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Check Point NGFW vs Zscaler Cloud Firewall comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 13, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Fortinet FortiGate
Sponsored
Ranking in Firewalls
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
380
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) Solutions (1st), WAN Edge (1st)
Check Point NGFW
Ranking in Firewalls
5th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
324
Ranking in other categories
Unified Threat Management (UTM) (1st)
Zscaler Cloud Firewall
Ranking in Firewalls
25th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
8.0
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Firewalls category, the mindshare of Fortinet FortiGate is 21.2%, up from 17.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Check Point NGFW is 3.0%, down from 3.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Zscaler Cloud Firewall is 0.4%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Firewalls
 

Featured Reviews

Vasu Gala - PeerSpot reviewer
A stable solution with an intuitive interface and quick customer service
I have been working with Fortinet FortiGate, WatchGuard, Sophos, and SonicWall. I'm not as comfortable with SonicWall because of their UI and limitations. I prefer Fortinet above all other options. When it comes to configuration, I am confident in my ability to handle various tasks, including creating policies such as firewall rules, web policies, and application policies. Additionally, I can configure VPNs and implement load balancing, among other tasks. Overall, I feel much more comfortable working with Fortinet. Fortinet has made significant improvements by integrating AI with firewalls for threat analysis and prevention. In the past 2-3 years, they have launched FortiSASE and SIEM, and they also provide SOC services. Both Palo Alto and Fortinet FortiGate are excellent. While Fortinet FortiGate comes at higher prices, the functionality and support justify the cost. They promptly resolve firmware issues and inform all support providers about configuration changes.
Hailemichael Yigrem - PeerSpot reviewer
Advanced security features enhance threat detection and prevention
Check Point NGFW provides granular application control and detailed visibility over application and user activity. It integrates with the ThreatCloud ecosystem, enabling real-time threat detection and prevention. The User Identity Awareness blade integrates with Active Directory, identifying user traffic sources. Check Point NGFW is highly scalable and has centralized management through SmartConsole, which manages policies, logs, and threat data. It reduced our incidents and decreased the time to analyze cyber threats by 70 percent.
Bhaskar Rao - PeerSpot reviewer
Though it helps deal with web traffic or any malicious traffic, it needs to work on its DC performance issues
The product's initial setup phase is moderate in level, so it is neither very complex nor very easy. For the deployment, my company first needs to gather all the requirements of the users and the domain names and consider how many users there are in the company. In the implementation and planning part, my company needs to consider what kind of policies we will create while ensuring that the policies are created based on the requirements of the users. There is a need to segregate the users' requirements since there are separate departments in the company, like the HR department, sales department, IT department, and manufacturing department, so that our company can create policies depending on their requirements. On-site, if you want a GRE tunnel, our company can handle GRE tunnel traffic routing and Zscaler Cloud Firewall, after which Zscaler will take action based on the policies created by our organization. For the deployments and maintenance, a team of five members consisting of two managers and three engineers is required.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiGate are the APIs. They are the most widely known."
"FortiGate's web and URL filtering are unlike any other firewall I've used. The functionality of URL filtering in those solutions is problematic because everything is encrypted, and firewalls can't break that encryption protocol. Fortinet has an SSL proxy, so the encryption is done before the packet ever leaves the FortiGate. The URL filter is definitely one of the most helpful features."
"It has a good UI and overall integration, including FortiGate Manager for controlling all firewalls from a single place."
"With FortiClient, you can easily connect when you are home, check out what you want to do, and connect to your network when you are not at work. You can switch on servers and you can check what is wrong."
"Fortinet FortiGate is the best option on the market when it comes to firewalls."
"Fortinet FortiGate is a very good next-generation firewall."
"User-friendly and affordable security solution that's recommended for SMB customers. This solution has good technical support."
"The most important features of Fortinet FortiGate are the Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) and firewall control applications."
"It is easy to configure and it is a valuable antivirus protection. I especially like the IPS feature of this product."
"The activation of additional features is very easy and well documented."
"The Check Point appliances are considered NGFW devices and can process both the ASA and FTD requirements on a single instance, removing the requirement for an expansion SSD module and/or additional hardware."
"The IPS protection is the most useful feature that I found from Check Point."
"Everything can be managed from a single dashboard nowadays."
"We can decipher the activity of each connection and see what is inside it."
"It has various features, like Threat Prevention and Antivirus. It is easier to use and have knowledge of a single device rather than multiple devices/technologies when doing an installation. It is also easy to use because of having Antivirus and Threat Prevention features within the same firewall."
"In R80.10 and above, you can view logs in SmartConsole. You don't have to open another smart tracker to view logs. That is the improvement Check Point has done which makes it better because it is much easier to find logs. This saves time, approximately 40 to 50 a day in one shift."
"Zscaler Cloud Firewall understands the applications in the current generation and adapts to the present generation cloud applications."
"If malicious traffic attacks our on-premises servers, then it gets blocked by Zscaler Cloud Firewall."
"Once you have Zscaler running you have access to configure it however you want."
"The product’s firewall and VPN package are fantastic compared to any other solution."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"The solution is scalable."
"The technical support from Zscaler was excellent."
"The visibility and log availability offered are highly valued for troubleshooting purposes, and this is a key factor driving customer interest in the firewall module."
 

