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Check Point CloudGuard Network Security vs Palo Alto Networks VM-Series comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 16, 2024
 

Categories and Ranking

Fortinet FortiGate
Sponsored
Ranking in Firewalls
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Number of Reviews
316
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) Solutions (1st), WAN Edge (1st)
Check Point CloudGuard Netw...
Ranking in Firewalls
8th
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
126
Ranking in other categories
Managed Security Services Providers (MSSP) (2nd), Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) Solutions (3rd), Cloud and Data Center Security (6th), WAN Edge (3rd), Unified Threat Management (UTM) (6th)
Palo Alto Networks VM-Series
Ranking in Firewalls
12th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
57
Ranking in other categories
Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) (10th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2024, in the Firewalls category, the mindshare of Fortinet FortiGate is 19.8%, up from 17.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Check Point CloudGuard Network Security is 0.3%, down from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is 0.7%, down from 0.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Firewalls
 

Featured Reviews

DineshKumar28 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sep 25, 2024
Effective threat prevention with responsive customer support
We are using Fortinet FortiGate as a firewall Fortinet FortiGate has been invaluable. It has helped save costs due to its various features, reliable performance, very good UI, low latency, and stability. The Threat Intel engine in Fortinet FortiGate is highly rated for its effectiveness in…
PRASHANT GARJE - PeerSpot reviewer
May 22, 2024
Cost-effective, supports automation, and provides good security
We have done a lot of automation with the firewall, but sometimes, there are some failures because of some bugs. The fixes for them are still not available. We have daily or weekly communication with the Check Point people giving support in the India region, but we have not seen much improvement or response to our requests for some additional features. We are moving to infra as a code, so we are expecting more advancements in this product. Just installing the patches is not going to help us. They need to focus on this area. I expect Check Point CloudGuard to come up with some AI/ML integration. A firewall is the first L3 security device available to you. It is the single point that manages or processes the traffic for an organization. There is a possibility that the device goes down or gets rebooted for any reason. The integration of artificial intelligence with the devices can help us to know in advance that there might be a surge in traffic. There might be a spike in the traffic, so we can have some additional firewalls integrated. This predictive analysis has to be there. This way, if required, a second, third, or fourth firewall can come into the picture. All the firewalls will process the traffic simultaneously. I am expecting such capability. This sort of feature is available with AWS. We are deploying all the firewalls on AWS, but it would be easy if, in the future, such a feature is available from the OEM or Check Point itself. It will be very helpful for the organization. We have had a couple of outages because of some misconfiguration. They were human errors but there were no prior indications that if we were making these sorts of changes, this would happen. People making the changes on the firewall were not aware of this, and that is the reason why the outage happened. In a financial organization, an outage of even five minutes can cost a lot.
AshwaniTyagi - PeerSpot reviewer
Sep 16, 2024
Advanced protection and good integration capabilities with good reliability
We use Palo Alto Networks VM-Series to offer services to our customers as a managed security service provider. We provide solutions and services to our customers across the globe. For example, if I want to host a firewall in the cloud or somewhere where the physical appliance is not a possibility…

