We performed a comparison between Meraki MX 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 initial setup is straightforward."
"It's super reliable. I don't think I've ever had a reliability issue with it."
"Good anti-malware and web filtering features."
"I like Fortinet FortiGate's antispam filter, SPN, and clustering features."
"I appreciate FortiGate's flexibility, which allows for centralized management through FortiManager."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the analytics."
"Offers good security and filtering."
"The most valuable features are the enterprise modeling and the simple interface."
"The most valuable feature of Meraki MX is I can manage the solution from anywhere remotely, I can throttle bandwidth, and create all rules. Additionally, it is secure for our customers."
"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."
"It is very easy to use and manage. It is also very easy to scale."
"It is very easy to configure."
"Deployment takes no more than one working day."
"The features we have found most valuable are the firewall and the monitoring tools."
"The technical support people from Meraki are brilliant."
"Meraki makes it easy to be secure and know where the holes are to fix them. We have been fixing anything that we have ever found for 20 years. We keep up-to-date with firmware upgrades. We just try to stay on top of everything for security, like maintaining updates and getting rid of old systems. I feel like we're on top of it."
"The VM-Series reports how much bandwidth a particular IP is using. You don't need to regularly log into a website, like a Cisco command, to see what kind of ACL it's getting. There isn't an ACL use portal event. You can go there and see how much my ACL has been getting me."
"The most valuable feature is that you can launch it in a very short time. You don't have to wait for the hardware to arrive and get it staged and installed. From that perspective, it is easy to launch. It is also scalable."
"It has a good performance which helps you with the stability of your virtual environment."
"It ensures that every interaction, pre and post-loan processing, undergoes a thorough inspection, leveraging VPN features and comprehensive security protocols."
"The initial setup was straightforward."
"The most valuable features are the User ID, URL filtering, and application filtering."
"The Palo Alto VM-Series is nice because I can move the firewalls easily."
"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. "
"One of the problems I was having was with user mapping, and it is an issue for which I have escalated tickets with Fortinet support."
"I would like to see improvements in the product's application rules."
"Lacks training for new features."
"The debugging and troubleshooting has room for improvement."
"The pricing could be a bit better, especially when you consider how they have the most basic offering priced."
"The non-error conserve mode has room for improvement."
"The support we receive when we need to upgrade is not satisfactory and has room for improvement."
"They should make the rule sets more understandable for the end user. When you're trying to explain to somebody how a computer network is secured, sometimes it's difficult for an end user or customer to understand. If there was a way to make the terminology more accessible to the end user, the set up could be easier. They should translate the technical jargon to an easily relatable and understandable conversation for the end user, the customer, that would be brilliant. Particularly in an environment where the IT structure is audited regularly, there's always pressure from the auditor to up the standards and up the security and you get your USCERT's that come out and there's a warning about this and the customer will want to lock out so much and when you apply it they run into issue where they can't search the internet or print to their remote office. Of course they can't print to your remote office, they just locked it up. They should make the language more understandable for the customer. If there's a product out there that made the jargon understandable to John Q. Public, I would buy that."
"It would be nice to get detailed logging information without third-party software."
"As far as what needs to be improved — nothing really comes to mind. It does what we need it to do."
"We feel that Cisco provides smaller features, with fewer possibilities versus other solutions out there."
"I do not have the kind of feature I need for SSL decryption in Meraki MX. It would be great to see the SSL decryption feature in Meraki MX."
"When we do API integrations with Meraki, they have always been hard as well as tedious to build. The data that we want out of the API integrations has been only recently available. Six months ago, it was hard to get someone to build something correctly or useful with Meraki APIs. Recently, they have made more data available on the API, but it is just a start. They need to do more."
"More detail needed for configuration of the VPN."
"The client-side VPN is weak. The product could be improved with deployment templates."
"When it comes to cost, that's a pain point."
"There should be an option for direct integration with the Azure platform."
"Palo Alto should update their documentation to make it more readable and provide easier-to-follow instructions through videos."
"There's room for improvement in terms of integration with the load balancer. It isn't like Fortinet, which has a load balancer built into its firewall. It is effortless to integrate within the load balancer-plus-firewall solution."
"The interface is all Java-based. I would prefer an HTML5 interface."
"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."
"All areas need improvement: manufacturing, education, financial, etc."
"Palo Alto is that it is really bad when it comes to technical support."
"We have ran into issues with Palo Alto’s limitations for resolving large IP lists from DNS lookups, as well as the antivirus interfering with App-ID."
Meraki MX is ranked 2nd in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 59 reviews while Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is ranked 10th in Firewalls with 53 reviews. Meraki MX is rated 8.2, while Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Meraki MX writes "Cost-effective, simplified, easy to manage, and reliable with advanced security features and granular visibility". 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". Meraki MX is most compared with Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Cisco Secure Firewall, Sophos XG, SonicWall TZ and Netgate pfSense, whereas Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is most compared with Azure Firewall, Fortinet FortiGate-VM, Cisco Secure Firewall, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls and Sophos UTM. See our Meraki MX vs. Palo Alto Networks VM-Series report.
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