Cons

"I wish that they could integrate zero-trust technology into Fortinet FortiGate. I am not sure whether it has been done already, but if they could implement that, it would help significantly."
"Technical support is good but the response time could be faster."
"There aren't really any negative aspects to discuss."
"Difficult to add or define, and not that easy to configure and manage."
"I would suggest that Fortinet add sandboxing to their solution."
"Security is a continuous process. In every product, there is a requirement for improvement. Its pricing should also be improved according to Indian market requirements. They must also improve on the reporting part. Its reporting can be more precise. If we can get a real-time report in a specific format, it will be helpful for customers to know about the current status of their security."
"Usually, we sell the bundle with the UTM or threat management piece with IPS, IDS. Other providers, such as Palo Alto, are ahead in terms of safe functionality. So, for me, delivering truly safe service is probably something that still needs to be improved."
"The license renewal process, annual renewal price, and the web application firewall features should be improved."
"Scalability should be improved."
"It would be nice if there is a mobile-friendly console for our techs."
"I would like less CPU-intensive features to be introduced to replace the existing heavy-duty processes."
"Although very efficient, the product could be developed in a way that does not take a lot more system resources."
"Check Point NGFW could improve by introducing machine learning and more modeling dividing the way they manage the ports. However, they have evolved over the last year."
"It would help if they were easier to deploy, without needing more technical people. It would be nice if we could just give basic information, how to connect, and that would be all, while the rest of the setup could be done remotely."
"In terms of new features, maybe it would help if we could start to manage all the stuff in the cloud and not in the on-prem servers. The management side could also be faster when you install policies. But other than that, I'm satisfied."
"At the moment it is not easy to configure some VPN S2S in Check Point."
"The issue right now is probably that Zscaler is not providing web browser isolation. Another solution, Menlo, offers this. For one customer, we had to send traffic to Menlo to do the isolation for us. It was requested by the customer so that they could integrate any iframe. Zscaler needs to add this type of feature in their next release."
"There are several areas for improvement. Firstly, the GUI is outdated, with noticeable lags and delays, especially when generating reports for past transactions."
"Apart from the issues associated with the product in areas like the DC performance issues and DC failover, Zscaler Cloud Firewall's IP should not have a proxy IP."
"It would be better if they improved their policy, package visibility, and flexibility while we're creating rules for inspection. It could also be cheaper or more things could be included in the basic package. In the next release, I would like better coverage in the Asia Pacific region and better quality of service."
"Because it's on cloud, it doesn't allow application of extra settings."
"When it comes to customer support, there is room for improvement in Zscaler's service."
"Certain criteria need to be met if you want to scale this solution."
"Data Leak Prevention is only for web filtering and there is no protection for email."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"If you purchase a one-year subscription with the hardware and then you want to renew for the second year, it is very costly."
"It is cost-effective, and provides a good value for your money. The pricing, and license renewal, is very reasonable for us."
"Fortinet FortiGate gives you most of the features in one license."
"When you look at these end security systems and firewalls, these firewalls even five years ago were $50,000 or perhaps $25,000 to implement in some types of customer sites. Now we're talking about tools that are $1,000. In this case, it might have been $500 or something like that."
"For medium and enterprise organizations, FortiGate is more affordable."
"Its pricing is good. It's average or normal as compared to Palo Alto and Check Point firewalls."
"Pricing is lower than Cisco."
"The price is fair for what we get with FortiGate."
