We performed a comparison between WatchGuard Firebox and Zscaler Internet Access 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."One of the valuable features is a standardized OS."
"The reporting and monitoring are very good."
"The product is very stable, easy to troubleshoot, and configure, so it has reduced the time it takes for support."
"The interface is very good."
"With FortiClient, you can easily connect when you are home, check out what you want to do, and connect to your network when you are not at work. You can switch on servers and you can check what is wrong."
"The most valuable features are simplicity, management, and that it's constantly evolving."
"The most valuable feature is the ease of use."
"The features that I have found most valuable are the SD-WAN and their IP4 policy."
"The throughput is great. It's perfect. We have no issues whatsoever. The management features are very powerful..."
"Intrusion Prevention is my primary focus so that's what I find most useful. The why is straightforward: It's to prevent intrusion."
"One of the most valuable features is the Geolocation. Because we aren't a multinational corporation, it allows me to look at things which might be suspicious to make sure that they are legitimate transactions rather than people sniffing around the network."
"The features that I have found most valuable are the FireWall features. The management side of WatchGuard is quite easy because it supports two ways to manage it - by the web and the other one they call WatchGuard systems manager. I used to be familiar with WSM only, but they improved their GUI in the web browser and now it is much easier to do it within the web browser."
"The solution has a useful traffic monitor."
"[A] valuable feature would be the branch office. We have five offices throughout the United States, and it coordinates the connections of those offices."
"Policy VPN, site-to-site VPN, traffic monitoring, anti-spam filters, and all other advanced features are valuable."
"They've done a lot of work with their SD-WAN, which we do use, to have our old internet service with our new internet service. If anything goes down on a particular interface, I can have different rules applied. Most of my users don't even know when our primary internet goes down anymore... I don't have to be here to do anything to switch it to our backup internet or to switch it back."
"The most valuable feature of Zscaler Internet Access is that it is a consolidated solution, it comes with many features, such as DLP."
"We use ZIA for outbound internet connectivity. The internet traffic of on-prem users will be directed to the ZIA cloud for security checks and web filtering."
"The solution’s customer service is good."
"The solution offers a distributed organization to master and to control all of the endpoints."
"Zscaler excels in security protection and the cloud is always up-to-date. It does not matter if you are a small or big organisation, you will receive the same security quality."
"Whether you are in a hotel somewhere, or in Africa, it does not matter. You will get the Zscaler protection presence anywhere."
"The VPN is valuable, as the whole technology is very different from a traditional VPN."
"The URL filtering has been the most valuable feature."
"Fortinet FortiGate should improve the VPN tokens."
"Its price could be better."
"Fortinet FortiGate can improve the integration with Active Directory. Additionally, I would like to have a Cloud Controller, such as they do in the Cisco Meraki solution."
"FortiGate support could do some improvements on their IPv6 configuration. Right now it's still in the very early stage for utilizing in an enterprise level network environment."
"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."
"Fortinet should focus on enhancing the capabilities of FortiGate by consolidating its various products, such as FortiGate Cloud, FortiManager, and FortiAnalyzer."
"One of the features that I would like to have is to do with endpoint production, it should be integrated. For example, the firewall gets notified of any kind of forensic event that needs to be done, such as if there is a ransomware attack and how it originated, all those records have to be available from the firewall, which is not."
"A sandbox would be good in order to be able to inspect the emails containing spam and be able to validate the emails that contain malware, prior to delivering to the customer."
"Reporting is something you've got to set up separately. It's one of those things that you've got to put some time into. One of the options is to set up a local report server, which is what I did. It's not great. It's okay... Some of the stuff is a little complicated to get up and running. Once you do, it becomes very user-friendly and easy to work with, but I find there are some implementation headaches with some of their stuff."
"This solution needs the option to add an external hard drive."
"There is a slight learning curve."
"In terms of what could be improved, I would say their web blocker feature. It is still quite a confusing setup, especially when you want to filter out a particular category for granularity. For example, you do not want to filter Facebook but you do want to filter Facebook games only. It can be done, but the process to do it is very confusing."
"The area where I think this product can be improved is the user interface and the reporting. It can be quite difficult to find the correct logs and to actually find out what is going on. The digging can be time-consuming."
"Make WatchGuard Firebox capable of integrating with third-party vendors like FireMon, Splunk, Tenable, etc."
"Setup of this solution is complex, it's not plug and play."
"I haven’t dug deeply into the reporting features yet or if they are working well. However, I have generated several reports and there was too much unnecessary information, in comparison with the reporting features in the Sophos firewall. Sophos' reporting is more readable and easier to configure."
"I would like to see the ability to choose a pool of IPs for my company, set up rules based on them, and know that those IPs are not used by other companies."
"One thing that they could improve is the ability to import rules from other platforms."
"Technical support could be better."
"Zscaler Internet Access needs to integrate more ISPs. It is good to have more than three ISPs."
"Zscaler Internet Access can improve by adding traffic filtering based on the DNS."
"The reporting functionality could be a bit easier to use. There is a reporting function, but it's quite hard to do any good reporting, from a user-management perspective. For example, if a department manager wants to know how his department is using the web, there is a way to get the data, but it's quite cumbersome to get it and show it well. And that's true for comparing between departments."
"There are a few features that are not compatible with the Azure cloud."
"Currently, the solution's interface is not that user-friendly."
WatchGuard Firebox is ranked 13th in Firewalls with 79 reviews while Zscaler Internet Access is ranked 2nd in Secure Web Gateways (SWG) with 46 reviews. WatchGuard Firebox is rated 8.4, while Zscaler Internet Access is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of WatchGuard Firebox writes "Offers a streamlined deployment, intuitive interface and robust security features". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Zscaler Internet Access writes "Provides integrated CASB and file sandboxing but could be less expensive ". WatchGuard Firebox is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Sophos XG, OPNsense, SonicWall TZ and Meraki MX, whereas Zscaler Internet Access is most compared with Cisco Umbrella, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, Netskope , Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks and Appgate SDP. See our WatchGuard Firebox vs. Zscaler Internet Access report.
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