Check Point NGFW Reviews

We leverage it as a next gen firewall, it does all of our IPS, URL filtering. We use it for our remote users, for VPN access. We use it to build VPN tunnels out to remote sites. It handles quite a bit.

It allows us to be a little bit more diverse in our hiring. We can hire people out in remote areas, that otherwise we wouldn't be able to because they'd have to come into the office without it.

The VPN side of it. Obviously without the VPN, we'd have tons of end users that wouldn't be able to connect to our environment.

Stability issues. I built out this firewall in a cluster, and I had stability issues day one. Needs to be rebooted frequently. Tunnels need to be bounced frequently. Their hardware compatibility guide, when I built out the servers to host them on, was not accurate. And there are compatibility issues and stability issues.

We would lose our remote sites, they would just dump. Say we had our site in California, all of a sudden we're not connected to them anymore. Or we have site in AWS, then we can't connect there anymore. So I'd have to go in and reset the IPSec VPN tunnels, in order to regain connectivity, more frequently than I should have to. Obviously that can happen from time to time, but it was pretty frequent with Check Point, to the point where we're going to rip it out the next two weeks, and install Cisco everything.

As far as scalability goes, I don't feel we really had to push it. We're not a huge company. It was literally always resolved with a license upgrade. If there were too many users connected, we would just upgrade a license and then have more users connected concurrently. So scalability, not an issue. But we sized it pretty appropriately when we installed.

We had third-party tech support through our contract, and it was okay. I pretty much ended up having to figure everything out if there was a problem. As far as Check Point goes, I haven't really dealt directly with their tech support.

When I started at the company, this solution had been in place, and it was failing, the cluster was failing. So I was tasked with rebuilding the entire solution, to make it a little bit more stable. I bought two brand new servers, and spun up a cluster for Check Point. And it improved a little bit, but for what we paid for that solution, it was not really worth it. Because of stability. 

We have migrated some stuff over to Cisco ASA Firewalls. And those seems to be more stable. A lot easier to use, more stable, faster to get going.

I thought it was pretty straightforward, myself. The issue that I ran into, on their website, when you go to install a solution they have something called the hardware compatibility list. That assures you that if you install their product, you also have the right servers to do it, you have the right NICs card, etc. So I actually bought brand new servers with brand new NIC cards that matched all the specs for the hardware compatibility list. I started getting everything setup, and it turns out the hardware compatibility list was wrong. It was wrought with issues. And I ended up having to pull some old NIC cards to throw in the servers to even get the thing to work.

So they don't have accurate documentation, I guess you could chalk it up to that. Or they didn't test it very thoroughly before they put it on the website. So that caused us a lot of heartache. This was a business-impacting setup. I had to do late-night maintenance windows, so when things don't work, it affects us at a pretty big level.

I don't think the product's pricing is a good value. I feel it's very overpriced. 

I feel a lot of the features for a next gen firewall are there. But I feel it's overpriced, because of the stability issues. As far as support goes, I really can't speak to direct Check Point support, but the third-party was pretty terrible. 

I feel you'd get a lot more out of it with Cisco. With Cisco you'd pay about the same. I feel the licensing is a lot more straightforward. It's easier to understand. 

That's another thing about Check Point, I think their licensing model is very confusing. As far as the licensing goes, it's pretty complex. If anybody was to purchase the Check Point product, definitely make sure they have an account rep come on site, and explain it line by line, what each thing is. It's not straightforward. It's very convoluted. There's no way you could just figure it out by looking at it.

We're halfway there right now, with the Cisco Firewalls we're switching to. They're very capable, they work like you'd expect, simple licensing, simple upgrades. It's been a breeze with those so far. 

I would say avoid it. There are definitely better solutions out there. For the amount of headache that you get with this product, it's not like you're saving yourself any money. It's just as much, if not more, than other solutions.

When it works, it works well. But, like I said, I've never really had a stretch of time where it just worked really well for everyone. It's been a constant pain point for our organization.

