We performed a comparison between Fortinet Fortigate and Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison of Results: Based on the parameters we compared, Fortinet Fortigate seems to be a slightly superior solution. All other things being more or less equal, our reviewers found Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls to be one of the most expensive products on the market. Some also felt that the user interface and the documentation could be improved.
"Their reliability and their policy of pre-shipping replacements when a unit has failed."
"It increases security posture and is helpful for firewall reporting, intrusion protection, web filtering, and SD-WAN implementation."
"Good performance, stability, and virtual domain ability."
"You can create multiple Virtual Domains (VDOMs), which are treated as separate firewall instances."
"The user interface (UI) is very, very good."
"Fortinet FortiGate is stable. It's used across all the countries, this is the way most multinationals run their system."
"It enables our organization to become more productive. Also, it protects our NEtWare from viruses and malware."
"It is quite easy to handle."
"Their Prisma log collection is pretty great. Our product collects the logs, and it definitely makes the configuration of log collection easier."
"Decryption is one of Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls' best features because we can decrypt by category. For instance, we can decrypt everything except for bank traffic so that we don't interfere with the passwords and two-factor authentication of those checking their bank accounts at work. We can still monitor for malware and other threats that come through a secure channel. It's seamless for users. The URL filtering and IPS are both great as well."
"The most valuable features are application inspection and sandboxing. Application inspection decides where traffic is transmitted. If I have a perimeter report for a particular service, then other services or malicious services cannot use an open port. In this way, application inspection is doing a fantastic job. We also have a very good sandbox with almost no rate limit. It will inspect any file that comes in and goes out in a dedicated patch to identify malware. Therefore, these two things help me to protect our organization from any bad actors."
"It is very scalable."
"I like the navigation of the general Panorama solution. I can easily navigate around and get to the thing I need. I'm not wasting time trying to find something."
"The application awareness feature that recognizes application IDs and vulnerability protection are Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls' most valuable features."
"It's very important that Palo Alto NG Firewalls embed machine learning into the core of the firewall to provide inline, real-time attack prevention. That increases our security posture... The firewall is able to capture it and flag it and it is easy to mitigate as soon as we see something like that happening, to secure the environment more, in real time."
"We like the fact that this product can provide multiple layers of protection depending on our clients requirements, and can be configured to whatever level of protection and the specific protocols that they want."
"The feedback that I have received is that the performance could be better, and the user experience is not as good compared to a previous solution we used. It could be more user-friendly. Of course, it still works fine for our operations."
"WAN load-balancing could be a lot better at detecting when a link is poor or inconsistent, and not just flat out dead."
"There are some tiny bugs that sometimes affect the operations. In the past revision of it, there was a bug. Because of the bug, we had to downgrade the version. It happened only with the last revision."
"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."
"There can be more security in hybrid implementations. When a customer has a hybrid environment where some parts are in the cloud, we need a consistent security solution for such scenarios."
"I think that the infrastructure for the VPN could be improved. The way that it is bundled also made it difficult to use and sell as it is too expensive."
"There are some problems that support cannot give you a logical reason as to why it happened. For example, I had a case where I was dealing with a WhatsApp application that was giving issues. Technical support gave more than one reason it could be giving issues, but none of them solved the problem. Eventually I solved the problem, but it was far from the solutions that support had given."
"We would like to see an upgrade to the VPN feature, we are using the VPN from outside of our office and there is a limitation to 10 connections, more connections would be suitable."
"Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls don't provide a unified platform that natively integrates all security capabilities. It's missing some features for geofencing and understanding locations."
"Generating reports is not so easy."
"The advanced manual protection needs to be improved a little bit because they used to make a cloud manual analysis for the cloud."
"The bugs can be improved."
"We need better affiliations for profiling the user."
"Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls need better training modules. You have to do a lot of reading prior to watching the training videos, and it's good for people who are really into it. However, often you want to use a video for a TID. You want to see how to do something rather than spend 30 minutes reading and then another 30 minutes watching the class. As a result, I take third-party training classes rather than Palo Alto's training because they are a lot better."
"The areas that need to improve are network protection and user identification."
"The price could be more friendly, which would be good for Palo Alto and us. If the price were a little lower, then it would be a viable option for mid-level businesses, who may not be able to deploy at the current price point."
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Fortinet FortiGate is ranked 2nd in Firewalls with 306 reviews while Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is ranked 6th in Firewalls with 162 reviews. Fortinet FortiGate is rated 8.4, while Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Fortinet FortiGate writes "It's a reliable solution that's easy to install and cheaper than competitors ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls writes "We get reports back from WildFire on a minute-by-minute basis". Fortinet FortiGate is most compared with Sophos XG, Cisco Secure Firewall, Netgate pfSense, Meraki MX and WatchGuard Firebox, whereas Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is most compared with Check Point NGFW, Azure Firewall, Meraki MX, Sophos XG and Netgate pfSense. See our Fortinet FortiGate vs. Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls report.
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