We performed a comparison between Check Point NGFW and Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls based on our users’ reviews in four categories. Our conclusion is presented below.
Comparison Results: Our users feel Check Point NGFW is the better choice for NG Firewalls. Users appreciate its unique multi-layer, multi-blade approach. Additionally, the central management station allows users to manage everything in one place, helping to improve overall performance. The great price, support, and performance make this a great choice.
"It has improved our organization with control data."
"The IPS is good. It protect my network from attackers."
"It's a user-friendly firewall. Most of the tasks are very simple. It's simple to configure and troubleshoot this firewall."
"The solution is very user-friendly."
"Security, SD-WAN, and Streetscape are valuable features."
"The most valuable feature is the VDOM, which allows the customer to have multiple firewalls in a single campus."
"This is a quality product with ok support, and it is better than the competition we've tried."
"It can expand easily."
"The best feature is the ability to increase the capacity of the solution by exactly what you add, not losing anything for High Availability."
"The uncomplicated configuration ensures that mistakes are avoided and rules are easily audited."
"The application authentication feature of Check Point is the most valuable as it helps us keep users secure."
"The Network Address Translation (NAT) will always be a valuable feature as it allows me to turn my private cloud to the public at the click of a button and have secure control over the accessible servers/applications."
"It has various features, like Threat Prevention and Antivirus. It is easier to use and have knowledge of a single device rather than multiple devices/technologies when doing an installation. It is also easy to use because of having Antivirus and Threat Prevention features within the same firewall."
"The online documentation is complete and easy to read and understand."
"Configuration and deploying are easy."
"Check Point's rule management helped us simplify access control. At one point, we had more than 1,000 access control policies, and it was challenging to manage them all. We cut it down to 300 policies using Check Point's management features, and we are still working on reducing this further to achieve the best way to manage policies. Its logging and monitoring enable us to trace and investigate suspicious traffic."
"A feature introduced by Palo Alto with the version 10-OS is embedded machine learning in the core of the firewall to provide inline, real-time attack prevention. Machine learning analyzes the network traffic and detects if there is any usual traffic coming from outside to inside. Because of Palo Alto, organizations detect around 91% of malicious attacks using machine learning. The machine learning helps customers by implementing firewalls in critical and air gap areas so there is no need to integrate with the cloud sandbox."
"The most valuable features are application inspection and sandboxing. Application inspection decides where traffic is transmitted. If I have a perimeter report for a particular service, then other services or malicious services cannot use an open port. In this way, application inspection is doing a fantastic job. We also have a very good sandbox with almost no rate limit. It will inspect any file that comes in and goes out in a dedicated patch to identify malware. Therefore, these two things help me to protect our organization from any bad actors."
"The most valuable aspect of this solution is pre-sales and post-sales because of the support and relationship building."
"It is pretty important to have embedded machine learning in the core of the firewall to provide inline, real-time attack prevention, because all these different attacks and threats are constantly evolving. So, you want to have something beyond just hard pass rules. You want it to learn as it is going along. Its machine learning seems pretty good. It seems like it is catching quite a few things."
"The most valuable features of this solution are all of the services it provides."
"Some of Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls' valuable features are their powerful capabilities and user-friendliness."
"The key aspect of this solution that provides the most value is its next-gen capabilities, which represented a significant change for us."
"I like that it has high security."
"The firmware needs improvement because there are bugs when a new release comes through. Sometimes, the configuration changes, and it's a bit harder to see where the fail is. The first time that you have the firmware, it tends to have some issues, and it's better to wait a bit to update the equipment."
"I would like some automated custom reporting."
"They should offer special pricing to premium partners and customers."
"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."
"There is room for improvement related to the logging and reporting aspect."
"Some of the software stability could improve."
"The solution could be more secure and stable."
"There are just some services that aren't available. For example, the Ethernet or point-to-point protocols. They could add these services to their product offering - especially services for ISPs."
"The current reporting capability needs to be parsed and edited to be appreciated by leadership."
"It should be user-friendly from an implementation point of view. Its setup is a little bit difficult."
"It would help if they were easier to deploy, without needing more technical people. It would be nice if we could just give basic information, how to connect, and that would be all, while the rest of the setup could be done remotely."
"The improvement could come from better monitoring of traffic data in and out of the firewall."
"The antivirus is less effective than its competitors' antivirus. The antivirus is good, but in other firewalls, such as Palo Alto, it's quite effective. Check Point should provide more output. Sometimes it provides comprehensive information and sometimes it doesn't."
"This solution requires management software that is sold separately; it's actually a different appliance altogether."
"Although the GUI is simple to use and fairly comprehensive, more support via CLI would be beneficial for bulk operations."
"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."
"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."
"We are not happy with Palo Alto at all. It would be better if they provided more support for the firewall. We have a few pending issues with the configuration for each application. We cannot deploy them yet due to some support-related problems in the firewall. We have deployed a few policies for DNS spoofing and DNS attacks, but we could only block a few IP addresses through the policy. That's DNS security, and we have configured a few policies for DNS spoofing and more. URL categorization and URL filtering are not yet adequately maintained. For example, if you created a few rules in the rule-based configuration and made some rules downstairs, you will lose some of them if you give access upstairs. It's not giving us a proper solution for which route it is using. We need to apply the application-based policies and URL filtering-based policies. It creates more issues because we are not getting good support from the team."
"We have not taken Palo Alto's firewall management solution because it's too expensive and we don't feel it delivers significant value."
"The support could be improved. Palo Alto does not have a support team located in Bangladesh, and their support team operates from another location. Therefore, when we raise a ticket, it takes some time for them to respond, which can be problematic for us."
"I would like to see better third-party orchestration so that it is easier for the team to work with different products."
"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."
"If you enable SSL you will face a problem. The throughput of the firewall will be degraded. SSL is a big issue on all firewalls. All products suffer from issues with SSL, but Palo Alto firewalls suffer more from it."
"The scalability compared to other products is not good. You need to change the box whenever you want your number of connection sessions to increase."
More Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls Pricing and Cost Advice →
Check Point NGFW is ranked 5th in Firewalls with 275 reviews while Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is ranked 6th in Firewalls with 161 reviews. Check Point NGFW is rated 8.8, while Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is rated 8.6. 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 Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls writes "We get reports back from WildFire on a minute-by-minute basis". Check Point NGFW is most compared with Sophos XG, Netgate pfSense, Cisco Secure Firewall, Azure Firewall and OPNsense, whereas Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is most compared with Azure Firewall, Meraki MX, Sophos XG, Netgate pfSense and Cisco Secure Firewall. See our Check Point NGFW vs. Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls report.
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Hi, I would suggest going for Checkpoint, the suitability depends on your specific security needs, budget constraints, network infrastructure, Integration capabilities, cloud integration, compliance and reporting, user-friendly interface but the support and the specific behavior for some solutions for routing, networking balance or specific connectivity is better known constraints, Checkpoint Multiplatform support (Open Servers Solutions) The advantages in Palo Alto (SSL Decryption, Wildfire SandBox Integration, Scalability)
Hi, I would suggest going for Check Point.
I'm with Check Point now, for more than 2 years. IPS, threat prevention, antibot identification, and antivirus notification are up to the mark. Moreover, it has a friendly user interface where anyone can create policies and work on it.