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The stability and scalability of this solution are satisfactory. Its SD-WAN, VPN, and URL filtering features are very useful."
"FortiGate is flexible and easy to use."
"The response is very quick and they can visually resolve our problems in a short period."
"Its stability is the most valuable."
"The Fortinet FortiGate local partners were good. I did not have direct contact with Fortinet support."
"You can create multiple Virtual Domains (VDOMs), which are treated as separate firewall instances."
"The stability of the solution is excellent, as it is with other Fortinet products."
"The SD-WAN feature is the most valuable. This feature evolved from link load balancing. It has helped us in terms of our uptime and privatizing applications whenever we experience an outage. The SD-WAN feature has been a plus for us. Two-factor authentication has allowed us to add more users in terms of remote working. We have two-factor authentication for remote workers to authenticate them before they get on the network."
"Workflows across the company ecosystem have can flow smoothly without experiencing any challenges."
"The interface is very good. It's a single window and UI-based. It's not overly technical or complex."
"We have found the overall functionality of the product to be exactly similar to the physical product. The one good advantage is that it is cloud-based and can be deployed either as a part of a scale set or one can shut down the virtual machine and adjust the physical parameters of the virtual machine easily and bring it right back up."
"We consolidated from three management consoles and three clusters to only one, which is a big improvement."
"As per the solution's blade design, there are many options. For example, you have to buy a UTM blade and an advanced malware blade, etc. If the blade license is there, we can configure from the firewall GUI."
"Check Point is one of the few solutions that pay attention to cloud security. Many others mostly focus on providing on-premises solutions."
"The tool's most valuable feature is its scalability. You will only have to pay less for scaling up. Its notable benefit is deployment complexity. Regional deployment is simpler compared to on-premise setup."
"The solution's most valuable feature is scalability. We can increase the number of CPUs, memory, and firewall throughput easily. Using CloudGuard Network Security for managing cloud firewall rules is considered easier than using the normal security groups provided by Azure or AWS."
"Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is very easy to use."
"In terms of security breaches, the product aids in categorizing and monitoring traffic, allowing for the identification of potentially malicisous or incorrectly formatted applications."
"You already can scale it if you put it in Auto Scaling groups. If you put it in a load balancer, it should already be able to scale."
"It has a good performance which helps you with the stability of your virtual environment."
"In AWS, Palo Alto provides us a better view than flow logs for network traffic."
"The most valuable feature is the Posture Assessment."
"The product provides more visibility into our traffic."
"The most effective features of the solution for threat prevention are Layer 7 inspection, SSL decryption, IPS, and the web filtering profile."
 

