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Check Point Cloud Firewall (formerly CloudGuard Network Security) vs ShieldX comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 16, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

Fortinet FortiGate
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
591
Ranking in other categories
Secure Web Gateways (SWG) (2nd), Firewalls (1st), Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) (1st), Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) Solutions (1st), WAN Edge (1st), ZTNA (1st), Unified Threat Management (UTM) (1st)
Check Point Cloud Firewall ...
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
167
Ranking in other categories
Firewalls (8th), Managed Security Services Providers (MSSP) (1st), Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) Solutions (4th), Cloud and Data Center Security (6th), WAN Edge (3rd), Unified Threat Management (UTM) (4th)
ShieldX
Average Rating
9.2
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
Microsegmentation Software (11th)
 

Mindshare comparison

Firewalls Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Check Point Cloud Firewall (formerly CloudGuard Network Security)2.4%
Fortinet FortiGate15.1%
OPNsense8.5%
Other74.0%
Firewalls
Microsegmentation Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
ShieldX2.0%
Illumio23.8%
Akamai Guardicore Segmentation20.4%
Other53.8%
Microsegmentation Software
 

Featured Reviews

Abhinandan Yadav - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Security Engineer at a consultancy with 51-200 employees
Unified security and sd-wan have improved uptime and cut wan costs for multi-site branches
Users report stability issues in certain versions, which requires regular updates. Real-world attacks have also highlighted the need for urgent patching of vulnerabilities.Fortinet FortiGate, while a powerful and feature-rich web firewall, could improve in areas like firmware stability, documentation, and ease of use. The learning curve can be steep for some users. For beginners, support quality can vary, and frequent updates with occasional vulnerabilities call for careful patch management. However, once Fortinet FortiGate is configured, it remains highly reliable and efficient. Customer support needs improvement, as I find it very slow, with reports from other users reflecting that customer support is inadequate.
Viral Shaa - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Security Analyst at Eos Energy Enterprises, Inc.
Cloud security has unified hybrid policies and now protects critical energy workloads continuously
I would say Check Point Cloud Firewall (formerly CloudGuard Network Security) is valuable due to its hybrid cloud security features. It offers granular policy management across the on-premises and cloud environments, giving administrators consistent control for configuration drift. We need to change the policy and the inbound and outbound traffic settings, indicating what traffic must be blocked or allowed, and this capability with Check Point provides significant input into our security strategy. Check Point Cloud Firewall (formerly CloudGuard Network Security) provides unified security management across both hybrid clouds and on-premises environments. Unified security management affects my security operations positively, as we maintain critical systems on the cloud that require strong security and air gap networks. This cloud-native routing and policy installation helps close gaps in protecting critical applications and environments from exposure to the public cloud. From an administrator's perspective, Check Point Cloud Firewall (formerly CloudGuard Network Security) enhances our organization with clearer and more intuitive logging, making decisions easier to understand without deep investigation. In the CloudGuard UI, I can see which threats have triggered alerts, and this information is available on the unified dashboard that provides details of the threat analysis upon alert. As a small team, we log into the console to check specific alerts for high or low network usage or machine shutdowns. If needed, I tune the configuration policy, and the visualizing tools with reporting functionality simplify tracking changes made on the firewall, including the relevant source IP or device names. We ingest logs into our SIEM for detailed oversight, which allows us to monitor any administrative changes. Check Point Cloud Firewall (formerly CloudGuard Network Security) has significantly reduced our organizational risk. We clearly understand our threat landscape and the associated risks. Onboarding the CloudGuard solution directly into our cloud environment has significantly lowered the risks throughout the network and it is easy to launch. When we assess our security posture with third-party assessments, we gain granular visibility into our network pre- and post-CloudGuard installation, showing how we have addressed significant risks and secured vulnerabilities.
MP
IT Director at park holidays uk
Proactively monitors, blocks, and reports what it has blocked; and self-updates meaning there is zero maintenance
The most valuable feature is the automatic scaling. With its microservices, it scales both up and down, depending on traffic and throughput. The traffic through our website depends on holiday bookings. It's very quiet in November through January, and then our traffic picks up quite rapidly and, at our peak, we will take in excess of a million pounds of business a day through our website. The UI was also one of the huge selling points. My web development manager was blown away with the detail and the granularity that you can get out of the UI. It is a very strong and informative UI, with the amount of data it provides. Uptime on the system has been 648 days and we do very little to it because it self-updates and alerts. It does everything that we need it to do, so the administration side of it is zero. One of the beauties about ShieldX is that it's such a good "fire-and-forget" product.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The product's most valuable features are SD-WAN and the integration of WiFi and switches."
"The solution is very stable; it doesn't have bugs or glitches, it doesn't crash or freeze, and it's reliable."
"The Fortinet FortiGate local partners were good. I did not have direct contact with Fortinet support."
"FortiGate's threat detection capability is excellent."
"Valuable features include the Web Application Firewall, and it even has DLP (data leak prevention)."
"The support is good because, although the response time for tickets may occasionally take some time, at the end of the day they have always solved the issue at hand."
"The most valuable features of the solution are SD-WAN, filtering testing applications, web filtering, and the new VPN."
"Since deploying FortiGate 3401E clusters, we have observed: Dramatic Reduction in Risk Exposure—blocked peer-to-peer and unauthorized applications (e.g., BitTorrent) at the perimeter and east-west segments, eliminating a major source of malware and bandwidth abuse."
"Check Point CloudGuard technical support is good."
"Additionally, the centralized reporting and management, accessible through a single pane of glass, offer consistency and efficiency across multi-cloud environments."
"Advanced check prevention is a great feature that provides threat intelligence at speed."
"The tool's most valuable feature is its management console."
"The Identity Awareness blade and dynamic tagging in Azure are valuable because they make access management automatic. Instead of manually setting up access for each new resource, it happens automatically based on the same access policy. This dynamic setup is scalable."
"The CloudGuard Network Security's most valuable feature is implementing IPS for accessing our data center and server environment in Azure. It helps us to prevent attacks. By protecting our environment with Check Point, which we were already familiar with, it provided a solution that extended into the cloud environment."
"Check Point Cloud Firewall (formerly CloudGuard Network Security) helps to reduce my organizational risk significantly."
"The solution provides a centralized management console for easy administration and monitoring of security policies and events, making it easy for the security team."
"The Adaptive Intention Engine is fantastic. It allows us to develop security policies using the language of our internal customers. It's machine-learning applied to security workflows. That allows us to much more easily construct the policies that will protect those workflows."
"It has helped us tighten our security posture. Now, staff can only access things that they should be accessing."
"We were able to see what devices are talking to each other, giving us more visibility."
"The UI was also one of the huge selling points. My web development manager was blown away with the detail and the granularity that you can get out of the UI. It is a very strong and informative UI, with the amount of data it provides."
"Very often, when new challengers come in, what they do is they end up coming in at a lower cost with more functionality."
"ShieldX makes it a lot easier and a lot simpler to define your policies and define your rules, and that greatly reduces the opportunity for user error."
"ShieldX has been designed from the very beginning to work well in cloud environments. It understands autoscaling, automation, and auto-configuration. These are the things which are important in today's operating environment."
"...It takes the exact same policies that you would apply to your on-premise environment and enables you to simply apply them to the cloud. It becomes one policy for both on-prem and for the cloud."
 

