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Palo Alto Networks PA-Series 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
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
317
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) Solutions (1st), WAN Edge (1st)
Palo Alto Networks PA-Series
Ranking in Firewalls
14th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
31
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Palo Alto Networks VM-Series
Ranking in Firewalls
10th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
59
Ranking in other categories
Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) (10th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2024, in the Firewalls category, the mindshare of Fortinet FortiGate is 20.5%, up from 17.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Palo Alto Networks PA-Series is 0.3%, up from 0.0% 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
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…
Deminda Dilan - PeerSpot reviewer
Good for enterprise-level businesses and offers many features like URL filtering and antivirus capabilities
Palo Alto can improve the web application firewall (WAF) feature at layer 7. Currently, I don't think it's available. If they can improve that, it would be better. We wouldn't need to purchase a separate WAF solution because they already have advanced URL filtering. But I don't think that advanced URL filtering has the same features as a dedicated WAF, like F5 or other solutions. That is an area for improvement. If they can improve the WAF feature, customers won't have to buy a separate WAF solution. They could do it with the same Palo Alto firewall, perhaps through a subscription-based model. So the web application firewall feature has to be improved.
AshwaniTyagi - PeerSpot reviewer
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

"Security management tool that's easy to integrate and easy to work with. No issues found with its stability and scalability."
"The threat prevention is the solution's most valuable aspect."
"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."
"I'm pretty happy with its reliability. It is also very scalable."
"It's a firewall that secures our internal network. I have been using it since 2013, and I find that most of the features are advanced, and very user friendly."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiGate are the different types of profiling. It has been the most effective for me. The WAF and the antivirus profile are the most effective in network protection."
"I'm looking forward to FortiGate's dashboard features, insights, application oversight, and monitoring, which could help us significantly."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"App-ID is a really good feature."
"It is scalable. But that depends on what model you are using."
"It has its own logging system. You can go to monitoring and check the logs to see if a connection is getting blocked. You can use multiple types of logs to check if a file or a port is getting blocked or if there are any TCP resets from the source or destination. It's easy to troubleshoot with the monitoring and logging it provides."
"The cloud-based aspect helps significantly. It integrates seamlessly with other Palo products like Prisma Cloud, offers robust VPN protection, and it's all in one convenient package."
"A valuable feature that we can consider is the deployment time, which is significantly reduced. It is almost 90% faster compared to other solutions."
"Comprehensive logging is essential for monitoring and analysis purposes. For remote users, the firewall can be configured as a VPN concentrator, with VPN policies defined within the firewall settings."
"It functions very well in data centers."
"The reporting feature and application ID functionality within Palo Alto Networks PA-Series are incredibly valuable to us."
"The most valuable feature is the Posture Assessment."
"The Palo Alto VM-Series is nice because I can move the firewalls easily."
"In Palo Alto the most important feature is the App-ID."
"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."
"We have reduced the number of configuration lines by 90%. We need fewer number of admins right now because of it."
"Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is easy to maintain...From a security point of view, I find Palo Alto Networks VM-Series to be a better product compared to the other solutions in the market."
"The most valuable features of the solution are its stability, ease of implementation, ease of operation, and security."
"In terms of security breaches, the product aids in categorizing and monitoring traffic, allowing for the identification of potentially malicisous or incorrectly formatted applications."
 