We have proposed and deployed Check Point in a university environment that has multi-layer firewall protection for different zones, including DMZ, a server zone, Wi-Fi, a staff zone, a student hostel zone, guests, etc. Each zone is guarded by a firewall.

We need the NGFW to protect and secure the campus networks for more than 50,000 users. One of the key points is it is cost-effective and scalable to expand the throughput capacity. We expect the solution is possible to protect the networks for at least five to eight years without replacing the hardware investment. 

The solution provides better stability and some interesting features such as the ease of throughput expansion (or we can say the load sharing).

The scalability helps to offload the high traffic volume during school time. It also enhances redundancy. 

The load sharing capabilities using ClusterXL is possible to switch over the cluster mode to load sharing or Maestro. I also appreciate how easy it is to scale this product.

It is also great that the Check Point community (CheckMates portal) has a lot of helpful guidance. It helps us to work better and ease to find unfamiliar configurations on the new features, it is great for larger organizations as well as very small ones.

They offer very scalable solutions to extend computing resources if needed. We can expand the capacity in a very short time. 

The threat analysis reporting from their management console is very comprehensive and easy to use. 

Their web-based dashboard is well designed and offers much out-of-the-box reporting, and provides admins extensive customizations. 

In the operational GUI, Check Point provides rich customization methods to allow us to easily visualize/categorize objects in different colors. It makes operating the firewall much easier.

Under the same capacity requirements, Cheak Point is a bit higher than Fortinet yet much cheaper than Palo Alto. Although using Quantum Maestro to enhance scalability expansion is very helpful to cut down the total cost, it is still an issue for most of the company. Check Point is not a cheap solution and it's always painful to see exactly how much we need to spend on this. 

The upgrade process is not as easy as may be expected. If there is something that goes wrong, it causes the internet service to go down for the whole campus network. I am not happy with that situation since the upgrade process is a very common process. The outcome is not acceptable.

It is scalable and very easy to expand the throughput and resources.

Check Point firewall provide a very cool feature using Quantum Maestro Hyperscale Orchestrator, it provides on-demand cloud-like scaling of our on-premises security gateways. By using Maestro, we can aggregate multiple mid-level Check Point appliances to provide a high throughput volume. It is very useful to scale up to 52 appliances. If we use other firewall solutions, they can only aggregate up to TWO firewalls with same model in clustering or purchase a more high end model firewall. 

For a long term planning, we can expand the throughput by reusing the existing Check Point hardware investment and adding new appliances to.

The deployment is straightforward, however, the ongoing upgrades are not satisfactory.

I would like to see Check Point add more cloud management features and better integration with LAN software-defined networking. 

I rate Check Point eight out of 10 for stability. 

Check Point is definitely scalable.

It really depends on the customer's deployment and environment, but we often mix and match firewalls. Check Point is more expensive but easier to manage, and their presales and after-sale support are way better than Fortinet's.

Check Point is more complicated to deploy than Fortinet.

Check Point needs to lower its price drastically, and the licensing model is very complex.

I rate Check Point NGFW nine out of 10. I would only recommend it for medium to large enterprises.

I use Check Point NGFW for controlling traffic and controlling access to the production server. It is a HA (high availability) environment. It is easy to use failover solutions.

We use it on our disaster recovery (DR Site) and it runs smoothly.

In the office, Check Point Infinity is the only fully consolidated cybersecurity architecture that protects your business and IT infrastructure.

Integrating the most advanced threat prevention and consolidated management, the security gateway appliance is designed to prevent any cyber attack, reduce complexity, and lower costs.

Check Point gateways provide superior security beyond any Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW).

Best designed for network protection, these gateways are the best at preventing the fifth generation of cyber attacks.

Overall, for us, it improves the private cloud security and helps to prevent the spread of threats while consolidating visibility and management across our physical and virtual networks.