"Maybe the pricing is a bit high but you get the durability and the duration."
"The licensing is straightforward; there are only three types of licenses that include NGFW, NGTP, and SNBT, so the organization can choose its license according to their requirements."
"The technology itself is impressive, but I find the pricing a bit on the higher side."
"Comparatively, Check Point pricing is a little high. However, if you have that budget, I would recommend anybody to go with Check Point."
"It is more expensive than Cisco ASA but cheaper than Palo Alto."
"It may be considered relatively expensive, but the investment is justified when compared to other competitors."
"If you use the features then it's cost-effective. Otherwise, it's expensive."
"The hardware cost is not huge, but you need to push for good pricing on software licensing and blades."
"Zscaler is priced too high compared to the cost of Fortinet."
"It comes at a significantly reduced cost while ensuring control and effectiveness."
"On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing an eight out of ten."
"The product is a bit expensive compared to the solutions offered by its competitors, like Palo Alto. There is a need to make yearly payments towards the license in charges associated with the product."
"It is expensive for small businesses."
"The licensing is on a yearly basis. It is somewhere around 30 or 40 pounds per user for our organization."
"It is not the most budget-friendly solution, but it's important to consider its overall value."
"There are different subscription models available."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Educational Organization
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Educational Organization
26%
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Comms Service Provider
5%
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Retailer
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Which is the better NGFW: Fortinet Fortigate or Cisco Firepower?
When you compare these firewalls you can identify them with different features, advantages, practices and usage a...
What is the biggest difference between Sophos XG and FortiGate?
From my experience regarding both the Sophos and FortiGate firewalls, I personally would rather use FortiGate. I know...
What are the biggest technical differences between Sophos UTM and Fortinet FortiGate?
As a solution, Sophos UTM offers a lot of functionality, it scales well, and the stability and performance are quite ...
How does Check Point NGFW compare with Fortinet Fortigate?
I have experience on both from Disti and channel experience. Please find below my comments (nothing new as such). -Ch...
Which would you recommend - Azure Firewall or Check Point NGFW?
Azure Firewall is easy to use and provides excellent support. Valuable features include integration into the overall ...
What do you like most about Check Point NGFW?
Check Point NGFW provides essential security, featuring no-obligation access for secure connections, strong intrusion...
Which lesser known firewall product has the best chance at unseating the market leaders?
Netscope, Zscaler if they continue route they are on now. FIrewalls needs great deal of automation on each end, datac...
What do you like most about Zscaler Cloud Firewall?
The product’s firewall and VPN package are fantastic compared to any other solution.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Zscaler Cloud Firewall?
Zscaler Cloud Firewall is quite expensive compared to competitors. However, it offered moderate value for money.
 

Also Known As

FortiGate 60b, FortiGate 60c, FortiGate 80c, FortiGate 50b, FortiGate 200b, FortiGate 110c, FortiGate, Fortinet Firewall
Check Point NG Firewall, Check Point Next Generation Firewall
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, IBM, Cisco, Dell, HP, Oracle, Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, Vodafone, Orange, BT Group, Telstra, Deutsche Telekom, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, CenturyLink, NTT Communications, Tata Communications, SoftBank, China Mobile, Singtel, Telus, Rogers Communications, Bell Canada, Telkom Indonesia, Telkom South Africa, Telmex, Telia Company, Telkom Kenya
Control Southern, Optimal Media
Zenith Live, Azure, Carlsberg Group
Find out what your peers are saying about Check Point NGFW vs. Zscaler Cloud Firewall and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
861,524 professionals have used our research since 2012.