FireMon Security Manager vs Palo Alto Networks Panorama comparison

FireMon Security Manager vs. Palo Alto Networks Panorama

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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

FireMon Security Manager

Ranking in Firewall Security Management

4th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Palo Alto Networks Panorama

Ranking in Firewall Security Management

3rd

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Firewall Security Management category, the mindshare of FireMon Security Manager is 16.6%, up from 16.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Palo Alto Networks Panorama is 8.1%, down from 10.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Firewall Security Management

Featured Reviews

Ganesh-Khutwad

Senior Network Specialist at Tech Mahindra Limited

Rapid policy insights with robust dashboards and cross-vendor automation

FireMon Security Manager is excellent for real-time compliance management. It allows us to quickly retrieve any policy needed for testing and easily analyze it for loopholes. If a loophole exists, FireMon provides comprehensive details within the policy manager. It alerts us to firewall rule additions or changes that violate compliance policies. It supports various firewall platforms, including Checkpoint, Zscaler, Fortinet, Cisco, and AWS, and provides centralized management for all configured policies through a single console. FireMon Security Manager provides many features, like whether my firewall is compatible with required standards such as NTP and SNMP. Each compliance included in our RFPs is shown in the UI of FireMon. It gives robust and clear dashboards, making it easier to understand risks because the policies have ratings showing usage, and the number of hit attacks. It streamlines our compliance reporting processes by providing comprehensive risk and compliance assessments. It offers a range of features, including verification of firewall compatibility with protocols like NTP and SNMP, and detection of signal charges. FireMon effectively addresses all compliance requirements outlined in our RFPs. For instance, it can determine if firewalls or proxies within a stack are configured in Secure Mode or Active-Active mode. FireMon Security Manager enables us to generate reports on all these aspects, ensuring thorough compliance monitoring and documentation. FireMon Security Manager is robust and can help automate firewall policy changes across large multi-vendor enterprise environments. FireMon Security Manager helps automate firewall policy changes across various environments, including on-premises, cloud, hybrid, SASE, and SD-WAN. It also simplifies cleaning up firewall rules in our environment. The time required to accurately create, approve, and deploy firewall policy rules has been reduced. Tasks that took 30 minutes can now be completed in just five minutes using FireMon. FireMon provides immediate visibility into our policies through a robust and clear dashboard, making it easy to identify errors or misconfigurations based on the policy rating.

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Kim Ejby Lorentzen

Senior Principal Solutions Architect, HPE Aruba Networking - Full Stack Platform Expert at Danoffice IT ApS

Unified firewall management streamlines operations across branches with prompt support services

The primary use case for this solution is the management of the entire firewall portfolio across various branches Palo Alto Networks Panorama has simplified management by providing a unified interface for firewall management and configuration. One of the key advantages of Palo Alto Networks…

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"In one report, FireMon tells us there are, say, 1,000 rules that can be taken out and it gives us the ability to disable those for a year and to track when we made our changes. After a year, we can go back and eliminate the rules, to bring the configuration down to an almost human-readable level."

"The most valuable feature is the Firewall reviews for our company compliance."

"The unused objects is another nice feature, where it digs a little bit deeper into comparing the logs that it sees versus the configurations that it sees... The unused objects feature will go through in a pretty detailed way and show us which ones aren't being used. Or, if they are used, it will show us how often they're used."

"The SQL language is convenient to use. It allows us to process a bunch of criteria very quickly and narrows things down if there is an issue with the firewall. It's easy to do that with SQL queries."

"The most valuable features are Policy Optimizer and Firewall Manager for different brands of firewall."

"It gives us the ability to go to one place to look for potential firewall rules that are inappropriate, or which don't meet compliance. Instead of manually searching hundreds of firewalls for a policy, we can go to this one location and find the rules which are now out of compliance."

"FireMon decreases errors and misconfigurations by 10% that increase risk in our environment. That has to do a lot with the change reporting that is in place, but also with the built-in controls and custom controls that we have made. Those all decrease the errors that people naturally make on a day-to-day basis for firewall administration."

"For the cleanup of firewall rules, it performs really well for us. We utilize it in our regular rule cleanup tasks, several times a year. FireMon is our primary tool when doing that, either by going through its out-of-the-box compliance rules or using it to search for certain things in our rules that we want to prune from our firewalls."

More FireMon Security Manager pros

"Palo Alto Networks Panorama has good stability. I didn't see any instability from it, and its initial setup was straightforward."

"The product features allow the capacity to take effective, advanced security measures."

"A valuable feature of Palo Alto Networks Panorama is reporting because it gives you different reports on data, logs, and threats. I also like the centralized firewall management feature of the product."

"Palo Alto Networks Panorama has a lot of features."

"The most valuable feature is the Threat Intelligence."

"Panorama enables you to provision all your firewalls and other things as a cluster. It is quite useful for that."

"It's a reliable solution."

"The main value of Palo Alto Networks Panorama lies in its ability to centralize management, similar to FortiManager."

More Palo Alto Networks Panorama pros

Cons

"FireMon could be made more user-friendly when it comes to creating filters or conducting traffic analysis."

"FireMon could improve its end-user practices. As an end user, I am just trying to catch up on all the alerts. There are so many, and you still have to go through them and document what was found."

"When it comes to identifying risk in our environment and prioritizing fixes, it is really about the different priorities within the organization. FireMon is not so smart that it can tell what's important to us. It's up to us to figure that out."

"While I like the reporting, I think that has the biggest room for improvement. Right now, as a user of FireMon, if I create a report, I am the only one who can see it inside FireMon. If someone on my team creates a report, they are the only person who can see that report on FireMon. It doesn't matter if you're admin in FireMon or not. The way we have to do it now is that we have created a service account user and that service account user runs all the reports. This way, all the reports, which are running, are just run under a single user so we can always access them. This definitely needs to change so users can see other users' reports or we can share reports within FireMon."

