We performed a comparison between Meraki MX and Palo Alto Networks VM-Series based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Firewalls solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."Overall security features and performance routing is good."
"The tool is a nice product and easy to handle. The software's user interface is also good. You can easily implement remote access in the solution."
"The most valuable feature of Fortinet FortiGate is load balancing. It can provide central management and VPNA. Additionally, it has enhanced our security environment."
"The email protection and VPN features are the most valuable."
"The most valuable features are simplicity, management, and that it's constantly evolving."
"The most valuable feature of Fortinet FortiGate is security. They are known for efficiency and are on the top of Gartner Quadrant reviews. Fortinet FortiGate has an easy-to-use platform with a good graphical interface. The configuration is simple and the solution provides an overall good layer of security."
"The solution is scalable."
"From the firewall perspective, the rules and policies are very sufficient and easy to use."
"The cloud management system is really valuable."
"Intrusion detection and prevention (IDS/IPS): The best feature. It can detect malware, even a virus, and warn you by email about the device that has it. When the Meraki detects that something is wrong, it automatically blocks the connection or the intrusion, delivering a graphic report with all the necessary content."
"Ease of management is the best thing about the solution."
"A strong, reliable solution for small companies with little or no dedicated IT department."
"In terms of WAN optimization, it's completely cloud-controlled. Anyone can manage their network environment from a mobile phone."
"Its ease of configuration and management is very useful for us and for other companies that don't have an onsite IT person. It is easy to configure and easy to manage. It is easy to configure the VPN with the Auto VPN feature."
"Deployment takes no more than one working day."
"It is a robust SD-WAN solution."
"The most valuable feature is that you can launch it in a very short time. You don't have to wait for the hardware to arrive and get it staged and installed. From that perspective, it is easy to launch. It is also scalable."
"It offers a single pane of glass for all the different types of installations."
"I like the UI. Most things are accessible from the user interface and it is quite user-friendly. With respect to both VM-based firewalls and physical firewalls, it's easy to create updates."
"AWS has improved our agility to apply firewall rules. It has reduced the amount of time that it takes to apply firewall rules because everything is based in the cloud."
"The VM-Series scalability is fast and easy to implement, improving our security posture as our Azure network grows."
"It is an easy-to-scale product."
"Embedding it into my application development lifecycle prevents data loss and business disruption, allowing the adoption to operate at the speed of my AWS Cloud."
"The filtering feature is good."
"While FortiGate is cheaper than most other solutions, we're seeing increased license renewal costs. Most of our clients are asking for more significant discounts because the price is going up."
"Application management can be improved."
"The solution could be more evenly structured."
"At first glance, the interface for the device is very confusing."
"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 support from Fortinet FortiGate could improve. They are not easily accessible when we need them. They could improve their response time."
"Cisco Meraki products are rising very quickly in the cloud and the connected era. Meraki products offer much better ROI, upgradability, and manageability."
"One of the problems I was having was with user mapping, and it is an issue for which I have escalated tickets with Fortinet support."
"When we do API integrations with Meraki, they have always been hard as well as tedious to build. The data that we want out of the API integrations has been only recently available. Six months ago, it was hard to get someone to build something correctly or useful with Meraki APIs. Recently, they have made more data available on the API, but it is just a start. They need to do more."
"The solution's pricing should be reduced."
"In general, the SD-WAN feature needs to be improved. The load sharing and load balancing of the traffic should be improved. I have had some problems with these features in the past."
"You cannot use switching behaviors as you see on the Meraki switch."
"Meraki has some hidden features and information that is only privy to their engineers. If that information became available to us, then it would improve our ease of management, and we would be able to make certain adjustments instead of having to go to them."
"The client-side VPN is weak. The product could be improved with deployment templates."
"Meraki MX can come across as an expensive solution."
"We can’t access GUI management and CLI opening features when the Internet is unavailable."
"The solution must improve Zero Trust integration and use cases."
"We have ran into issues with Palo Alto’s limitations for resolving large IP lists from DNS lookups, as well as the antivirus interfering with App-ID."
"Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is a complex product to work with."
"Palo Alto is that it is really bad when it comes to technical support."
"There could be dynamic DNS features similar to Fortinet in the product."
"From time to time, they have released some content updates that have some issues, maybe twice a year."
"The disadvantage with Palo Alto is that they don't have a cloud-based solution that includes a secure web gateway."
"It would be good if the common features work consistently in physical and virtual environments. There was an integration issue in the virtual deployment where it didn't report the interface counters, and we had to upgrade to the latest version, whereas the same thing has been working in the physical deployment for ages now. It seems that it was because of Azure. We were using VMware before, and we didn't have any such issues. We do see such small issues where we expect things to work, but they don't because of some incompatibilities. There also seems to be a limitation on how to do high availability in a virtualized environment. All features should be consistently available in physical and virtual environments. It is not always easy to integrate Palo Alto in the network management system. We would like to be able to compare two network management systems. They can maybe allow monitoring an interface through the GUI to create a reference or do a baseline check about whether your network monitoring system is actually giving you the correct traffic figures. You need traffic figures to be able to recognize the trends and plan the capacity."
Meraki MX is ranked 2nd in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 59 reviews while Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is ranked 10th in Firewalls with 53 reviews. Meraki MX is rated 8.2, while Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Meraki MX writes "Cost-effective, simplified, easy to manage, and reliable with advanced security features and granular visibility". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Palo Alto Networks VM-Series writes "Many features are optimized for troubleshooting real-time scenarios, saving a lot of time". Meraki MX is most compared with Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Cisco Secure Firewall, Sophos XG, SonicWall TZ and Netgate pfSense, whereas Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is most compared with Azure Firewall, Fortinet FortiGate-VM, Cisco Secure Firewall, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls and Sophos UTM. See our Meraki MX vs. Palo Alto Networks VM-Series report.
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