We performed a comparison between Azure Firewall and Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Based on the parameters we compared, while Azure Firewall is certainly a solid option, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is equally good. Users of both products have been happy with the ROI results. What differentiates the two products is the stark difference in pricing, which may ultimately sway an organization’s purchasing decision.
"All of the features of Fortinet FortiGate are useful and the security protection is good."
"Its stability is the most valuable."
"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."
"We use the FortiGate Sandbox to detect zero-day vulnerabilities, such as anomalies or malware, that are unknown and have not yet been discovered."
"It's inexpensive compared to some of the other technology out there."
"The most valuable features are the enterprise modeling and the simple interface."
"The feature I like most is the SD-WAN. It allows you to manage more than one ISP at the same time. And there is a high-availability mode, so if one of your ISPs is down, you still have a backup."
"It is a one box solution, which covers most of the edge device’s requirements."
"The solution is stable."
"Network filtering is valuable. The scalability capability from the cloud-native service helps us a lot because it simplifies our day-to-day maintenance activity."
"I can easily configure it."
"The solution is very stable. When comparing it to other environments, it's actually quite impressive."
"It is easy for me to protect certain ports or even the IP addresses, as well as do whitelisting, blacklisting, and the FQDN when we want virtual machines connected and to protect certain websites."
"Performance and stability are the key features of this product."
"The solution should be capable of self-scaling, which is one of the features we like about it."
"Microsoft's technical support is very good. They're quite knowledgable and responsive."
"It's one of the best products I've worked with. It's typically a market leader on Gartner. It's a very respected brand."
"Flexible and integrates well with apps and other security tools."
"In general, I appreciate the regular firewall function of Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls."
"The interface is very nice. We generally like the UI the product offers."
"Most of the features in Palo Alto are very valuable."
"The management options are good."
"It is critical that Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls embeds machine learning in the core of the firewall to provide inline, real-time attack prevention. In my environments, we have an integration with a third-party vendor. As soon as there is new information about new threats and the destination that they are trying to reach on any of our network devices, that traffic will be stopped."
"Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls saves us time."
"Its reporting capabilities can be improved. It should have some out-of-the-box reporting capabilities and some degree of customization. The basic reporting that it currently has is not sufficient to create more usable reports. It needs some sort of out-of-the-box reporting. They try to make customers purchase FortiAnalyzer for this kind of reporting, which is an additional cost. Other firewall vendors, such as SonicWall and Sophos, provide this sort of reporting without any additional cost."
"The solution's framework needs to be frequently updated in order to have a stable solution."
"The inability to scale the FortiAnalyzer to match our growth necessitates the purchase of new hardware."
"Fortinet FortiGate can be integrated with different platforms. They have integrations in place, but I can't say they're 100%."
"The initial setup and configuration are not intuitive and require training."
"I would prefer to have more detailed logs within the FortiGate products themselves rather than relying on a separate tool."
"Due to its higher cost, Fortinet FortiGate can lead to increased operational expenses."
"We'd like more management across other integrations."
"The tool needs to improve the onboarding and transition process for on-prem users."
"The threat intelligence aspect of this particular firewall is not at par with other providers."
"The solution doesn't offer the same capabilities of Fortinet. It should offer intrusion prevention and advance filtering. These are two very useful features offered on Fortinet that Azure lacks."
"The development area and QA area could be improved. With those improvements, we can improve projects and take even less time to implement them."
"There should be better monitoring and logging. Currently, it is put in Sentinel. It should be more seamless and from the interface."
"The solution should incorporate features similar to competitors like split tunneling."
"For larger enterprises, they need to adjust the scalability."
"You have to have a defined IP range within your network to associate it with your network. The problem is you have to plan ahead of time if you expect to use the firewall in the future so that you don't have to reconfigure your subnets or that specific IP range. Other than that, I don't any issues. I use it for basic configuration for a single application, so I really don't try to leverage it for multiple applications where I might find some complexity or challenges."
"They could improve their support and pricing and maybe integration. It's a little more expensive that Check Point but the quality is better. Integration with firewall endpoints could be better. Palo Alto does have very good malware or antivirus protection. I think they could improve on that front."
"The only real drawback to this product is that it is expensive. But you get what you pay for and there is no way to put a price on top-notch security."
"I'm thinking about a new feature. They have decryption. It's a good idea to use decryption on Palo Alto. It would be good if they had offloading of the traffic, and if they could decrypt the traffic and offload it. Like, for example, ASM on our site. We have an SSL decryption to offload the traffic. We could use that on Palo Alto."
"We need better affiliations for profiling the user."
"Palo Alto is like Microsoft. It has varied features, but it's too technical. A lot of the features could be simplified. The procedure, process, features, and usability could be more simple."
"The advanced manual protection needs to be improved a little bit because they used to make a cloud manual analysis for the cloud."
"The cloud could be improved. I would like to have more visibility of the vulnerabilities of the network as well."
"The only downside of Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, in my opinion, is the relatively higher price compared to Cisco FortiGate. This is especially noticeable when deploying basic configurations and considering the cost of licenses."
More Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls Pricing and Cost Advice →
Azure Firewall is ranked 21st in Firewalls with 33 reviews while Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is ranked 6th in Firewalls with 162 reviews. Azure Firewall is rated 7.2, while Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Azure Firewall writes "Easy to use and configure but could be more robust". 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". Azure Firewall is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate-VM, Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Palo Alto Networks VM-Series, Check Point NGFW and Cisco Secure Firewall, whereas Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is most compared with Check Point NGFW, Meraki MX, Sophos XG, Netgate pfSense and Cisco Secure Firewall. See our Azure Firewall vs. Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls report.
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