The most valuable feature is the next-generation firewall (NGFW) protection.

Check Point has long been a leader in the firewall market. It offers Quantum Security Gateways for a wide range of use cases and CloudGuard FWaaS and cloud security products too. NSS Labs scored Check Point just behind Palo Alto in security effectiveness and ahead of Palo Alto in TCO. Check Point’s management features are among the best in the business, but SD-WAN capabilities are lagging.

A firewall rule is the same on all systems, and I am very happy with the correlation and the display of the rules.

From the logs, you can trace back to the rule with a click, which makes it easy to investigate cases. It is also easy to search the log.

They have few predefined reports and it would be nice to increase them since the logs are excellent.

They should be quicker to release fixes for known vulnerabilities, including those related to Microsoft products.

If you make a mistake when creating rules, it is time-consuming to fix them. However, there is no problem with traffic processing. 

Sometimes you are forced to interact on several different levels. On the one hand, you put the rules in, and on the other, you put in the route. 

I have been using Check Point NGFW for between five and six years.

They have a good support team that is fast to respond. However, there are open cases that should be resolved in a more timely fashion.

We used another solution prior to this one, but the updates were too slow and it was harder to monitor the log.

The initial setup is very hard.

The vendor implemented this product for us.

This product is a good investment and I expect a full return in approximately three years.

The price of the appliance should be decreased.

 I evaluated several other solutions and compared them before choosing Check Point.

This is a product that I recommend.

We recommend to clients who are installing applications that they can work with Check Point Next Generation Firewalls. Our role is to support our customers in terms of their migration, firewall room cleanups, and implementing all the security features that the firewall has.

Our clients have branch offices in Mexico and Bermuda. Check Point is one of the top names in these areas.

Our clients come to us to fix holes in their endpoint security management infrastructure, which might be letting things through like ransomware. We recommend Check Point Firewalls and some other endpoint security management solutions to mitigate these risk factors. We use this solutions to help build a perimeter for the company, as it helps filter threats from affecting our clients' infrastructure.

The application authentication feature of Check Point is the most valuable as it helps us keep users secure. 

It works smoothly when managing clients' on-premise and cloud firewalls.

Permissions from the client regarding troubleshooting and how well we can packet capture have not been smooth.

Check Point should quickly update and expand its application database to have what Palo Alto has. 

There have been some issues with third-party integrations.

I've been using Check Point Firewalls since 2012. This was right from the beginning when it was hardware from Nokia and the R65 and R66 models. So far, that has gone well.

They are stable. There are no standalone Check Point boxes. If a module goes down, it doesn't affect the base as a whole. Check Point Firewalls have nice redundancy.

Scalability is a good feature that this solution has. It is easy scale out and do site-to-site implementations. Sometimes, you have to clean the OS or RAM to free up availability. However, if you do this, then there are generally no issues with scaling it.

The documentation is really good. 

Their support guys response is really quick. Though, sometimes it takes them more than four to five to get back to us via email and acknowledge an issue. If you have the diamond support, it is definitely fast. However, if you don't have that sort of expensive after-sale support, then it is a problem to engage a Check Point technician at a very fast pace.

We actively participate in the community group.

Our clients are migrating over to Check Point NGFW from Cisco, Juniper, and Fortinet because they want the Check Point Application Intelligence feature. 

We set up the management tool for the clients to manage all their infrastructure.

The migration is generally seamless and takes one shift or day (about nine hours).

We migrate clients to Check Point from other solutions. We also have situations where it's a clean install for deployment, which is the most common scenario.

We are working with Check Point Firewalls to provide installation, migration, updates, setup, etc. 

In the beginning, we needed help from the vendor with the setup. The support was good.

Our clients have seen ROI.

Cisco pushes clients to purchase their hardware, and this is not the case with Check Point. This helps to easily manage costs.

There are now more competitors in the market, like Palo Alto and VMware. 

