Check Point NGFW vs ShieldX comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Check Point NGFW and ShieldX based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Netgate, Fortinet, OPNsense and others in Firewalls.
To learn more, read our detailed Firewalls Report (Updated: March 2024).
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"We are using the FortiGate 100D series. VPN, firewall, anti-malware, OTM, and intrusion prevention are useful features.""The interface is very user-friendly and I like it very much.""The web filtering feature and the intrusion protection system are the most valuable. It is a resilient appliance. I never had an issue with it in terms of any security breaches.""​Easy to implement, and it is also reliable.​""The email protection and VPN features are the most valuable.""It does a lot for you for intrusion protection and as an antivirus. The threat management bundle is worth the money. You don't need another company to monitor your web traffic for you. You can do everything yourself on the firewall. You restrict your own black list for people on the firewall. You don't need to pay some other company for another product to do that for you. The firewall can do that for you. So, it's an easy-to-use product for people to be independent. They don't need to rely on other vendors to do what the firewall can do. They can do everything.""The CLI and GUI do a good job of putting a lot at your fingertips.""Centralized monitoring, policy management, and virtualized appliances allow us to take control over our public and private infrastructure."

More Fortinet FortiGate Pros →

"One ability that Check Point has is that it is the first to provide us with the ability to use identities instead of using the traditional IP-based format, which allows way more flexibility in what we can do with the rule base.""The most valuable features are the security blades and the ease of managing the policies, searching log for events, and correlating them.""It is easy to configure and it is a valuable antivirus protection. I especially like the IPS feature of this product.""Check Point NGFW is easy to use, flexible and provides good performance. The security of the product is excellent, we do not have to do a lot of patching or upgrades because of vulnerabilities.""It provides a central station where it is very easy to deploy our firewall policy in one click to many firewalls. This is one of the leading perks. It saves time by having one central station because I can deploy the same kind of policy to many firewalls at once.""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.""It creates granular security policies based on users or groups to identify, block or limit the usage of web applications.""Now we can add application signature in the same rule base & don't have to create a different policy for that."

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"The Adaptive Intention Engine is fantastic. It allows us to develop security policies using the language of our internal customers. It's machine-learning applied to security workflows. That allows us to much more easily construct the policies that will protect those workflows.""...It takes the exact same policies that you would apply to your on-premise environment and enables you to simply apply them to the cloud. It becomes one policy for both on-prem and for the cloud.""ShieldX has been designed from the very beginning to work well in cloud environments. It understands autoscaling, automation, and auto-configuration. These are the things which are important in today's operating environment.""The most valuable feature is the automatic scaling. With its microservices, it scales both up and down, depending on traffic and throughput.""The UI was also one of the huge selling points. My web development manager was blown away with the detail and the granularity that you can get out of the UI. It is a very strong and informative UI, with the amount of data it provides.""We were able to see what devices are talking to each other, giving us more visibility.""It has helped us tighten our security posture. Now, staff can only access things that they should be accessing."

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Cons
"The reporting in Fortinet FortiGate could improve. Customers are having to purchase additional reporting components. When I have used the Sophos solution it is a complete solution, in Fortinet FortiGate you have to use additional tools to have the features needed.""There are some tiny bugs that sometimes affect the operations. In the past revision of it, there was a bug. Because of the bug, we had to downgrade the version. It happened only with the last revision.""There are some license issues. Not every feature must have a separate license. There must be some of kind synergy between the license so we don't have to pay for every individual license that we would like to have.""They sometimes hide some features and if you want to enable them, you have to go in the CLI, enable the feature and configure it through the CLI. Customers, typically, like everything to be done by the GUI.""In the future, I would like to see improvements made to cloud-based management.""FortiGate is really good. We have been using it for quite some time. Initially, when we started off, we had around 70 plus devices of FortiGate, but then Check Point and Palo Alto took over the place. From the product perspective, there are no issues, but from the account perspective, we have had issues. Fortinet's presence in our company is very less. I don't see any Fortinet account managers talking to us, and that presence has diluted in the last two and a half or three years. We have close to 1,500 firewalls. Out of these, 60% of firewalls are from Palo Alto, and a few firewalls are from Check Point. FortiGate firewalls are very less now. It is not because of the product; it is because of the relationship. I don't think they had a good relationship with us, and there was some kind of disconnect for a very long time. The relationship between their accounts team and my leadership team seems to be the reason for phasing out FortiGate.""The biggest "gotcha" is that if the client purchases what they call the UTM shared bundle, which has unified threat management on both, it's not as easy to manage if you have more than one firewall.""Performance and technical support are the main issues with this solution."

More Fortinet FortiGate Cons →

"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.""One of the biggest disappointments is the GUI.""The exterior of the physical device can be improved with the use of a display and not just simple lights.""The technical support is really poor. We have to wait for approximately 48 hours sometimes for a simple solution.""Although the GUI is simple to use and fairly comprehensive, more support via CLI would be beneficial for bulk operations.""For the next release, we would like to have better ruleset cleanup tools that are already included.""SmartEvent Settings and Policy GUI, and the rest of external apps should be improved.""There is room for enhancement in the support system in India."