Cons

"The integration with third-party tools may be something that they should work on."
"The way everything is set up could be easier. Currently, people need a lot of experience and knowledge to administer it and to link it to devices."
"The scalability could be better."
"It is quite new for us, and we need to go more in-depth into the monitoring tools. It provides different features that we need to do what we want. So far, it is okay for us. In terms of improvement, in the future, they can provide a faster implementation of features. Some of the features are first available in other solutions. Fortinet sometimes takes a little bit longer than other solutions, such as Check Point, to implement new features."
"The customization could be improved. Cisco, for example, is much better at this. They need to work to be at least as good as they are."
"Due to its higher cost, Fortinet FortiGate can lead to increased operational expenses."
"Fortinet FortiGate could improve the user interface. There should be more functionality and options through the GUI."
"The ease of use could be improved."
"A threat categorization system can be added to give users the authority to define vulnerable attacks and classify areas that can threaten the workflow system."
"Check Point CloudGuard Network Security needs to improve the management of the actual firewalls. Improvement is also needed for the consolidated UI of different security aspects."
"We've had issues with the technical support."
"Its price is fair, but it can be more favorable."
"There are some usability issues we'd like to see improved."
"The product needs to improve technical support."
"If you compare the GUI with the Palo Alto and Forcepoint in the Cisco, they're very easy. Check Point, due to its design, is a little bit complex. They should make the GUI easy to use so that anyone can understand it easily, like Fortinet's GUI. Many companies end up using Fortinet because the GUI is very easy, and there's no need for training. They just deploy the box and do the configuration."
"Check Point Virtual Systems is a complete solution, but pricing can be better."
"There's room for improvement in terms of integration with the load balancer. It isn't like Fortinet, which has a load balancer built into its firewall. It is effortless to integrate within the load balancer-plus-firewall solution."
"The user-friendliness of the UI could be improved."
"Just sometimes it can be a bit sluggish navigating through pages. That is just purely because of Java.​"
"Enhancing the ease of accessing technical support would be useful."
"From time to time, they have released some content updates that have some issues, maybe twice a year."
"They made only a halfhearted attempt to put in DLP (Data Loss Prevention)."
"There is no proper support channel to follow up on cases."
"There could be dynamic DNS features similar to Fortinet in the product."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Fortinet Secure SD-WAN delivered the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO) per Mbps among all other vendors."
"Price-wise, it's at a good price point for our market."
"The beauty is the price performance ratio is great with FortiGate. It provides all the features we needed and the price is comparable with others' firewalls. The price is quite competitive with the firewalls with similar features."
"Setup cost may be not so low, as you expect, because it depends on different factors, but TCO for 5 years may pleasantly surprise you."
"The pricing for this solution is good."
"The license for Fortinet FortiGate is affordable in my country."
"Before choosing a piece of equipment you have to take into account the cost-benefit offered by each one. Sometimes it is not worth paying a very cheap price to have a minimum level of security."
"Go for long term pricing negotiated at the time of purchase."
"I like the flexibility because I am pretty sure you can use the same license on Azure or AWS. I forgot the name of the license, but there is a specific type you can use that lets you interchange them, and that is pretty good. I like that."
"We explored both pay-as-you-go and build-your-own-licensing models, and found both to be competitive."
"They're a little high in price. The price could be lower."
"Check Point CloudGuard Network Security's pricing is far better than Palo Alto's because Palo Alto is very expensive."
"The licesning has some good features. For example, the scaling feature is free of charge, allowing multiple scale-ups and scale-downs over a two-week period, which is pretty good."
"The cost is on the higher side, as it is based on workload, hence we need to decide which VPC or workload needs to be part of CloudGuard."
"I do not know the exact price, but it is fairly priced. It is neither cheap nor costly."
"It is fair. Its license covers all the features. There is a cost-benefit. The licensing for the cloud is better than on-premises because, with on-premises, you have to pay separately for different things."
"Some parts of purchasing through AWS Marketplace are good, such as this product was easy to find and launch. Some of the other parts could be clearer in the AWS Marketplace, e.g., how to properly do an annual subscription."
"When you have a client compare box against box, a lot of times Palo Alto is a bit more expensive, but its network firewalls have a very rich ratio."
"There is a need to make payments toward a yearly subscription-based model in which you need to add modules that you want to use in your company."
"Palo Alto definitely needs to be more competitive compared to other products. The problem that I have faced is that the price of licensing is very high and not very competitive."
"Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is an expensive product but the best one in the market."
"I know Palo Alto is not cheap. They have been telling me, the members of the finance team, it is not a cheap solution. It is a solution whose target is that no matter how big your organization is, small, medium, or large, it is about the maturity of your security team or infrastructure team whom you want to work with."
"Because the solution was getting deployed on AWS, it was the best place to go and it was available there."
"Based on the customer budget, they can choose from 12-month, 36-month, or 60-month licensing models."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
22%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Retailer
6%
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Which is the better NGFW: Fortinet Fortigate or Cisco Firepower?
When you compare these firewalls you can identify them with different features, advantages, practices and usage a...
What is the biggest difference between Sophos XG and FortiGate?
From my experience regarding both the Sophos and FortiGate firewalls, I personally would rather use FortiGate. I know...
What are the biggest technical differences between Sophos UTM and Fortinet FortiGate?
As a solution, Sophos UTM offers a lot of functionality, it scales well, and the stability and performance are quite ...
What do you like most about Check Point CloudGuard Network Security?
The tool's most valuable feature is its management console.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Check Point CloudGuard Network Security?
CloudGuard is pretty expensive. Azure ends up being cheaper. They are fairly priced. It's not cheap. However, you def...
What needs improvement with Check Point CloudGuard Network Security?
The solution's future releases would benefit from incorporating more advanced machine learning capabilities for real-...
Features comparison between Palo Alto and Fortinet firewalls
In the best tradition of these questions, Feature-wise both are quite similar, but each has things it's better at, it...
How does Azure Firewall compare with Palo Alto Networks VM Series?
Both products are very stable and easily scalable. The setup of Azure Firewall is easy and very user-friendly and the...
 

Also Known As

FortiGate 60b, FortiGate 60c, FortiGate 80c, FortiGate 50b, FortiGate 200b, FortiGate 110c, FortiGate
CloudGuard IaaS, Check Point vSEC, CloudGuard IaaS, Check Point Virtual Systems, Check Point CloudGuard Network Security
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, IBM, Cisco, Dell, HP, Oracle, Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, Vodafone, Orange, BT Group, Telstra, Deutsche Telekom, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, CenturyLink, NTT Communications, Tata Communications, SoftBank, China Mobile, Singtel, Telus, Rogers Communications, Bell Canada, Telkom Indonesia, Telkom South Africa, Telmex, Telia Company, Telkom Kenya
Physicians Choice Laboratory Services, Helvetica Insurance
Warren Rogers Associates
Find out what your peers are saying about Check Point CloudGuard Network Security vs. Palo Alto Networks VM-Series and other solutions. Updated: October 2024.
814,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.