Cons

"Palo Alto has a feature called WildFire Analysis that is unavailable in FortiGate. WildFire is better than a sandbox because it can address zero-day threats and vulnerabilities. It can immediately identify zero-day threats from the cloud."
"Its price could be better."
"It should be more stable. There should be full integration within Fortinet products themselves as well as with other third-party products. Especially when you're not dealing with SIEM and the correlation of the security box, we want Fortinet to be able to share that information with as many other products as it can."
"The support team for Fortinet FortiGate needs to be more customer friendly."
"Their software support needs improvement. I would prefer to have better support for bug fixes. Sometimes, we open a ticket, and it is very difficult to get a solution. Specifically, we are not at all happy with their support for load balancing."
"Tunnel flapping was one of the major things I had seen wherein your internet link remains but your VPN tunnel is down. However, since I got a fix from the TAC team, I have not noticed it, but the customer complained a few times that they couldn't access the internet because of this problem."
"Scalability is one of the disadvantages. When it comes to scalability, you have to actually change the box. If you want to upgrade it, you need to actually change the existing box and probably you take the system off to other sites."
"We'd like more management across other integrations."
"The solution's licensing price could be improved."
"In future releases, maybe Palo Alto can enhance and enlarge their portfolio with SIEM solutions. They already have an endpoint protection solution, SOAR solution, that's fine. But when it comes to standalone IDS/IPS solution or email security solution, for example, we don't have any product in that category for Palo Alto."
"Currently, they are not protected with any data security when they work from home or outside the network. They surf the Internet directly and should implement a proxy or firewall to monitor the data between the endpoint and the internet."
"Compared to other vendors, the solution's community should be strong enough to solve the problems engineers face."
"The SD-WAN feature of Palo Alto Networks is not good compared to FortiGate."
"Palo Alto Networks PA-Series is expensive. We would like to see additional threat hunting features."
"Palo Alto can improve the web application firewall (WAF) feature at layer 7."
"I experienced some problems with AWS cloud parameters connected to Palo Alto firewall."
"In the next release, I would like to see better integration of multi-factor authentication vendors."
"The reporting part of the product is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"The web interface is very slow, and it needs to be faster."
"Recently, they introduced their Prisma Cloud solution. Compared to the previous technologies, like Panorama, which is used for centralized firewall management, or even the individual firewalls, it's a bit challenging to integrate the traditional firewall policies into Prisma Cloud."
"The DLP functionality or data classification can be improved in the solution's basic firewalling."
"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."
"Integrative capabilities with other solutions should be addressed."
"It would be helpful if we had a direct number for the support manager or the supporting engineer. That would be better than having to email every time because there would be less wait."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is quite affordable for our customers. There is a separate cost for IPS, antivirus, web filtering, and other features. They have a great choice of licenses. You can go for the license that you want, which is quite useful."
"While Fortinet FortiGate has a higher price point compared to Sophos XG, its user-friendly interface justifies the cost."
"Easy to understand licensing requirements."
"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 cost is too high... They have to focus on more features with less cost for the customer. If you see the market, where it's going, there are a lot of players offering more features for less cost."
"They need to be competitive with other solutions."
"Fortigate's pricing is competitive."
"The price of Fortinet FortiGate is better than Cisco, Check Point, and Palo Alto. In terms of pricing, it's probably a better-priced firewall solution overall."
"This product has an affordable and reasonable price point."
"Compared to other vendors, Palo Alto Networks PA-Series is expensive."
"Palo Alto Networks PA-Series's price is much higher than other firewall brands."
"The pricing is a bit on the higher side."
"The product is offered to users at high prices compared to the pricing model of the other vendors in the market."
"We have to pay a yearly licensing fee for the solution."
"From my perspective, managing the price is important, especially because we're a small business. For larger organizations like Barclays, we provide our requirements to the client, and they place the order on BigFix. It's their responsibility to consider their budget and make decisions accordingly. We appreciate the features we get, but the cost-sharing still depends on the client."
"Palo Alto’s pricing is way higher than any other solution provider."
"The solution is a little bit expensive compared to other vendors."
"Palo Alto can be as much as two times the price of competing products that have twice the capabilities."
"The price is not bad. They have a yearly renewal fee, and the pricing is exactly where we expect it to be."
"For what you get, it does do what it says. It is a good value for an enterprise firewall.​"
"I rate Palo Alto Networks VM-Series pricing an eight out of ten."
"The product is cheaper than the on-premise version."
"Because the solution was getting deployed on AWS, it was the best place to go and it was available there."
"The license fee is slightly high."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
22%
Computer Software Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Computer Software Company
20%
Manufacturing Company
10%
University
10%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
6%
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 Palo Alto Networks PA-Series?
The reporting feature and application ID functionality within Palo Alto Networks PA-Series are incredibly valuable to...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Palo Alto Networks PA-Series?
It's not cheap. In Sri Lanka, it's expensive compared to other firewalls. But considering the features and the potent...
What needs improvement with Palo Alto Networks PA-Series?
Palo Alto can improve the web application firewall (WAF) feature at layer 7. Currently, I don't think it's available....
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, Fortinet Firewall
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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
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Warren Rogers Associates
Find out what your peers are saying about Palo Alto Networks PA-Series vs. Palo Alto Networks VM-Series and other solutions. Updated: December 2024.
823,875 professionals have used our research since 2012.