Check Point NGFW Reviews

I do like that this solution is a very robust firewall.

It's very stable. 

The product is well supported. The solution is very scalable. 

Technical support has been quite good. 

The only thing I would like to improve is the updates. Sometimes when they bring on new upgrades, they affect something else. That happens sometimes. For example, something that was working well might have a new issue after an update. It's understandable as they do have like to add innovations. When you are innovative, you face some risks. 

They have already announced that they will be adding SD-WAN as a new feature.

I've been using the solution for 18 years.

The solution is very stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. That said, I would like the latest version to be more stable.

The product is very scalable. You have very good options. For example, if you start with a smaller firewall and you want to upgrade to have newer hardware, they have different options. For example, you can run a script that is going to tell you the new appliances that you need, according to your new requirements according to your network consumption. 

It did launch Maestro about two years ago. Maestro is something that allows you to stack firewalls. If your current firewalls handle the traffic anymore, you can add new firewalls to it. 

If you want to change the firewall you can do these trade-ins. You can return the old firewall and they will give you a special discount. 

Technical support has been very helpful and responsive. We've been happy with the level of support they offer. 

The product is easy to set up. I am seasoned on Check Point. For me, it's very easy. I wouldn't say it's hard. 

I'd rate the solution at a ten out of ten.

I'm a consultant at a Check Point partner. I have deployed a lot of Check Point firewalls and support Check Point firewalls for our customers. Our customer environments are different. I have deployed standalone, cluster, and two-layered firewalls.

Check Point firewall products include a lot of modules including Application Control, IPS, Email security, Mobile access, Content Awareness, URL Filtering, Antivirus, Antibot, and DLP. 

Check Point meets our customers' requirements at the perimeter with an all-in-one solution. For example:

• The IPS blade prevents attacks with updated signatures.
• URL filtering policy control customers' users' internet activity.
• Antivirus and antibot blade controls malicious activity and files.
• Mobile access blades allow customers to access their sites from anywhere securely.

There are a lot of features that I have found valuable for our customers.

For example, active/active and active/standby high availability features are very useful. If you want to share traffic loads to both cluster members, you can use the active/active feature, whereas if you don't want to share traffic loads then you can prefer active standby. Your connections sync on both cluster members for either highly available choice, so your connections never lost.

One of the most valuable features is performance improvement, wherewith ClusterXL and CoreXL, you can improve performance.

Check Point should include additional management choices; for example, Check Point does not offer full management support via browser.

You should use Check Point Smart Console for management, although it is an EXE and is supported only on the MS Windows platform. If you are using Linux or Mac, you cannot manage Check Point. Instead, you need to use a virtual PC with the Windows OS installed, running inside Linux or Mac. Check Point states that this is a decision made for security reasons, but that certain management features can be done through the browser, although not fully.

I have been using the Check Point firewall for more than 20 years.

This solution is very stable for all of our customers.

One of our customers has more than 200 branch offices, which are protected by Check Point SMB appliances. All of these appliances are managed by Check Point SmartProvisioning. This customer has one Check Point cluster that secures server segments and another Check Point cluster to secure the client segment.

The latest product, Maestro is very good and scales well.

Check Point support is very good and we are very satisfied.

My company is working with different firewall products but I am a Check Point expert and only support their products.

The initial setup is straightforward.

All implementation is handled by our team.

There are different ROIs for each customer but our customers' ROIs are high, as expected.

The pricing is high compared to competitors.

Our customers evaluate other products but a lot of them prefer Check Point.

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 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 am a Check Point distributor and the Next-Generation Firewall is one of the products that I am dealing with. My customers use this as part of their security solution that covers mobile devices, computers, their network, cloud, SD-WAN, IoT devices, IP phones, IP cameras, and others.

Checkpoint has provided Security to the entire data center. 

This is a feature-rich product and all of them are useful.

The most valuable feature is the Stateful Inspection, which was developed by Check Point.

The throughput is very good with Check Point. Checkpoint ThreatCloud is the largest threat intelligence database. 

Checkpoint management is a single pane of glass from where you can manage all the CP solutions from a single point be it on-prem or cloud or hybrid.

There is always room for improvement and CP Dev team is on right path.

I have been working with Check Point firewalls for more than five years.

This is a stable firewall. It is very good.

Scalability and throughput are very high. They have also launched a solution called Check Point Maestro, which provides cloud-level scalability on-premises. This makes it very scalable.

My customers use firewall products from several vendors, including Sophos. Sometimes they replace their existing firewalls, and at other times, they run Check Point in parallel.

The initial setup is very simple. This solution can be installed on-premises or on the cloud.

It takes between 30 and 45 minutes to deploy.

Our in-house team does the installation for our clients. We also handle support, depending on what level of support the client has. Sometimes, they go directly to the OEM.

Until earlier this year, the consolidated management was application-based and required installation. As of recently, they have launched web-based management, as well as cloud-based management. This is an upgrade that I had been waiting for because we no longer have to go to the dashboard. Instead, we just enter the IP into chrome and you get the dashboard on the web page, without having to install anything.

This is a very good product, although there is always room for improvement.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

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 Check Point NGFW as a perimeter NAT Gateway with the security features, it helps us to prevent hackers. We implement Check Point-based infrastructures for our customers. In most cases, this is the same perimeter gateway and internal segmentation firewalls. Many of our customers also using the VPN feature to organize remote access to the company's assets for employees, especially in the COVID period, and to connect their branch offices to the base infrastructure. Environments are differing from one out customer to another, but these are primary use cases. 

We catch much more malware and spam with incoming traffic, and now we are more protected with our environment. For our customers, this is always a surprise, when we are running a pilot project - how mush malware and attacks we catch during the two weeks period. Check Point has a great report called "Security Check Up", that show these results on informative charts. In our region, our customers use primarily local solutions, that has no good security features inside. Check Point has a certification there, which allows them to work in our region and make the world safer. 

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. When we using sandbox with Sandblast agent, often there are not real-world exciting results, but when we show a solution in work with existing samples, it also shows good results. 

I hope for product simplification. It would be better to use one security console, instead of many of them (for licensing and monitoring). The solution is hard for newcomers and takes much time to deep in. Also, I want a historical graph for throughput and system resources usage. Maybe it will be great to make easy step-by-step installation and configuration cookbooks as Fortinet did, and integrate the documentation within the solution. In most cases, the solution works great and I recommend it for our customers.

3 years.

Everyone falls sometimes. I recommend using high availability or at least two power blocks. 

Nice, easy to connect and implement high availability.

Support is great, we solved cases with solution integrations easily.

We are using many solutions at the same time. Just to be closer to our customers. 

Initial is very easy. Further - harder.

In-house

12 months.

NGTP is easy and strong. If you need the best security - use SanbBlast in addition.

We always check security options before implementing them to customers.

Good solution - I recommend it. 

We use the product as a firewall solution for application control, defined rules and policies, and insights features.

The platform helps our organization to save working hours.

Check Point NGFW is easy to configure.

The product's technical support services need improvement.

We have been using Check Point NGFW for two years.

It is a stable product.

It is a scalable platform.

The technical support team could include skilled engineers to understand the issues and respond.

Neutral

We have used Fortigate before. In comparison, Check Point NGFW provides a more detailed configuration.

The initial setup is easy and takes 20 minutes to complete.

The product provides value for pricing in terms of performance and technical features compared to other firewalls.

I recommend Check Point NGFW and rate it a nine out of ten.