We performed a comparison between Meraki MX 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."The ability to set up remote systems is the most valuable feature."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiGate are remote access, web filtering, and IPS."
"Some of the key features of the solution is that it has good reporting, you can receive many details from the connection, for example, clients and website information."
"The user interface (UI) is very, very good."
"The solution is very user friendly. The user interface in particular is quite nice."
"The product is very stable, easy to troubleshoot, and configure, so it has reduced the time it takes for support."
"The UTM feature is quite good. FortiAP is easy to deploy because both Fortigate and FortiAP are under the same brand. Otherwise, you need to do more work on the configuration."
"The most valuable features are the policies, filtering, and configuration."
"Intrusion detection and prevention (IDS/IPS): The best feature. It can detect malware, even a virus, and warn you by email about the device that has it. When the Meraki detects that something is wrong, it automatically blocks the connection or the intrusion, delivering a graphic report with all the necessary content."
"They have very good technical support and I have relied heavily on them."
"The cloud management system is really valuable."
"In general, Meraki MX is easy to work with."
"It has the most advanced security features, for example, layer 3 and layer 7 firewall capabilities and the end team and IPS protection. It also has IPS, and it has very good functioning of cloning services. You don't actually have to touch the device. If you have multiple companies in different countries, you don't really require this device to be touched. You can get it delivered directly to any office of a country, and then you can simply put your configuration over the cloud. It's very simplified and easy to manage. It gives a very good granular visibility about your network. Earlier, a lot of things were lacking in the network. We were unable to identify where the problem was, but after implementing Meraki MX, we are able to dig down and identify where is the problem. We can easily and quickly identify the sources and the root causes of the issues."
"The solution is good for load balancing."
"You can use your web browser to do the configuration which is easier than Cisco CLI transcripts."
"Both the scalability and the scalability are great with Meraki MX."
"Palo Alto’s Panorama centralized management system simplifies our security posture based on our requirements. Instead of manually pulling logs, then generating them into readable formats, it gives us the console in a readable format to view."
"It has excellent scalability."
"AWS has improved our agility to apply firewall rules. It has reduced the amount of time that it takes to apply firewall rules because everything is based in the cloud."
"The filtering feature is good."
"With the improved visibility we now have, the traffic is being properly monitored, which means that we are better able to manage it. These are improvements that we saw very quickly."
"Using Palo Alto Networks Panorama, we were able to deploy a single point of management and visualization of the firewall infrastructure in cloud, on-premise and integrated with Azure to automate scale up. Its security features, i.e. anti-malware, threat prevention, URL Filtering, VPN, and antivirus are the most valuable. The ID-User integrated with AD and 2FA features are also very useful to provide secure access to servers and some users in the company. "
"It is reliable and the support is very good."
"It ensures that every interaction, pre and post-loan processing, undergoes a thorough inspection, leveraging VPN features and comprehensive security protocols."
"There can be more security in hybrid implementations. When a customer has a hybrid environment where some parts are in the cloud, we need a consistent security solution for such scenarios."
"FortiOS is not simple."
"Some of the software stability could improve."
"I would like reporting to be improved and should offer a lot more tools to monitor the products."
"The security of Fortinet FortiGate could improve."
"The feature which gives us a lot of pain is ASIC architecture."
"They should improve high CPU and memory usage that occurs."
"The support is the main thing that needs to be improved."
"They need to improve the link between Meraki and Active Directory."
"I do not have the kind of feature I need for SSL decryption in Meraki MX. It would be great to see the SSL decryption feature in Meraki MX."
"They're very complacent and I find the rule set to be a little arcane."
"MX can only be managed via a web interface, but I'm accustomed to using a CLI or a graphical interface. I would also like to see more reporting features. It doesn't provide enough information for me to know precisely about some clients."
"The product could incorporate tools like ThousandEyes into the system so we can see things directly."
"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."
"As far as what needs to be improved — nothing really comes to mind. It does what we need it to do."
"The only stability issue is in Content Filtering. Sometimes we need to report these types of issues to Cisco support."
"In the next release, I would like to see better integration of multi-factor authentication vendors."
"I would like a way to do everything programmatically, or be able to copy the configs from different prices at different levels."
"The utilization monitoring and GUI have room for improvement."
"The implementation should be simplified."
"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."
"The one issue that I didn't like is that the SNMP integration with interfaces didn't record the interface counters."
"The product needs improvement in their Secure Access Service Edge."
"On the cloud side, they need to come up with more HA solutions to support the multi-region."
Meraki MX is ranked 2nd in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 59 reviews while Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is ranked 10th in Firewalls with 53 reviews. Meraki MX is rated 8.2, while Palo Alto Networks VM-Series 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 VM-Series writes "Many features are optimized for troubleshooting real-time scenarios, saving a lot of time". Meraki MX is most compared with Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Cisco Secure Firewall, Sophos XG, SonicWall TZ and Netgate pfSense, whereas Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is most compared with Azure Firewall, Fortinet FortiGate-VM, Cisco Secure Firewall, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls and Sophos UTM. See our Meraki MX vs. Palo Alto Networks VM-Series report.
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