We performed a comparison between Check Point CloudGuard Network Security and Palo Alto Networks VM-Series 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."The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiGate are it is one of the most mature firewalls in the UTM bundle."
"Fortinet FortiGate is stable. It's used across all the countries, this is the way most multinationals run their system."
"Some of the key features of the solution is that it has good reporting, you can receive many details from the connection, for example, clients and website information."
"There are great templates, so you don't have to customize them if you don't want to. You do have the option to custom create some folders and some reports, however, with what is there, you don't really need to go through extra effort, as they already give you a lot of predefined views of reports and so forth."
"It is a safe product."
"The SD-WAN function is very developed. It has SD-WAN functionality with security features in one device. We can manage from one single console SD-WAN and the security policy."
"The network security and cloud security are most valuable."
"The features that I have found most valuable are the SD-WAN and their IP4 policy."
"The installation process doesn't take very long."
"Check Point CloudGuard is quick to deploy and easy for the customer to use."
"We primarily secure our network using CloudGuard Network Security's next-generation firewall features, including anti-spam, IPS, and URL filtering. Our chosen package for the go-to-market strategy is NGTP. For customers seeking more features, we provide options to upgrade to the tool's advanced packages."
"We find all the features valuable, particularly the firewall, application control, URL filtering, and HTTPS detection."
"The most valuable features are the ease of administration with the cloud management extension and the cloud licensing model."
"I find it really useful that CloudGuard supports all the main players on the Public Clouds market including AWS, GCP, and Azure, as well as some exotic ones like Alibaba Cloud, Oracle Cloud, and IBM Cloud."
"One of the main characteristics that Check Point CloudGuard Network Security has given us is granularity and visibility."
"The notifications, the visibility, and the deployment are the most valuable. It could be packaged in such a way that it took a lot of time and resources off our hands, so it was more efficient."
"Using Palo Alto Networks Panorama, we were able to deploy a single point of management and visualization of the firewall infrastructure in cloud, on-premise and integrated with Azure to automate scale up. Its security features, i.e. anti-malware, threat prevention, URL Filtering, VPN, and antivirus are the most valuable. The ID-User integrated with AD and 2FA features are also very useful to provide secure access to servers and some users in the company. "
"The VM-Series scalability is fast and easy to implement, improving our security posture as our Azure network grows."
"The filtering feature is good."
"The initial setup was straightforward."
"AWS has improved our agility to apply firewall rules. It has reduced the amount of time that it takes to apply firewall rules because everything is based in the cloud."
"The most valuable feature is that you can control your traffic flowing out and coming it, allowing you to apply malware and threat protection, as well as vulnerability checks."
"It has a good performance which helps you with the stability of your virtual environment."
"I like the UI. Most things are accessible from the user interface and it is quite user-friendly. With respect to both VM-based firewalls and physical firewalls, it's easy to create updates."
"The updates Fortinet provides are sometimes unstable."
"The cloud management and automation capability could be improved."
"They sometimes hide some features and if you want to enable them, you have to go in the CLI, enable the feature and configure it through the CLI. Customers, typically, like everything to be done by the GUI."
"It can be a little bit more user-friendly in terms of policy definition and implementation. It seems a little bit complicated, and it could be simplified."
"There are problems with the custom reporting of the unique traffic. The data is there, but it is too difficult for us to extract."
"I don't like that anything more than very basic reporting is not included."
"I would like to see improvements made to the dashboard and UI, as well as to the reporting."
"With the reports, you can see it, and you can get good feelings so upper management can go, "Oh, wow. That looks pretty." However, it's very basic."
"People don't know about the tool's features. There's a lack of skill. Users require more knowledge on how to integrate it into the cloud environment and orchestrate routing. So, it's not necessarily a CloudGuard Network Security or Check Point issue but more about integration, knowledge, and understanding."
"The biggest room for improvement is that, for a long time now, they've moved everything over to R80 but they still maintain some of the stuff in the old dashboard. They need to "buy in" and move everything to the modern dashboard so that you don't have to go to one place and to another place, at times, to configure the environment. It's time they just finish what they started and put everything in the new, modern dashboard."
"The user interface can be improved."
"We are at the place where we are looking at better integration with the management system. We use an MDS today, and it is self-deployed. We want to get to the Smart-1 Cloud, but we do not know what that looks like today because it does not support a multi-domain setup. Smart-1 should either be able to do multi-domain or there should be some form of taking a multi-domain environment and putting it in Smart-1."
"The connection to the on-premises management requires using the CLI. It's not just a click, and you cannot edit in the management to prepare everything. You need to do it online and in real time. After that, you must execute a script, and then you should be happy that it appears in the management."
"We have Microsoft CASB cloud app security and it's one of the least compatible firewalls. They really need to look at this, as both Check Point and Microsoft are major players. Why aren't they compatible? If we had Palo Alto then we wouldn't have this problem."
"A threat categorization system can be added to give users the authority to define vulnerable attacks and classify areas that can threaten the workflow system."
"Check Point CloudGuard is not a feature-centric product because Check Point concentrates on security."
"The interface is all Java-based. I would prefer an HTML5 interface."
"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."
"It is not very easy to scale up the solution."
"The one issue that I didn't like is that the SNMP integration with interfaces didn't record the interface counters."
"All areas need improvement: manufacturing, education, financial, etc."
"I would like a way to do everything programmatically, or be able to copy the configs from different prices at different levels."
"Its web interface is a bit outdated, and it needs to be updated. They can also improve the NAT functionality. We have had issues with the NAT setup."
"Integrative capabilities with other solutions should be addressed."
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Check Point CloudGuard Network Security is ranked 8th in Firewalls with 121 reviews while Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is ranked 10th in Firewalls with 53 reviews. Check Point CloudGuard Network Security is rated 8.6, while Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Check Point CloudGuard Network Security writes "Highly reliable, great visibility, and centralized management". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Palo Alto Networks VM-Series writes "Many features are optimized for troubleshooting real-time scenarios, saving a lot of time". Check Point CloudGuard Network Security is most compared with VMware NSX, Azure Firewall, Akamai Guardicore Segmentation, Cisco Secure Firewall and Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, whereas Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is most compared with Azure Firewall, Fortinet FortiGate-VM, Cisco Secure Firewall, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls and Netgate pfSense. See our Check Point CloudGuard Network Security vs. Palo Alto Networks VM-Series report.
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