We performed a comparison between Azure Firewall and Check Point NGFW based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison of Results: Based on the parameters we compared, Azure Firewall seems to be a superior solution. All other things being more or less equal, our reviewers found Check Point NGFW to be rather expensive to purchase. Users of Check Point NGFW feel that the stability of the product could be improved. Additionally, some users are not so impressed by the technical support and training that it offers.
"The most valuable feature of Fortinet FortiGate is security. They are known for efficiency and are on the top of Gartner Quadrant reviews. Fortinet FortiGate has an easy-to-use platform with a good graphical interface. The configuration is simple and the solution provides an overall good layer of security."
"The solution is very, very easy to use."
"One of the valuable features is a standardized OS."
"Initial setup is straightforward. There weren't too many issues with setting it up. It takes one hour or so."
"Fortigate represents a really scalable way of delivering perimeter network security, some level of layer 7 security, WAF, and also a way to create a meshed ADVPN solution."
"This is an easy solution to deploy."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiGate are the ability to work in proxy mode, which other solutions, such as Palo Alto cannot. There are some features that are better that come at no extra license or subscriptions cost, such as basic SD-WAN. The DLT is useful, other solutions have the same feature too, such as Palo Alto."
"What's most important is the ease of use."
"Azure's cost-effectiveness is its major advantage."
"The Layer four features are okay and meet my business needs."
"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."
"We use the solution for application and server deployment."
"It's helped us improve our security posture."
"In terms of the reporting, it's beautiful. It integrates with Azure monitoring and with Azure policies. That piece is a big help. You can set governing policies and you can use the application firewall, as well as the Azure Firewall, to enforce those policies."
"The SIEM that Azure Firewall provides us is very robust."
"The firewall policy control, URL content control, and antivirus are all the most valuable aspects. Threat prevention is as well quite good."
"It provides access to the Internet for corporate resources in a secure manner."
"The ease of configuring VPNs can be very useful especially for companies with lots of remote locations."
"The Check Point architecture and packet are very good."
"There are many useful features including the Office VPN, which provides us with a seamless connection for users who are working remotely."
"In addition to the different security features that Check Point security solutions have, their integration with other technologies makes the security environment a complete security type."
"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."
"Check Point provides dedicated blades to monitor network traffic, which helps while troubleshooting network and packet-related issues."
"Check Point is able to satisfy almost any security tool for enterprise clients. This allows us to deploy complex changes from a single management interface, get better visibility, and significantly reduce operational complexity."
"I'm not sure if it's something that they already have or are developing something, however, we need some dedicated features for container security."
"It is very expensive, and their support is not very good. I hope that their technical support will be better in the future."
"The routing capability on the FortiGate devices has room for improvement."
"The firewall engine is not so strong as of now, in my opinion... My second concern is that, while they have Zero-day vulnerability and anti-malware features, the threat engine needs to be strengthened, its efficiency can be increased."
"They need faster serviceability and more security features."
"The sniffing packets or packet captures, can be simplified and improved because it's a little confusing."
"Some features of Fortinet FortiGate are actually fee enabled that are inconvenient for deploying in production. Other issues relate to isolation with Cisco products and your server."
"Its price could be better."
"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."
"There are a number of things that need to be simplified, but it's mostly costs. It needs to be simplified because it's pretty expensive."
"It would be much easier if the on-premises, firewall rules, had some kind of export-import possibility in place, which is not the case right now."
"It would be nice to be able to create groupings for servers and offer groups of IP addresses."
"The development area and QA area could be improved. With those improvements, we can improve projects and take even less time to implement them."
"For large organizations, a third-party firewall would be an added advantage, because it would have more advanced features, things that are not in Azure Firewall."
"It's a little heavy compared to a FortiGate or other firewalls."
"The solution should incorporate features similar to competitors like split tunneling."
"Heavy load causes a higher CPU to peek which causes us to need to reboot the device. Malicious activity database corrupts the directory or path and restoring it takes a lot of time."
"Management: Check Point should move away from its current architecture wherein it mandatorily requires a management server to manage the gateways. They should develop A feature in the gateway itself so that no management server is needed for policy and gateway management."
"It requires enhanced automation tools for regulatory compliance to ease the burden of compliance reporting and auditing."
"There is nothing more that I need in terms of improvement."
"It's too expensive for mid-market companies."
"SmartEvent Settings and Policy GUI, and the rest of external apps should be improved."
"The smart consoles could be improved."
"One thing to improve is the VSX gateway. It is quite complex to work with VSX and they are quite easy to break if you aren't familiar with them."
Azure Firewall is ranked 21st in Firewalls with 33 reviews while Check Point NGFW is ranked 5th in Firewalls with 275 reviews. Azure Firewall is rated 7.2, while Check Point NGFW is rated 8.8. 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 Check Point NGFW writes "Good antivirus protection and URL filtering with very good user identification capabilities". Azure Firewall is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate-VM, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Palo Alto Networks VM-Series and Cisco Secure Firewall, whereas Check Point NGFW is most compared with Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Sophos XG, Cisco Secure Firewall, Netgate pfSense and OPNsense. See our Azure Firewall vs. Check Point NGFW report.
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Check Point firewall does a deep inspection of packets till Layer 7 and is more compatible with the organizational environment.
The Azure firewall is also a cloud-based security solution that also provides Advance Threat Protection.