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."Its administrative panel is very intuitive and simple. It is simpler than the other solutions that we had. As an administrator, we are always looking for the easiest solution to manage network policies. We are able to filter everything on our network and also use the VPN feature, which is important these days when people are working remotely during COVID."
"It is a good source for firewall protection."
"You can create multiple Virtual Domains (VDOMs), which are treated as separate firewall instances."
"FortiGate firewalls are user-friendly, and I like the security profiling features."
"The most valuable features are SD-WAN, application control, IPS control, and FortiSandbox."
"It's great for capturing the traffic and troubleshooting it."
"Whenever we raise a complaint with FortiGate, their response and resolution times are minimal."
"The security features that they have are quite good. On top of that, their licensing model is quite nice where they don't charge you anything for the SD-WAN functionality for the firewall."
"AV, IPS, AntiSpam, Sandbox. That's gentlemen set for any basic security, and it was implemented very well. In our reports, the most exciting results belong to AV and IPS. It can be explained by using ThreatCloud - a global knowledge base, which accumulates signatures for all existing and new coming malware, and all the Check Point solutions are always up to date with potential threats."
"On the firewall side, the security efficacy is good."
"I rate the tool's stability a ten out of ten."
"The ability to split single hardware into multiple virtuals along with support for dynamic routing using BGP is very useful for our environment."
"The most valuable features are the security blades and the ease of managing the policies, searching log for events, and correlating them."
"It creates granular security policies based on users or groups to identify, block or limit the usage of web applications."
"The scalability is very good."
"The management platform and the dashboard, the graphical user interface, is one of the best, if not the best, in the business. It's the most intuitive and it's really user-friendly in day-to-day operations."
"I have not actually called their support line, because we have a direct contact to a senior engineer in the company for any issues that we handle with them. I will say they are very responsive, and they do give you the information you need when you need it."
"The feature that I have found the most useful is that it meets all our requirements technically."
"Centralized management is valuable because it allows us to configure settings in one location and apply them across all three locations."
"A solid operating system with all the necessary data center security features."
"The solution enables organizations to enforce policies."
"In Palo Alto the most important feature is the App-ID."
"It is very stable. It is fairly easy to use."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the zero-trust security architecture."
"The firmware needs improvement because there are bugs when a new release comes through. Sometimes, the configuration changes, and it's a bit harder to see where the fail is. The first time that you have the firmware, it tends to have some issues, and it's better to wait a bit to update the equipment."
"The initial setup and configuration are not intuitive and require training."
"There are some tiny bugs that sometimes affect the operations. In the past revision of it, there was a bug. Because of the bug, we had to downgrade the version. It happened only with the last revision."
"The renewal price and the availability could be improved."
"The customization could be improved. Cisco, for example, is much better at this. They need to work to be at least as good as they are."
"The captive portal could be improved."
"Reporting is limited to providing an external appliance for improving the reporting capabilities of the FortiAnalyzer. It does not offer a central management and is also sold separably as an appliance."
"I would suggest that Fortinet add sandboxing to their solution."
"The biggest improvement they could make is having one software to install on all three levels of their products, so that the SMBs, the normal models, and the chassis would all run the same software. Now, while there is central management, everything that has to be configured on the gateway itself works differently on the three kinds of devices."
"The VPN part was actually one of the most complex parts for us. It was not easy for us to switch from Cisco, because of one particular part of the integration: connecting the Check Point device to an Entrust server. Entrust is a solution that provides two-factor authentication. We got around it by using another server, a solution called RADIUS."
"The setup is a little complex compared to its competitors."
"Unfortunately, as is the case with many big companies, new features seem to always be more important than fixing the last little bugs that affect only a minor customer base."
"Support cases have been generated several times, and it takes time for the case to be resolved."
"We need east/west Check Point firewalls in order to do micro-segmentation."
"Check Point should improve services related to the cloud-based solution."
"When I was creating the VPN on it and the client side through the portal, that feature was very annoying. I could not use it. It was much more usable after downloading it to the laptop. That was very good compared to using it directly from the browser."
"I would like to see a more thorough QA process. We have had some difficulties from bugs in releases."
"Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is a complex product to work with."
"It is not very easy to scale up the solution."
"The product needs improvement in their Secure Access Service Edge."
"The interface is all Java-based. I would prefer an HTML5 interface."
"We have run into some issues with scaling and limitations associated with some of the configurations."
"The DLP functionality or data classification can be improved in the solution's basic firewalling."
"Recently, they introduced their Prisma Cloud solution. Compared to the previous technologies, like Panorama, which is used for centralized firewall management, or even the individual firewalls, it's a bit challenging to integrate the traditional firewall policies into Prisma Cloud."
Check Point NGFW is ranked 5th in Firewalls with 279 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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