We performed a comparison between Check Point NGFW and KerioControl 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 CLI and GUI do a good job of putting a lot at your fingertips."
"The inspection and web security features are most valuable."
"There is an easy process for configuring it, and it is straightforward to implement the device from scratch."
"The pipe filter application is an outstanding feature."
"Advanced routing (RIP, OSPF, BGP, PBR). It gives you a seamless and simple integration into a large network."
"Reliability is the best feature. We faced some issues when we were setting it up, but the service, portal, and administration are good."
"The solution is extremely reliable."
"The Intrusion Prevention System and the web filtering are both working well."
"The technical services always replied in a very fast and effective way."
"The uncomplicated configuration ensures that mistakes are avoided and rules are easily audited."
"The management interface is easy to operate and is a standardized way of managing different firewall modules in the same client application."
"The most valuable feature is the centralized management, which gives us control over all of the Check Point gateways."
"The solution offers very good central management, which saves time and is hassle-free."
"As with any firewall, IPSEC VPN is the critical functionality. Not every organization has the budget to implement MPLS or SD-WAN, which makes IPSEC the go-to for site-to-site connectivity."
"We used Check Point for implementation, and they are top-notch. They know the hardware and software better than anyone."
"I like the SmartEvent feature. When we see a threat, SmartEvent can create a rule for that. SmartEvent works with the SmartCenter to block a threat attack with a block monitor. The SmartCenter has the management for all the firewalls and data centers in a single dashboard."
"In terms of the comprehensiveness of the security features, it does a great job of laying out what it does. It's fairly easy to edit and research. Some of the features were turned on by our IT company and I was able to easily find other features on my own by searching for videos on the internet. I've been able to block certain websites, and content filter, as well as manage some of our bandwidth because we live stream on Sunday. I'm able to dedicate bandwidth for the encoder that goes to the internet. It always has enough bandwidth, no matter how many people are on the network. That's really helpful."
"I have found the most valuable features of Kerio Control to be the IPS and firewall."
"The most valuable features of Kerio Control are the IPS and traffic rules. The traffic rules are very user-friendly and the IPS is working well. Additionally, the anti-virus is effective with quick options, such as filtering."
"The installation is straightforward."
"Kerio Control is easy to use and provides the ability to deliver customized solutions."
"Kerio has improved my organization's security."
"The most valuable feature is to provide users with the ability to log in to the portal page, keep track of their data usage and perform bandwidth management."
"The traffic insight page or the administrative portal is really helpful because you can see all the internet usage down to the point where you can see if it's big files or streams. It gives us a good view of what the internet usage is of users who are coupled to an IP address. That way, if there are problems with, for example, a lot of data usage or problems with the connection, we can narrow it down to a single user or server and address the problem. It's really helpful for diagnostic data."
"I don't really have anything negative to say as far as Fortinet firewalls are concerned. If anything, they can support a user a little bit better. They can stop being so time-sensitive about how much time the support call has taken, and they can help you do it yourself."
"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."
"To some degree, it's almost a question as to why some of this stuff isn't simpler. For example, for an AP deployment, while it's integrated, the number of steps that you have to go through in order to get the AP up, seems like a lot."
"The captive portal could be improved."
"There could be more integration between the logging and analytical platforms to make it more seamless and integrated."
"The solution lacks multi-language support."
"NGN, reporting and controls."
"It would be ideal if they had some sort of GUI interface for troubleshooting and diagnostics."
"Check Point should improve services related to the cloud-based solution."
"For R80.10 and above, if you want to install a hotfix, then you can't install it through the GUI. I don't know why. In the earlier days, I was able to do the installation of hotfixes through the GUI. Now, Check Point said that you have to install hotfixes through the CLI. If that issue could be resolved, then it would be great because the GUI is more handy than the CLI."
"We have run into an interface expansion limitation, and thus it would be helpful if products lower in the stack would offer more interface expansion options."
"Check Point's study materials should be provided by the company directly and be of very good quality. This is not provided right now and something that the company can improve."
"I would highlight the need for enhancements in technical support services."
"There are issues with stability while upgrading devices with hotfixes."
"At the moment it is not easy to configure some VPN S2S in Check Point."
"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 security part of the software, like virus scanning, website, traffic monitoring, things like that, can take a beating on the appliance. And when there's a lot of things going on, the system can get bogged down. The actual security functionality of it needs a little bit more work, which I believe they are remedying or attempting to remedy at this time, but that's the downfall at this time."
"I would like to be able to automatically send email from Kerio Control and have it tell me what my external IPs are, because on one of my lines I have a fixed IP address and on the other it is variable. If there were a permanent way for me to figure out, "Okay, my current external VPN and my firm IP is this," it would help. I need to know the IP address to connect with the VPN and, at the moment, one of the lines sometimes changes its IP address without me knowing it. It's a hassle to figure out what it is."
"The filtering on the unlicensed version of Kerio Control is inefficient - you have to add each website manually, which isn't feasible."
"When we did our last update, we had some trouble with the initial syncing process to get our messaging to go through. But we were also moving a store and a lot was changing during that process. I don't think it was on Kerio's end. It just coincided with the update. Once we got our third-party IT guy involved it was resolved very quickly."
"One area that confused me a bit when I was building my current network. I use VLANs to have separate functionality on the network, and the appliance I got was the WiFi model, but I discovered that you can't assign WiFi channels to the VLAN. So, you can have WiFi, but its own subnet. You can't run that over the VLAN. Effectively, I can't use the WiFi facility in the appliance and had to purchase a separate web that supports VLANs. In the end, I had to go to GFI support. They confirmed this is just a limited functionality of that device, as it is a low-end device. I don't know if any of their high-end models have a better facility or not."
"Improvements are needed to the Next Generation Firewall Protection, specifically with user-level protection."
"The reporting needs to be improved. It is hard to get a domain."
"Filtering of pages and greater personalization in services need improvement."
Check Point NGFW is ranked 5th in Firewalls with 275 reviews while KerioControl is ranked 28th in Firewalls with 54 reviews. Check Point NGFW is rated 8.8, while KerioControl is rated 8.0. 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 KerioControl writes "With VPN, any of our guys can log in to the system and effectively be on board; helps with our customers all over the world". Check Point NGFW is most compared with Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Sophos XG, Cisco Secure Firewall, Netgate pfSense and Azure Firewall, whereas KerioControl is most compared with Netgate pfSense, OPNsense, Sophos UTM, Sophos XG and SonicWall NSa. See our Check Point NGFW vs. KerioControl report.
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