configuration and made some rules downstairs, you will lose some of them if you give access upstairs. It's not giving us a proper solution for which route it is using. We need to apply the application-based policies and URL filtering-based policies. It creates more issues because we are not getting good support from the team."
"The scalability of the firewalls could be improved."
"As part of our internet filtering, we integrate heavily with Active Directory, and we use security groups to separate staff into two groups: those who should have full access to the internet and those who should have limited access. It may be just the way the topology is for our domain controllers and that infrastructure, but at peak usage, there seems to be a delay in reading back against the security group to find out what group the user is in."
More Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls Pricing and Cost Advice →
Azure Firewall is ranked 21st in Firewalls with 33 reviews while Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is ranked 6th in Firewalls with 162 reviews. Azure Firewall is rated 7.2, while Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Azure Firewall writes "Easy to use and configure but could be more robust". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls writes "We get reports back from WildFire on a minute-by-minute basis". Azure Firewall is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate-VM, Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Palo Alto Networks VM-Series, Check Point NGFW and Cisco Secure Firewall, whereas Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is most compared with Check Point NGFW, Meraki MX, Sophos XG, Netgate pfSense and Cisco Secure Firewall. See our Azure Firewall vs. Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls report.
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We monitor all Firewalls reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.