Palo Alto is a bit more smooth and cost-efficient than Check Point. Palo Alto has Unified Threat Management (UTM) coupled with a dake lake database that is huge. Also, its migration is more smooth than Check Point's. 

Look for a software with licenses that support the features you want. I would recommend doing an RFP before purchasing. Get in touch with Check Point's sales team and compare it with other solutions.

Check Point features are always evolving. They try to stay abreast of the market. I would recommend not using older, obsolete models of Check Point because of this. 

I would rate this solution as an eight out of 10.

We use it to provide security in our organization. Check Point Next Generation Firewalls are designed to support large networks, like a telco environment.

Check Point has a lot of features. The ones I love are the 

• antivirus
• intrusion prevention 
• data loss prevention. 

Apart from that, there is central management through which we can integrate all the firewalls and support them. It makes it easy to manage all the firewalls.

It's also user-friendly and not very complex. Anyone can use it and the dashboard is quite good.

Check Point has notably fewer tutorials on Google. If I'm facing any kind of issue and I Google it, less stuff is available. 

Apart from that, the antivirus is less effective than its competitors' antivirus. The antivirus is good, but in other firewalls, such as Palo Alto, it's quite effective. Check Point should provide more output. Sometimes it provides comprehensive information and sometimes it doesn't.

I have been using this firewall for more than one year.

The stability is good. We've never seen any kind of issue with the Check Point firewalls. In very rare cases we go to their TAC, but we normally try to resolve the situation from our side.

They are quite scalable. They are designed to extend in large data centers and tech environments. They are designed to support the needs of large networks, and offer reliability and performance.

Check Point's technical support is quite good. It's quite helpful. We have never faced any kind of issue with them. Whenever we have an issue with the firewalls, we just raise it with them and they are quite supportive and quite technical as well. They provide a resolution on time and effectively.

Previously, I worked on Cisco ASA firewalls and they have a lot of disadvantages. They have a lot fewer features compared to the Check Point firewalls. We just started using Check Point as a firewall in our organization and they give us new features which are better than the Cisco ASA. With Check Point, the IPS is already configured in the box, unlike the Cisco ASA, and there are a lot of features which help us to provide more security for our customers. In our case, the customers are all employees of our organization.

All of these are reasons we switched to Check Point.

The setup is straightforward.

Deployment depends on the customer's architecture or network.

In terms of a deployment plan, we have different teams in our organization that support different business cases. After an implementation ticket is raised by the requester it goes to the planning stage, then it goes to the implementation stage and then it goes to the validation stage. The planning stage is done by the network security admins. The approval stage that is done by our managers and the validation stage is done by us, the network security admins. This is the process that we follow in our organization. Everything is documented.

We do the deployment ourselves, but if we face any kind of issue, we just raise an issue with their TAC.

The pricing is good. It's not so expensive. You can deploy it and it will do a lot of jobs in one package. It's a good choice compared to the other firewalls.

We looked at Palo Alto and the Cisco FTD Next-Generation Firewall.

Check Point Next Generation firewalls are very good. They have a lot of features in one box and they're not that expensive. They support a lot of features, including antivirus, data loss prevention, and the central management is very good. We can configure all the firewalls through the central management. They have many things in a small package. I would recommend them.

The biggest lesson I have learned from the solution is that it has a lot of features that I was not aware of. The dashboard is quite simple and it's not complex to use.

We make changes on this Checkpoint Firewall as per customer demand. If they want to add a rule on the firewall we do that, and if they want to remove something we remove it for them. If they want to change the position of some rules or to allow or deny any kind of traffic, we do that for them.

In our organization we have a team of 20 - 25 network security admins. Sometimes the network team will also implement changes and they are about 25 people. Sometimes we get  the help of our managers to approve the changes or validate whether the change has been implemented correctly or not. If I sum it up, it's a team of about 100 people who directly use the solution, and they also take care of deployment and maintenance.

We use it for standard firewalls.

