We performed a comparison between Meraki MX and Palo Alto Networks based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Both products received high marks from users. Meraki MX has a slight edge in this comparison. According to its reviewers, it is easier to deploy and more reasonably priced than Palo Alto Networks.
"Easy to use support and licensing portal as well as activation process."
"The most valuable features are simplicity, management, and that it's constantly evolving."
"Security solution with a straightforward and quick setup. It's a stable and scalable product."
"We've found the solution to be pretty stable."
"The solution is easy to configure and maintain remotely."
"Overall, the pricing of the solution is very good. The product offers good value."
"The solution is very, very easy to use."
"The features that prevent internet connections, the filtering are the most valuable because we did not have any internet protection before."
"It has very good features; it's easy to use, configure, set up, and deploy."
"The technical support people from Meraki are brilliant."
"Site to Site VPN: The device can establish a VPN connection to multiple sites in a mesh environment in seconds, and without complex VPN knowledge."
"It is very fast to implement."
"A strong, reliable solution for small companies with little or no dedicated IT department."
"Meraki MX offers advanced filtration options, plus it behaves like a router and a firewall at the same time."
"The dashboard is very intuitive and easy to understand."
"What I like best about Meraki MX is that it's easy to deploy remotely. The product works. It has automatic updates. I also like that Meraki MX is a brilliant device. You turn it on, stick the key in there, activate it, and then you're done. Meraki MX does what my customers need at the end of the day, so I also like that."
"We standardized on the product and got rid of several other types of firewalls from different vendors."
"Ability to log each and every application."
"It has a unique approach to packet processing. It has single-pass architecture. We can easily perform policy lookups, application decoding, and integration or merging. This can be all done with a single pass. It effectively reduces the amount of processing required to perform multiple actions. This is the main advantage of using Palo Alto."
"The most valuable feature is the security provided by the ATP."
"I like all the functions and features."
"The most valuable features are application inspection and sandboxing. Application inspection decides where traffic is transmitted. If I have a perimeter report for a particular service, then other services or malicious services cannot use an open port. In this way, application inspection is doing a fantastic job. We also have a very good sandbox with almost no rate limit. It will inspect any file that comes in and goes out in a dedicated patch to identify malware. Therefore, these two things help me to protect our organization from any bad actors."
"I'm using most of its features such as antivirus, anti-spam, and WAF. I'm also using its DNS Security and DNS sinkhole features, as well as the URL filtering and application security features."
"The most valuable features are the IPS/IDS subscriptions."
"Technical support could be better. You don't always get the level of help you need right away."
"The Web-filter in this solution is not very good."
"Cisco Meraki products are rising very quickly in the cloud and the connected era. Meraki products offer much better ROI, upgradability, and manageability."
"The solution lacks multi-language support."
"Its reporting can be improved. Sometimes, I don't get proper reports."
"You do need some IT knowledge in order to effectively work with the solution."
"Backup can be improved."
"There are SD-WAN network monitoring, SD-WAN features, Industrial Databases, Internet of Things, Detection, etc., however, we do have not licenses for those features. We thought that if you bought a product, you should have all of the features it offers. Why should you need to make so many extra purchases to enable features? They should have one price for the entire offering."
"The configuration options for firewall and IPS have limitations."
"The solution's pricing should be reduced."
"It is very expensive."
"The problem is that the two licenses do not currently integrate. We have to create separate companies and do an interconnection."
"We can’t access GUI management and CLI opening features when the Internet is unavailable."
"I need more UTM protection security features."
"We have been having a problem with the VPN. When the energy goes down and is back again, the VPN link doesn't get established. We have to manually turn off the modems and other pieces of equipment and manually establish the VPN. It has been around one month since we have been having this problem, and we don't have enough support from Meraki to solve the problem."
"They're very complacent and I find the rule set to be a little arcane."
"The solution could be more cost-effective."
"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."
"Technical support could be faster."
"Surfacing actionable intelligence right away could be better. You have to dig far to get some of the information. If the solution could surface the two or three things out of the 10,000 a day that we really need to deal with, it would be helpful."
"The only real drawback to this product is that it is expensive. But you get what you pay for and there is no way to put a price on top-notch security."
"Enhancements could potentially be made to the firmware to improve its inspectability."
"If you enable SSL you will face a problem. The throughput of the firewall will be degraded. SSL is a big issue on all firewalls. All products suffer from issues with SSL, but Palo Alto firewalls suffer more from it."
"There is a tradeoff between security and network performance, as security is always top-notch, but performance can sometimes lag and has room for improvement."
More Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls Pricing and Cost Advice →
Meraki MX is ranked 2nd in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 58 reviews while Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is ranked 6th in Firewalls with 162 reviews. Meraki MX is rated 8.2, while Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Meraki MX writes "Cost-effective, simplified, easy to manage, and reliable with advanced security features and granular visibility". 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". Meraki MX is most compared with Cisco Secure Firewall, Sophos XG, SonicWall TZ, Netgate pfSense and SonicWall NSa, whereas Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is most compared with Check Point NGFW, Azure Firewall, Sophos XG, Netgate pfSense and Cisco Secure Firewall. See our Meraki MX 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.