Cons

"Technical support is good but the response time could be faster."
"One of the features that I would like to have is endpoint protection, this should be integrated."
"In the balance between links feature normally you can just choose one option to balance. It would be better for the solution to have more than one option, preferably three."
"To some degree, it's almost a question as to why some of this stuff isn't simpler. For example, for an AP deployment, while it's integrated, the number of steps that you have to go through in order to get the AP up, seems like a lot."
"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."
"When we cluster the two Fortinet FortiGate boxes together we have some issues."
"There are SD-WAN network monitoring, SD-WAN features, Industrial Databases, Internet of Things, Detection, etc., however, we do have not licenses for those features. We thought that if you bought a product, you should have all of the features it offers. Why should you need to make so many extra purchases to enable features? They should have one price for the entire offering."
"The product’s price is high."
"Despite using it for a long time, there are always new features. For example, just last week, I discovered a new feature that had been in the software for years yet it was not visible due to its placement behind multiple menus. Teaching sessions would be beneficial, yet it is our responsibility to learn, so we cannot entirely rely on Check Point."
"The solution needs to support more hypervisors."
"Check Point CloudGuard Network Security should give productive reports as per business requirements. It needs to improve support since the time-limit extended beyond a day. It should include more seamless API integrations."
"The challenge mainly revolves around the slower functionality of virtual IP switching in Azure Virtual Network compared to on-premise solutions. On-premise, switching between clusters is faster, taking only a few seconds, while in Azure, it can extend up to five minutes. The downtime is a concern for us."
"Check Point CloudGuard Network Security needs to focus more on the VPN side by being more flexible with configuring the VPN with route-based VPN and having a failover with it."
"There is definitely some improvement required. We currently use a deployment template provided by AWS each time."
"The price of Check Point CloudGuard Network Security is very high compared to other solutions, such as Fortinet FortiMail."
"We have Microsoft CASB cloud app security and it's one of the least compatible firewalls. They really need to look at this, as both Check Point and Microsoft are major players. Why aren't they compatible? If we had Palo Alto then we wouldn't have this problem."
"There should be a bit more customer care, with regular review meetings on it or regular reports. It would be nice to have a quarterly or biannual review of what ShieldX has blocked."
"With any kind of tool like ShieldX, where you're in the cloud instead of a traditional firewall, you're using CPU resources in those environments to provide the protection. So there's a cost associated with CPU resources. I'm pressing upon them to make the product much more efficient and use less CPUs to do the same thing."
"I would like better reports and in-depth reporting."
"We are having some issues with their LDAP and integrating it with the Active Directory. We can't seem to set it up."
"They need to be consistent in performance and capabilities over time, given the fact that this is new and I want to see where this goes in the next year or so. As the vendor continues to evolve and add future functionality, we want to make sure that we are still keeping up with the integrations, etc. Time will be the key factor here. The proper support for some of the latest technologies, Docker containers, etc. They need to keep up with threat landscape, so we will see how the security get layered. This is what we are going to be keeping an eye on."
"They need to be consistent in performance and capabilities over time, given the fact that this is new and I want to see where this goes in the next year or so."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost of Fortinet FortiGate is competitive and not expensive compared to other enterprise- grade solutions. On average, the license cost per year is around seventy percent of the firewall's purchase price."
"The license of Fortinet FortiGate should be reduced."
"By default, they give SD-WAN along with the firewall. They don't have separate licensing for the SD-WAN functionality. However, they have security licenses that are sold separately on a subscription basis. Customers can consume these security features to protect their users from internet traffic."
"The price is okay."
"The licensing scheme of Fortinet is better than Cisco. It is more logical."
