We performed a comparison between Palo Alto Networks WildFire and WatchGuard Firebox based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Netgate, Fortinet, OPNsense and others in Firewalls."It is very flexible to use."
"The solution is scalable."
"It's inexpensive compared to some of the other technology out there."
"I appreciate FortiGate's flexibility, which allows for centralized management through FortiManager."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is Quota."
"The main reason why I purchased the particular unit was that it had good reviews and what other people were saying as far as its completeness and its leading capabilities in terms of endpoint security was very good."
"The solution is very, very easy to use."
"You can purchase switches and you don't need to do anything with them. You just put in the firewall and the switches get all the policies and rules that you already have in the firewall. With Fortinet, you just connect the FortiSwitch to the Fortinet and that's it."
"You have better control because you define apps. You just don't define ports. You define apps, and the apps are monitored in the traffic. It is more specific than the Cisco firewall when it comes to our needs."
"It gives a more accurate assessment of a virus in terms of whether it's truly a virus, malware, or a false positive. We have some legacy software that could pop up as being something that is malware. WildFire goes through and inspects it, and then it comes back and lets us know if it's a false positive. Usually, when it finds out that it's not a virus, it lets us know that it's benign, and it can exclude it from that scan, which means I don't even have to worry about that one popping up anymore."
"The backup is the best feature."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is how it keeps up-to-date with viruses."
"Being an application-based firewall, this is one of the critical focus factors along with the threat prevention services it provides."
"The solution is scalable."
"The solution has plenty of features."
"Stability is never a concern."
"If you just plan to use WatchGuard Firebox in your office and not publicly, then it is okay to purchase it. With WatchGuard Firebox, you can manage your users and permissions while also taking care of the basic setup phase in your office."
"It is a scalable solution."
"This product offers great protection using the default settings."
"The most valuable feature for small and medium businesses is the support for various protocol proxies."
"It's pretty simple to understand when you want to do any diagnostics on your network. If you want to go in and see what packages are having trouble getting through, what's being held, stalled, etc., it's very easy to use in that way."
"Firebox's best feature is the access portal."
"Two of the functionalities we use most are the traffic monitoring and the full panel dashboard. Those are two things that are very useful for us... In addition, it provides us with layered security. It allows us to determine what types of access, to which networks, we want to allow or deny."
"I like the High Availability features of the newest ones I'm using because they allow a firewall to fail and still be up and running."
"Fortinet FortiGate needs to improve the logging and reporting. Additionally, the next-generation application's policies should be improved. When they were released they had bugs."
"The visibility of the network can be better. The GUI can be improved for better visibility of the network flow. Other solutions have better GUI in terms of network visibility."
"The inability to scale the FortiAnalyzer to match our growth necessitates the purchase of new hardware."
"They should improve the interface to make it more user-friendly."
"The stability of Fortinet FortiGate could improve."
"The pricing could be reduced or include the first year warranty."
"Fortinet FortiGate could improve by adding FortiAnalyzer to its solution, we should not have to use another solution. FortiAnalyzer can provide more detailed information."
"The Web-filter in this solution is not very good."
"The price could be better."
"The data analytical system for deployment needs to improve."
"They can keep on doing more updates. As new malware and viruses are coming out, they can make sure that WildFire is up to date."
"In the future, I would like to see more automation in the reporting."
"The technical support response needs improvement."
"The global product feature needs improvement, the VPN, and we need some enhanced features."
"The product's false positive logs could be more user-friendly to understand. They could provide examples of precious cases to learn."
"Any enhancements should likely be focused on the firewall appliance to further strengthen overall security capabilities, such as refining app and user identity features."
"There is a slight learning curve."
"There's always room for improvement, especially if the threats are getting more sophisticated and the IT department cannot sufficiently meet this kind of sophistication with their own knowledge and experience. Knowing that this solution can get up to the level of addressing a lot of these threats is something that everybody wishes for. If we look at the dark web and the lawful web, they are two opposites, and if these two good and bad collide in the world of the internet, you want the best possible product—especially if you cannot get to that point of knowledge. I am just an individual and end user, with limited knowledge of usage. That's why I say there's always room for improvement, from their side and also from mine, because by knowing exactly what they can achieve and the knowledge that they can get on an everyday basis, and the portion that is understandable to me, it's an improvement for them as well."
"The performance of the solution's processor needs to be faster."
"I don't think I can get a full-blown DNS client from it. I've been trying to have DNS services. It has forwarding, but I don't get the services of a full DNS client. My main difficulty with it is that I can't run a complete service. I need NTP. I need DNS. I need DHCP for my domain, but I only get forwarding. As far as I can tell, I don't get caching and the kinds of reporting and registration needed to host a DNS for a domain. I have to have a separate solution for that."
"What could use some significant improvement in WatchGuard Firebox would be its interface and policy management. An additional feature I'd like to see in the next release of WatchGuard Firebox is the ability to modify an existing policy instead of having to recreate a policy when changes are necessary. At the moment, there's no possibility to modify the policy. You have to delete the policy and recreate it."
"There should be better integration and a way to configure multiple vendors into the same data center in order to offer more flexibility."
"The UI is not as user-friendly as the model that I had used before, which was from Check Point. The design of the Firebox UI is restricted and needs an experienced network guy to understand the format and settings."
"Websense is an application that monitors and filters internet traffic. Websense was derived from WatchGuard. But when you go to WatchGuard to actually implement that particular feature, you have to use some type of additional feature and you have to pay for it, unfortunately. I think it should be free or free in the WatchGuard box itself, as an option. It would be nice if they didn't charge us for that."
Palo Alto Networks WildFire is ranked 3rd in Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) with 58 reviews while WatchGuard Firebox is ranked 13th in Firewalls with 79 reviews. Palo Alto Networks WildFire is rated 8.4, while WatchGuard Firebox is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Palo Alto Networks WildFire writes "Good technical support and provides automatic analysis that saves us time in filtering email". On the other hand, the top reviewer of WatchGuard Firebox writes "Offers a streamlined deployment, intuitive interface and robust security features". Palo Alto Networks WildFire is most compared with Cisco Secure Firewall, Juniper SRX Series Firewall, Proofpoint Email Protection, Fortinet FortiSandbox and CyberArk Privileged Access Manager, whereas WatchGuard Firebox is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Sophos XG, OPNsense, SonicWall TZ and Meraki MX.
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