We performed a comparison between Check Point NGFW and Fortinet FortiGate-VM based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Features: Check Point NGFW is praised for its extensive security features, centralized management, and virtualization capabilities. Fortinet FortiGate-VM receives appreciation for its stability, reliability, and user-friendly interface.
Check Point NGFW needs enhancements in integration, hardware upgrades, cost and pricing, stability and security, setup process, load balancing capabilities, technical support, and reporting. Fortinet FortiGate-VM requires improvements in key activation, log management, cloud management, IPsec failover, monitoring tool, setup and configuration, performance, firmware updates, log settings, GUI capabilities, costs, technical support, and integration.
Service and Support: The customer service for Check Point NGFW has garnered varying opinions, with some customers appreciating its helpfulness and responsiveness, while others believe there is room for improvement. Fortinet FortiGate-VM's support has received a mix of feedback. Certain customers commend its prompt response times and expertise, while others highlight concerns regarding delayed responses.
Ease of Deployment: Check Point NGFW's initial setup can be complex and may require expertise and experience for certain configurations and migrations. Fortinet FortiGate-VM offers a generally straightforward and easy setup process, aided by Fortinet's support and assistance.
Pricing: Check Point NGFW has a high setup cost, yet offers flexible licensing options. Fortinet FortiGate-VM has competitive pricing and includes support without extra charges.
ROI: Check Point NGFW provides cost savings, simplicity, and strong security enforcement, resulting in a favorable ROI. Fortinet FortiGate-VM offers stability and enhanced security, guaranteeing a positive ROI when purchased initially.
Comparison Results: Check Point NGFW is the preferred choice when comparing it to Fortinet FortiGate-VM. Check Point NGFW stands out for its extensive security features, such as URL filtering, intrusion prevention systems, identity and access management, and application control capabilities. Additionally, it offers centralized management and virtualization options, as well as stability, user-friendliness, and scalability.
"The management console is pretty simple, so anyone who understands networking can initially deploy the solution."
"We are very happy with the general bandwidth agility we have seen from one website to another website."
"The solution is scalable."
"Our project needs to link two sides through the internet. One of these was in Cairo and the other in another city. We used FortiGate as the integrating solution between the two locations, i.e. the Fortinet 30E & 100E."
"The technical support in our region is excellent."
"The customization potential is quite impressive."
"The solution is highly scalable because they have devices that can handle a large amount of traffic."
"It is easy to manage, and it doesn't need much knowledge from the team. It is a stable device, and there are many features that are included out of the box."
"The scalability is very good."
"The edge security posture has dramatically improved as we can now detect and prevent threats from the public internet."
"The most valuable feature of Check Point NGFW is the unparalleled distribution of the network traffic. The central management station they have allows you to manage everything from one place."
"The online documentation is complete and easy to read and understand."
"The only area that Check Point still seems to excel in is their logging."
"The Check Point architecture and packet are very good."
"The firewall and IPS are the most valuable features of the solution."
"The solution provides better stability and some interesting features such as the ease of throughput expansion."
"We like FortiGate-VM's IPS features and its ability to create multiple virtual firewalls."
"It's a very simple solution to manage."
"The pricing of the solution is good."
"It has allowed us to centralize every network service into one appliance."
"The performance overall is very good."
"It is highly scalable because it has a mesh architecture that allows consistent policies."
"In spite of the solution being inexpensive, it has everything one would need."
"Web filtering and the IPS functionality."
"The room for improvement is about the global delivery time period. Usually I need to wait for almost one month to deliver it overseas. So if you can shorten the deliver time it'd be great."
"It should be more stable. There should be full integration within Fortinet products themselves as well as with other third-party products. Especially when you're not dealing with SIEM and the correlation of the security box, we want Fortinet to be able to share that information with as many other products as it can."
"Security is a continuous process. In every product, there is a requirement for improvement. Its pricing should also be improved according to Indian market requirements. They must also improve on the reporting part. Its reporting can be more precise. If we can get a real-time report in a specific format, it will be helpful for customers to know about the current status of their security."
"The web-cache feature which was previously on the FortiGate device, but was deleted with the recent upgrade should be returned. It was a very valuable feature for us."
"We had a minor problem where there was a major system upgrade on the hardware platfrom and the Mac client was not available as soon as it might have been. The PC client was available immediately, but we had to wait a month or so, before there was a mac client. I was slightly irritated that it was not ready on time, but it was eventually resolved."
"A couple of things I've seen that need improvement, especially in terms of a hard coding. The driver-level active moment really is out-of-the-box and we have to have contact the customer support and sometimes it is difficult to resolve."
"Lacks training for new features."
"Fortinet FortiGate could improve by adding enhancements to FortiMail, FortiSOAR, and FortiDeceptor."
"The Antivirus feature is something that could be improved. We don't get much from the Antivirus update in comparison to their competitor's firewalls. It needs to be more advanced because Check Point is nowadays sent all over the world. Therefore, the Antivirus feature should be of very good quality and cover all virus checks. I would also like the Antivirus updates to be more frequent."
"Stability issues. I built out this firewall in a cluster, and I had stability issues day one. Needs to be rebooted frequently. Tunnels need to be bounced frequently. Their hardware compatibility guide, when I built out the servers to host them on, was not accurate."
"The interface can be more user-friendly in terms of design and the location of critical and commonly used icons."
"The command line is very difficult to use, which is one of the biggest drawbacks of this solution."
"If you have the standard support level, sometimes they take a long time to understand or even give you a solution or good workaround to a problematic situation."
"Right now, with a larger user database and a high number of rules, it takes a bit of time for policy installation."
"I would rate the technical support as a seven out of 10. Sometimes, it's difficult to get them to understand what the issue is. Sometimes, the issue is not resolved, then we solve it by ourselves with Check Point's documentation, which can be useful. When you open a case with Check Point, they can be a little slow. Sometimes, they don't solve things."
"I have had some issues in the past with the desktop client being slow to come up for logging in, and then slow to respond to screen changes, however, overall, it really hasn't been too bad."
"The user interface could be improved."
"The log settings and filters could use some improvement."
"It needs an Application Inspection."
"The GUI could be improved."
"Integration could be better. Whatever devices I'm using with FortiGate are all compatible. The access points and switches are also FortiGate, so I can easily integrate them. But it would be better if we could embed other devices as well. There are compatibility issues with other brands, and we need that. We can only integrate universal brands with FortiGate. The initial setup could also be easier."
"The product does not have a good graphical interface."
"The user interface (UI) and the performance of interface both need improvement."
"The performance could be better. Some features need to have quality control when the switch is working. The dedicated bandwidth for some users is not reliable."
Check Point NGFW is ranked 5th in Firewalls with 276 reviews while Fortinet FortiGate-VM is ranked 9th in Firewalls with 113 reviews. Check Point NGFW is rated 8.8, while Fortinet FortiGate-VM is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Check Point NGFW writes "Good antivirus protection and URL filtering with very good user identification capabilities". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Fortinet FortiGate-VM writes "An easy-to-manage and configure tool that provides ample documentation to help with the setup phase". Check Point NGFW is most compared with Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Sophos XG, Cisco Secure Firewall, Netgate pfSense and Azure Firewall, whereas Fortinet FortiGate-VM is most compared with Azure Firewall, Palo Alto Networks VM-Series, Fortinet FortiOS, OPNsense and Cisco Secure Firewall. See our Check Point NGFW vs. Fortinet FortiGate-VM report.
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