The interface and the IPS intrusion prevention are the most valuable features of this solution.

It's pretty straightforward to use once you get your head around it. It's fairly straightforward to use. 

With the version we're on, it's a bit time-consuming if you have multiple IP addresses to add. But in the later versions, which we're moving to, it makes it a lot easier to add IP addresses with dynamic objects, as they call it.

In the next release, I would like to have the ability to automatically add rules from the tracking log. I've used that in other firewall software whereby you can trace the logs, and from the log, you can add a new rule automatically. That would be a nice feature.

I have been using Check Point NGFW for around a year. 

We're on R77 and soon to go to R80. They're virtual machines.

It is very stable. We had one issue recently where Check Point had made a change, and it took a lot of our connectivity down. But that was really a one-off, so that was a mistake on Check Point's side with their policy testing/QC control that affected lots of their customers. 

I've not had to deal with scaling them but from what I understand, they scale to huge organizations.

We have around five IT engineers who use this solution in my company and five who work on deployment and maintenance.

It's used throughout the business, with around 1,500 users, so for all the traffic. We do not have plans to increase usage. 

 I've used the technical support. They're very responsive, we usually get a response the same day. The advice they've given has been very good and the knowledge base articles that they send are also very good.

In other companies I've worked at, I also used all sorts of firewall solutions including FortiGate, Cisco, and pfSense. Check Point is easier than Cisco but more complex than pfSense or FortiGate in terms of its features and management.

Check Point's push to make deploy policy changes is slow when you've made a change to then push it out to the firewall. It does take 10 minutes or so to push that change out, so it's not as instant as some of the other firewalls I've used.

I have seen ROI. There have been no complaints. We haven't had any security breaches, so it's been good.

It's a good product. My advice would be to get some training or watch some videos on using it. You do need a bit of training on it. Initially, there is quite a steep learning curve.

My comfort level with it is on and off. I've been at my company for a year and I'm starting to get comfortable, but it's such a big product that unless you're using it all day, every day, you wouldn't master it. If that was all you were doing every day, then it would probably take you three or four months to get the hang of it.

I would rate Check Point NGFW an eight out of ten. It's not as easy as the other firewalls I've used but that's probably due to the large feature set.

I use CheckPoint in our data center to control the internet and to enable threat prevention. I then integrate it into my center and to my events.

I like the SmartEvent feature. When we see a threat, SmartEvent can create a rule for that. SmartEvent works with the SmartCenter to block a threat attack with a block monitor. The SmartCenter has the management for all the firewalls and data centers in a single dashboard.

It could be more stable and scalable. Check Point price and support could be better.

I have ten years of experience using Check Point NGFW.

Check Point NGFW could be more stable. I think the problem is that the kernel sometimes won't play ball and isn't stable. Sometimes, they have a block, and we have to spend a lot of time fixing it. In contrast, I think Palo Alto and Fortinet are more stable.

Check Point NGFW could be more scalable. I think Palo Alto has more plugins and features, and Check Point needs more features. However, Check Point integration is very complex.

Check Point support could be better. I think Palo Alto has a very clear pricing model. When we have an issue, we create a ticket and receive fast service from Palo Alto. It's good.

The initial setup, in my experience, isn't simple as Fortinet and Palo Alto. It would be better if the person doing it has experience. 

I implemented this solution by myself.

The price could be better. I think Palo Alto pricing is high, and Check Point isn't much better. FortiGate is cheaper. I think when I implemented this solution, I recommended buying a yearly subscription.

When I choose a solution for a customer, I must verify the features, current specifications and make recommendations. When we use an all-in-one firewall solution, we usually recommend using a Palo Alto external firewall. This is because Fortinet has an SD-WAN solution and firewalls, and Palo Alto is the same. But I don't think Check Point has one. When a customer doesn't want to implement many solutions, we recommend using Fortinet or Palo Alto.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Check Point NGFW an eight.