"Licensing for Fortinet FortiGate is on a yearly basis. Pricing for it is a bit high. It could be cheaper."
"When I look around at other products, such as Sophos, Fortinet FortiGate is 20% to 30% more expensive with our current cost."
"I would rate the pricing a seven out of ten"
"The tool's monthly costs have undergone a significant reduction, dropping from approximately 12,000 euros to around 4,000. This represents a cost reduction of over 60 percent. However, it's essential to note that while costs decreased in some areas, they increased in others due to shifts in our environment. As our overall environment has grown, currently connecting 50 accounts to the cloud, it's challenging to directly compare costs with the state of our setup three years ago."
"Check Point CloudGuard Network Security's pricing is far better than Palo Alto's because Palo Alto is very expensive."
"It's not very expensive. It isn't very cheap either. Its price is okay. It depends on how much money you have. It might be expensive for some companies. Its licensing is on a yearly basis."
"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."
"The price is fair for most of the customers. We don't find the price excessive. It's okay."
"The pricing and licensing have been good. We just had to do a license increase for our portion of it. We had that done within a couple of days. Given the fact that it's purely a software-based license, it ends up being even quicker than doing it for an on-prem firewall."
"It is an expensive product, but when you realize that you need it, it does not feel so expensive. We have had a good experience with them as partners. They have helped us with designing and having good architecture and the best equipment at the best prices. We find it a good deal."
"We are using our BYOL. We are using our existing Check Point discounts to work with licensing. Overall, it is very competitive. Its pricing is reasonable to me."
"We are very happy with the pricing and licensing. It's about getting a site-wide license. One of the challenges that we've had with our previous vendor had been the cost of licensing."
"Security policies are now applied as applications are going up. Because it's automated, we don't have the three to four week delay. The insertion of applications in the cloud for us dropped from an average of three to four weeks to a couple of days."
"For other security professions who are looking for something which is low in cost that does microsegmentation, they should look at ShieldX. It might not be the big name out there, but it does everything that you are looking for in microsegmentation at a very low price."
"We are actually expecting our costs to drop in the coming year, but it is just a matter of the licensing expiring. That is going to happen in the next six months or so. Then, we will start to see a decrease in overall spend."
"ShieldX ensures that we can have the separation needed for our environment to avoid drastically increasing the cost on the licensing side. From this perspective, it's been very positive and helpful."
"For a three-year deal we paid £55,000 plus tax... But, and this is a big "but," this was over two years ago. ShieldX had only just hit the market. We were the first company in Europe to buy ShieldX."
"ShieldX also enables us to migrate to cloud environments faster. That is an important part of it for sure because it takes the exact same policies that we would apply to our on-premise environment and enables us to simply apply them to the cloud. It becomes one policy for both on-prem and for the cloud."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business368
Midsize Enterprise135
Large Enterprise193
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business71
Midsize Enterprise41
Large Enterprise79
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Check Point CloudGuard Network Security?
We have encountered a few subscription-based licensing models for the virtual gateway and security enablement. We hav...
What needs improvement with Check Point CloudGuard Network Security?
I find troubleshooting a bit challenging with Check Point Cloud Firewall (formerly CloudGuard Network Security); one ...
What is your primary use case for Check Point CloudGuard Network Security?
My usual use cases for Check Point Cloud Firewall (formerly CloudGuard Network Security) involve onboarding as an ene...
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Also Known As

Fortinet FortiGate Next-Generation Firewall
CloudGuard IaaS, Check Point vSEC, CloudGuard IaaS, Check Point Virtual Systems, Check Point CloudGuard Network Security
APEIRO, ShieldX APEIRO
 

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
Iowa State University
Find out what your peers are saying about Check Point Cloud Firewall (formerly CloudGuard Network Security) vs. ShieldX and other solutions. Updated: November 2024.
896,803 professionals have used our research since 2012.