We performed a comparison between Check Point NGFW and Meraki MX based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Unified Threat Management (UTM) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The GUI is good."
"User-friendly and affordable security solution that's recommended for SMB customers. This solution has good technical support."
"The VPN is the most valuable feature."
"Fortinet FortiGate is a stable solution."
"The CLI is robust and powerful, enabling rapid, consistent changes via SSH."
"Initial setup is straightforward. There weren't too many issues with setting it up. It takes one hour or so."
"We purchased Fortinet because of the pricing, its functionality, because it met our requirements, and the total cost of ownership over five years was quite reasonable. In the market, Fortinet is rated quite well."
"The solution is very, very easy to use."
"Check Point's Quantum helps our clients in their overall cybersecurity practice."
"It's a lightweight solution, requiring minimal storage, resources, and memory to operate effectively."
"Check Point has a lot of features. The ones I love are the antivirus, intrusion prevention, and data loss prevention. Apart from that, there is central management through which we can integrate all the firewalls and support them. It makes it easy to manage all the firewalls."
"All of the features are very valuable, but the most valuable features are the sandboxing and the advanced IPS/IDS."
"Check Point NGFW generates very helpful reports based on the logs of the activated features."
"The Identity-Based Inspection Control gives us the ability to leverage the organization’s Microsoft AD, LDAP, RADIUS, and Cisco pxGrid."
"It improves user productivity and frees up system resources."
"The product is flexible."
"The dashboard is very intuitive and easy to understand."
"The simplicity of configuration is the most valuable feature of the solution."
"The features we have found most valuable are the firewall and the monitoring tools."
"Since it has an integrated dashboard for all the products, customers can get complete network analytics regarding what the user is doing, monitoring, and observing."
"I love the simplicity of Meraki MX — specifically, the simplicity of the dashboard."
"Both the scalability and the scalability are great with Meraki MX."
"The security level of our organization has changed by using Meraki MX Firewalls. We didn't have the UTM before, but now we have sandboxing, tray scanning, attack preventions and monitorization. Our security level has improved."
"The product is quite secure, easy to manage, and well-connected with other devices."
"In terms of what could be improved, the SD-WAN is quite difficult, because if you install the new box, 15 is okay, but if you change from an old configuration, if there is already configuration and a policy when you change to SD-WAN, you must change the whole policy that you see in the interface."
"Fortinet FortiGate is not very easy to use. The navigation could be improved to make it easier to use."
"Its reporting capabilities can be improved. It should have some out-of-the-box reporting capabilities and some degree of customization. The basic reporting that it currently has is not sufficient to create more usable reports. It needs some sort of out-of-the-box reporting. They try to make customers purchase FortiAnalyzer for this kind of reporting, which is an additional cost. Other firewall vendors, such as SonicWall and Sophos, provide this sort of reporting without any additional cost."
"FortiLink is the interface on the firewall that allows you to extend switch management across all of your switches in the network. The problem with it is that you can't use multiple interfaces unless you set them up in a lag. Only then you can run them. So, it forces you to use a core type of switch to propagate that management out to the rest of the switches, and then it is running the case at 200. It leaves you with 18 ports on the firewall because it is also a layer-three router that could also be used as a switch, but as soon as you do that, you can't really use them. They could do a little bit more clean up in the way the stacking interface works. Some use cases and the documentation on the FortiLink checking interface are a little outdated. I can find stuff on version 5 or more, but it is hard to find information on some of the newer firmware. The biggest thing I would like to see is some improvement in the switch management feature. I would like to be able to relegate some of the ports, which are on the firewall itself, to act as a switch to take advantage of those ports. Some of these firewalls have clarity ports on them. If I can use those, it would mean that I need to buy two less switches, which saves time. I get why they don't, but I would still like to see it because it would save a little bit of space in the server rack."
"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."
"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."
"I would like to see improvements made to the dashboard and UI, as well as to the reporting."
"Some of the web policy reports could be improved."
"If you have the standard support level, sometimes they take a long time to understand or even give you a solution or good workaround to a problematic situation."
"They have few predefined reports and it would be nice to increase them since the logs are excellent."
"Check Point NGFW could improve by introducing machine learning and more modeling dividing the way they manage the ports. However, they have evolved over the last year."
"Reporting has to be improved."
"The speed of technical support is very slow and is something that should be improved."
"Improvement regarding the expansion of the SMS's compatibility to include various virtualization environments would be beneficial."
"The firewall can improved to make it more user-friendly."
"One of my issues with Check Point is the stability. There have been too many bugs, over the years, when I compare them with other vendors. Their QA team should do better work before releasing their GA versions."
"The product doesn't support route summarization and BGP dynamic routing protocol."
"Meraki MX firewalls are great for small to medium-sized businesses, but other solutions are better for enterprise-sized companies."
"It would be nice if the different services, including the SIEM SOC and endpoint detection and response (EDR) were integrated into one, so that I don't have to go to different vendors for different services."
"It is very expensive."
"We do not have account managers in our region for the solution. Some governments don't use the product since it is attached to the internet."
"It can be hard to get a hold of the solution’s technical support team."
"Right now, you can postpone the update but eventually, if you don't do the update, it will install the updates automatically for you and that's something that is not working for me."
"Expensive licensing and firewall stops immediately working if the license is not renewed at expiration date."
Check Point NGFW doesn't meet the minimum requirements to be ranked in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 277 reviews while Meraki MX is ranked 2nd in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 58 reviews. Check Point NGFW is rated 8.8, while Meraki MX is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Check Point NGFW writes "Good antivirus protection and URL filtering with very good user identification capabilities". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Meraki MX writes "Cost-effective, simplified, easy to manage, and reliable with advanced security features and granular visibility". Check Point NGFW is most compared with Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Sophos XG, Cisco Secure Firewall, Netgate pfSense and WatchGuard Firebox, whereas Meraki MX is most compared with Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Cisco Secure Firewall, Sophos XG, SonicWall TZ and Sophos XGS. See our Check Point NGFW vs. Meraki MX report.
See our list of best Unified Threat Management (UTM) vendors and best Firewalls vendors.
We monitor all Unified Threat Management (UTM) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
