WatchGuard Firebox and Azure Firewall compete in the firewall solutions category. User reviews suggest that WatchGuard Firebox has an edge in support and pricing, while Azure Firewall stands out in features and user satisfaction, making it a worthwhile investment.
Features: WatchGuard Firebox provides comprehensive security features, ease of management, and effective support. Azure Firewall offers integration with other Azure services, advanced threat intelligence capabilities, and a feature-rich environment, especially beneficial for those using Azure's ecosystem.
Room for Improvement: WatchGuard Firebox could improve its reporting capabilities, user-friendliness, and documentation. Azure Firewall needs better documentation, more flexibility in rule configuration, and enhanced user interface experience.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: WatchGuard Firebox is noted for its straightforward deployment and responsive customer service. Azure Firewall's initial setup is more complex, but it benefits from good support within the Azure environment.
Pricing and ROI: WatchGuard Firebox is considered cost-effective with a good return on investment. Azure Firewall, while more expensive, justifies its cost through advanced functionalities and seamless Azure integration for larger enterprises leveraging Azure services.
Clients are now comfortable and not wasting productive hours on IT support.
The automation part is giving us a cost benefit and speed; we can react faster.
It's a very useful tool to mitigate and protect your enterprise.
They offer very accurate solutions.
The quick resolution of issues with Fortinet FortiGate is due to the support of the company and the fact that the equipment is easy to work with.
I would rate the technical support for Fortinet FortiGate a ten out of ten.
Microsoft provides excellent customer support, especially with premium support plans.
Nevertheless, the final support from Microsoft remains effective.
With Azure products, customer support is really good.
On a scale of one to 10, I would rate the technical support of the WatchGuard Firebox a 10.
They scale up really well from smaller models like the FortiGate 40 and 50 to bigger sites with the FortiGate 100 for more throughput - up to enterprise datacenters.
The variation comes in terms of the interfaces and throughputs, but from a security perspective, you get the same benefit, irrespective of whether you have an entry-level unit or an enterprise.
We determine sizing based on multiple factors: number of users, available links, traffic types, server count, services in use, and whether services will be published.
Based on my experience, I would rate it nine out of ten for scalability.
Azure Firewall is highly scalable, and I would give it a scalability rating of nine out of ten.
When we started deploying the solution, it was not a mature product at times.
I find the WatchGuard Firebox scalable, as it's easy to change configurations from this product to another one.
We're experiencing 99.999% availability consistently.
I would rate the stability of Fortinet FortiGate a ten out of ten.
Currently, we are experiencing a general outage of one of the main internet service providers of the Dominican Republic, and we have not been impacted in our operations because with SD-WAN, we have another internet service provider and we are working with the second WAN connection without any disruption.
The stability of Azure Firewall is excellent.
Investing in a solution that can accommodate such growth would be more cost-effective than repeatedly purchasing new hardware.
The constant daily revisions necessitate meticulous identification of the relevant documents to prevent the use of outdated information that could jeopardize our environment.
While Fortinet claims to offer a comprehensive network solution, it falls short in addressing computer application issues, particularly server security.
Improvement in reporting and better visibility into network traffic would also be beneficial.
Azure Firewall could improve its reporting capabilities.
It lacks some functionalities when compared to competitors like Check Point and Fortinet, such as WAF or load balancing.
When implementing a rule using a group of IPs, it is not possible to do that directly.
The WatchGuard Firebox has certain features, but the challenge is that we have some clients who don't have a network or are only mobile users, which leads us to think the future is in SASE products, not in the WatchGuard Firebox.
FortiGate is priced lower than Palo Alto.
Last year, I renewed the support for three years, which can sometimes be expensive but depends on the security benefits and how it helps us.
It is about 20% cheaper.
Azure Firewall is quite expensive, with a high cost.
Azure Firewall is subscription-based, which is advantageous as there is no need for upfront payment.
Prices have increased recently
I have faced challenges with the WatchGuard Firebox regarding price since we work with customers who use the Stormshield product, which is less expensive and French-made.
In terms of security, we have not experienced any security flaws or loopholes, and it has proven to be quite stable.
FortiGate has helped reduce the risk of cyberattacks that might disrupt our client's production.
These features help reduce our downtime, manage the ISPs, and deploy SLAs for all the website traffic.
We have to combine multiple features and multiple products, and then we can say that this is more cost-effective and works properly to ensure the security posture of our cloud deployments.
The premium version includes all traditional firewall features, reducing the need for separate compute resources.
We created rules in the firewall to ensure that the traffic would be diverted to the right endpoint and made sure only specific application VMs could reach the database server.
The Firebox offers valuable features such as network security, URL filtering, UTM features, intrusion prevention and detection, and authentication.
I utilize AI within the WatchGuard Firebox, as we use the interconnection with threat syncs, and AI is implemented.