"It comes as a Linux appliance on a server and we're not a Linux shop, we're more of a Windows shop. It would be great if they could automate or integrate the backups into it and other things through their GUI interface, just to make the management of Linux a little more transparent."

"A phone app would be nice. This is the reason why it is not perfect yet."

"We're working on implementing FireMon with our ticketing system service now. Having that would be an improvement."

"Our firewalls have multiple paths through them and FireMon falls short a little bit because it's not Palo Alto-centric. I don't think FireMon has kept up with where Palo Alto is at. They started out being Check Point-centric for years and they've never really fully embraced the nuances others, like Palo Alto or Fortinet, have. They don't handle a lot of the capabilities and attributes that Palo Alto does yet. They're working on it. They're getting there."

More FireMon Security Manager cons

"The product could use some method of allowing for more customization and open integration with other controls."

"We have had some issues in the past because integrating a new device is not intuitive."

"It communicates with remote devices, and sometimes, there is a little bit of delay during its communication with remote devices. There should be real-time communication or updates from the manager to devices."

"A bottleneck in Palo Alto Networks Panorama is the licensing. The licensing model for the product is complicated. Another area for improvement is the PDF report generation because you'll notice that it's missing some details."

"The setup cost is too high."

"Its scalability can be improved. It is too expensive to scale it in the way Palo Alto wants us to scale. Scalability is one of the main reasons why our customer is looking for alternatives. It is too expensive to scale. Its redundancy also requires improvement, but it seems that in the latest version, redundancy is improved, and you can have more than two devices in an HA pair. So, they are heading in that direction. It would be good if they combine their dynamic list functionality in a much better way with Panorama and include it as out-of-the-box functionality. Palo Alto supports the dynamic list functionality for some basic threats, but there is a lot of scope for improvement."

"The configuration could be a bit better."

"Panorama needs to work on its configuration issues."

More Palo Alto Networks Panorama cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Regarding additional costs, if you want things like Policy Optimizer, extra features, that's extra."

"Pricing model seems fair."

"We don't license all of the devices in our network, so it does not provide us with a comprehensive visibility of all devices in a hybrid network at this time."

"Relative to what it offers, the price is fair."

"This is an expensive solution. The cost of three modules for three years was approximately one million."

"Pricing is reasonable."

"We pay for it yearly."

"Its pricing is good. Compared to others, it is not so expensive."

More FireMon Security Manager pricing and cost advice

"Sometimes the company prefers to give a license to test the product in our environment before we go to the customer. But the customer should buy his own license, and that's the system here. The system is different between one country and another. Some countries say that the IT solutions provider should provide the license."

"Pricing is high compared to other vendors in the same space. Licensing is also fairly high for different functions to be added on."

"Everyone, I suppose, would like the price to be improved. Price is always a good thing to change."

"The price of Palo Alto Networks Panorama is high. There is a pay-per-use model."

"The solution is relatively cheap; I rate it four out of five for affordability."

"Its licensing is yearly and multi-yearly. It is not expensive."

"It is pretty reasonable as compared to other companies."

"The pricing could be lower."

More Palo Alto Networks Panorama pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Firewall Security Management solutions are best for your needs.

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844,944 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

19%

Financial Services Firm

16%

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

14%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about FireMon?

I like the Security Manager console where we can see any changes that have been made or pull the results of an assessment and control the policies that we implement.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for FireMon?

Comparatively, FireMon has a very good price and is below the general competition in cost. I have not seen any additional fees beyond the general contract fees for the usage I have. So, I have not ...

What needs improvement with FireMon?

For one company I work with, I use Fortinet, and FireMon is not able to understand the zones that Fortinet uses. Part of that compliance piece does not provide me with the necessary information. An...

What do you like most about Palo Alto Networks Panorama?

The most valuable aspect of Palo Alto Networks Panorama for me is the centralized management of multiple firewalls.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Palo Alto Networks Panorama?

The setup cost is too high.

What needs improvement with Palo Alto Networks Panorama?

The solution requires more flexibility and quicker response times. High-speed replies are crucial. Additionally, the AI module should be on-premises, not in the cloud. It should support more flexib...

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Product Reports

FireMon Security Manager

Download FireMon Security Manager product report

Palo Alto Networks Panorama

Download Palo Alto Networks Panorama product report

Overview

The increasing complexity of networks, driven by the constant influx of new devices, applications, and cloud services, presents a daunting challenge for managing firewall policies and rules. A typical enterprise environment has millions of rules, and just one simple misconfiguration can lead to devastating consequences like compliance violations, outages, and data breaches.

FireMon’s Security Manager is a purpose-built network security policy management (NSPM) platform that automates the management of firewall and cloud security policies to eliminate policy-related risk, accurately and quickly change rules, and meet internal and external compliance requirements.

Reduce Risk Manage risk with real-time visibility and control
Manage Change Avoid misconfigurations, accelerate business, and improve security
Enforce and Maintain Compliance Avoid violations, avoid risk, and avoid fines

FireMon

Panorama network security management provides static rules and dynamic security updates in an ever-changing threat landscape. Reduce administrator workload and improve your overall security posture with a single rule base for firewall, threat prevention, URL filtering, application awareness, user identification, file blocking and data filtering.

Palo Alto Networks

Sample Customers

Convey, MGM Resorts International, Southwest Airlines, Alkami, Costco, Aetna, IBM, Verizon, Wells Fargo

University of Arkansas, JBG SMITH, Temple University, Telkom Indonesia

FireMon Security Manager vs. Palo Alto Networks Panorama