We did not evaluate other options. 

I evaluated both Cisco and Palo Alto. We went for Azure Firewall because the cost is comparatively cheaper, and it's easy to manage as compared to other solutions. Azure Firewall Monitor gives you a lot of monitoring controls that are quite easy to manage. When it comes to cons, threat intelligence is still lacking in Azure Firewall. The load balancing and high availability could also be improved.

We evaluated Check Point and Fortinet.

It's simpler to implement Azure. It's simpler in terms of handling the license. With the other providers, in order to get support, it is necessary to sign a contract. With Azure, it's different. It's more agile and simpler to get service. The support is embedded in the service.

We evaluated Palo Alto. If you want to have a Palo Alto firewall in the cloud, you need to deploy it as a virtual appliance. This part is not that easy because it requires two types of tech stack. You need an Azure computing license for the Palo Alto virtual appliance. In addition, scalability is your responsibility. It is not the responsibility of your core service provider. So, for maintenance, you need to spend more time and effort.

Azure provides a unified API or interface, whereas if you want to have a traditional firewall appliance implemented in the cloud, you need to take care of the API or interface so that it can be managed in an automated way.

Each company will prioritize what it wants to work on. Azure may outperform AWS in some areas, but after working with the two platforms for roughly the same amount of time, I've found AWS friendlier and more sophisticated overall. AWS just seems to be a better platform for me, honestly.

Cisco ASA is a better product. The ASA offers VPN functionality that is not found in Azure Firewall, although an ESA can be used as a simple alternative. It's much easier to deploy the Azure Firewall in high availability mode and to make it more scalable.

We were using Check Point mostly. We had decided to move to FortiGate, and then we moved to Azure Firewall. 

We did not go with Check Point because of the premium features such as the URL filtering, and the TLS inspection included with Check Point cost a lot more. This was the reason we chose the Azure Firewall.

The solution of Palo Alto and the other one, whose name I don't remember, were IaaS-based, but we wanted a platform as a service, and Azure Firewall is that.

It needs more features so that it is comparable to Fortigate and other companies.

We have looked at Azure Firewall Premium and at Palo Alto's firewalls.

When we did the comparison we found the regular version of Azure Firewall has limited visibility for IDPS, no TLS inspection, no app ID, no user ID, no content ID, no device ID. There is no antivirus or anti-spyware. Azure Firewall doesn't scan traffic for malware unless it triggers an IDPS signature. There is no sandbox or machine learning functionality, meaning we are not protected from Zero-day threats. There is no DNS security and limited web categories.

We're looking at switching to Palo Alto virtual firewalls, but we want to make sure that what we switch to is compatible with our environment.

FortiGate - also nice solution...

Azure Firewall is the best to use with all Microsoft solutions. I also use Fortinet, Sophos, and Cisco. It's about the client's priority, that is, what they request.