Fortinet FortiGate offers comprehensive network security and firewall protection across multiple locations. It effectively manages data traffic and secures environments with features like VPN, intrusion prevention, and UTM controls.
Organizations rely on Fortinet FortiGate for its robust integration with advanced security policies, ensuring significant protection for enterprises, cloud environments, and educational sectors. It facilitates network segmentation, application-level security, and authentication management, securing communication within and between locations such as branches and data centers. Its efficient SD-WAN and UTM features enable streamlined data management and enhanced threat protection capabilities. Users appreciate its centralized management, facilitating seamless operations across diverse environments.
What are the key features of Fortinet FortiGate?
What benefits should users expect from Fortinet FortiGate?
Fortinet FortiGate is crucial in sectors like education, offering robust networks for secure data flow between campuses and facilitating remote learning. In enterprise environments, it allows efficient management of application traffic and security across multiple branches, while in the cloud, it seamlessly integrates with diverse platforms to enhance security infrastructure.
Azure Firewall is a user-friendly, intuitive, cloud-native firewall security solution that provides top-of-the-industry threat protection for all your Azure Virtual Network resources. Azure Firewall is constantly and thoroughly analyzing all traffic and data packets, making it a very valuable and secure fully stateful firewall as a service with built-in high availability and unrestricted cloud scalability. Azure Firewall allows users to create virtual IP addresses and provides for secure DDoS protection for the virtual machines on your network. It also provides fast and efficient east-west and north-south traffic security.
Azure Firewall is a managed, cloud-based network security service built to protect your Azure Virtual Network resources. It is a fully stateful firewall as a service with built-in high availability and unrestricted cloud scalability.
Azure Firewall has two significant offerings, Standard and Premium.
Azure Firewall Standard works directly with Microsoft Cyber Security and supplies excellent L3-L7 filtering and threat awareness. The proactive real-time threat awareness will quickly alert you and immediately deny all traffic to and from any known problematic or suspicious domains or IP addresses. Microsoft Cyber Security is updated continually to protect against all new and known potential threats at all times. To learn more about Azure Firewall Standard, click here.
Azure Firewall Premium provides everything the standard version does, and additionally adds extra levels of data encryption, network intrusion detection, extended URL filtering, and Web category filters. To learn more about the added features of Azure Firewall Premium, click here.
Key Benefits and Features of Azure Firewall:
What our real users have to say:
Many PeerSpot users found Azure Firewall to be very user-friendly and easy to use. They liked that it offers seamless integration to the cloud and were especially pleased with the threat filtering options.
Regarding integration and threat intelligence, our users wrote:
“The most valuable feature is the integration into the overall cloud platform.”
WatchGuard Firebox is a versatile security solution primarily used for security purposes such as firewalling, VPN, and protecting networks from outside and inside threats. It is also used for routing, multi-factor authentication, vulnerability management, and segregating industrial networks from corporate networks.
The product is praised for scalability, stability, user-friendliness, reasonable pricing, and good technical support. Some users use it for web filtering and hosting web pages, while others – for remote access connections and mobile VPNs. Firebox offers great protection, good performance, and flexibility without licensing limitations.
WatchGuard Firebox Features
WatchGuard Firebox has many valuable key features, including:
WatchGuard Firebox Benefits
Some of the benefits of using WatchGuard Firebox include:
Reviews from Real Users
Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by WatchGuard Firebox users.
PeerSpot user Kelly C., IT Manager at a hospitality company, mentions, “One of the most valuable features is the Gateway AntiVirus. We scan all traffic as it's coming through. We also use spamBlocker to scrub spam. We use content filtering, which is critical in any corporate environment to make sure that people don't surf things they're not supposed to. WatchGuard has a very easy VPN and branch office VPN setup, so we use those pretty extensively too.It's very easy to use. In terms of performance, WatchGuard has always worked well for us. Regarding the reporting, I was in the Dimension server earlier today. It's very powerful. I like it. And the management features are easy to use. I like the fact that I can open up the System Manager client or I can just do it through the web if I'm making a quick change.”
A Director of Information Technology at a retailer says, “Among the most valuable features is the ease of use — love the interface — of both the web interface and of the WatchGuard System Manager. It's a stable platform. The devices are pretty rock-solid.”
Jason M., IT Director at a healthcare company, explains, “The policy monitoring and allowing different traffic flows are the most useful features for us; regulating which traffic comes in and out. In terms of the throughput and performance, we don't have a problem or any bottleneck there. We downgraded the size of our appliance because we're a small facility, and what we had before was actually too big. The one we are now going with seems to be doing a great job.” He also adds, “The management feature is pretty nice.”
Steve R., President and Owner at Peak Communication Systems, Inc., comments, "It saves us time in the respect that we now have the template built for it so we can get in and get it done. We've had much less problems supporting Voice over IP technologies from different companies. Because our client base has grown over the years, we're probably saving 20 to 30 man-hours a month now that we've got this on a good stable level."
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