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"I would like better reports and in-depth reporting.""There should be a bit more customer care, with regular review meetings on it or regular reports. It would be nice to have a quarterly or biannual review of what ShieldX has blocked.""With any kind of tool like ShieldX, where you're in the cloud instead of a traditional firewall, you're using CPU resources in those environments to provide the protection. So there's a cost associated with CPU resources. I'm pressing upon them to make the product much more efficient and use less CPUs to do the same thing.""We are having some issues with their LDAP and integrating it with the Active Directory. We can't seem to set it up.""They need to be consistent in performance and capabilities over time, given the fact that this is new and I want to see where this goes in the next year or so. As the vendor continues to evolve and add future functionality, we want to make sure that we are still keeping up with the integrations, etc. Time will be the key factor here. The proper support for some of the latest technologies, Docker containers, etc. They need to keep up with threat landscape, so we will see how the security get layered. This is what we are going to be keeping an eye on."

More ShieldX Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "Fortinet has one or two license types, and the VPN numbers are only limited by the hardware chassis make."
  • "These boxes are not that expensive compared to what they can do, their functionality, and the reporting you receive. Fortinet licensing is straightforward and less confusing compared to Cisco."
  • "Go for long term pricing negotiated at the time of purchase."
  • "Work through partners for the best pricing."
  • "The value is the capability of having multiple services with one unique license, not having the limitation per user licensing schema, like other vendors."
  • "Easy to understand licensing requirements."
  • "​We saved a bundle by not needing all the past appliances from an NGFW.​"
  • "The cost is too high... They have to focus on more features with less cost for the customer. If you see the market, where it's going, there are a lot of players offering more features for less cost."
  • More Fortinet FortiGate Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "I don't think the product's pricing is a good value. I feel it's very overpriced. I feel a lot of the features for a next gen firewall are there. But I feel it's overpriced, because of the stability issues. As far as support goes, I really can't speak to direct Check Point support, but the third-party was pretty terrible... As far as the licensing goes, it's pretty complex. If anybody was to purchase the Check Point product, definitely make sure they have an account rep come on site, and explain it line by line, what each thing is. It's not straightforward. It's very convoluted. There's no way you could just figure it out by looking at it."
  • "Check Point solutions are very expensive here. They're good, but they're expensive... Check Point is only useful for customers that have a big IT budget."
  • "The price is high in comparison to other solutions."
  • "We pay $5,000-$6,000 a year."
  • "Maybe the pricing is a bit high but you get the durability and the duration."
  • "Licensing issues may be confusing at times."
  • "It is quite an expensive product, although security is a top priority."
  • "This product is not cheap and there are additional costs that depend on what model or package that you buy."
  • More Check Point NGFW Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "ShieldX ensures that we can have the separation needed for our environment to avoid drastically increasing the cost on the licensing side. From this perspective, it's been very positive and helpful."
  • "We are very happy with the pricing and licensing. It's about getting a site-wide license. One of the challenges that we've had with our previous vendor had been the cost of licensing."
  • "We are actually expecting our costs to drop in the coming year, but it is just a matter of the licensing expiring. That is going to happen in the next six months or so. Then, we will start to see a decrease in overall spend."
  • "Security policies are now applied as applications are going up. Because it's automated, we don't have the three to four week delay. The insertion of applications in the cloud for us dropped from an average of three to four weeks to a couple of days."
  • "ShieldX also enables us to migrate to cloud environments faster. That is an important part of it for sure because it takes the exact same policies that we would apply to our on-premise environment and enables us to simply apply them to the cloud. It becomes one policy for both on-prem and for the cloud."
  • "For other security professions who are looking for something which is low in cost that does microsegmentation, they should look at ShieldX. It might not be the big name out there, but it does everything that you are looking for in microsegmentation at a very low price."
  • "For a three-year deal we paid £55,000 plus tax... But, and this is a big "but," this was over two years ago. ShieldX had only just hit the market. We were the first company in Europe to buy ShieldX."
  • More ShieldX Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer: When you compare these firewalls you can identify them with different features, advantages, practices and usage at… more »
    Top Answer:From my experience regarding both the Sophos and FortiGate firewalls, I personally would rather use FortiGate. I know… more »
    Top Answer:As a solution, Sophos UTM offers a lot of functionality, it scales well, and the stability and performance are quite… more »
    Top Answer:I have experience on both from Disti and channel experience. Please find below my comments (nothing new as such)… more »
    Top Answer:Azure Firewall is easy to use and provides excellent support. Valuable features include integration into the overall… more »
    Top Answer:Check Point NGFW provides essential security, featuring no-obligation access for secure connections, strong intrusion… more »
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    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    FortiGate 60b, FortiGate 60c, FortiGate 80c, FortiGate 50b, FortiGate 200b, FortiGate 110c, FortiGate
    Check Point NG Firewall, Check Point Next Generation Firewall
    APEIRO, ShieldX APEIRO
    Learn More
    Overview

    Fortinet FortiGate enhances network security, prevents unauthorized access, and offers robust firewall protection. Valued features include advanced threat protection, reliable performance, and a user-friendly interface. It improves efficiency, streamlines processes, and boosts collaboration, providing valuable insights for informed decision-making and growth.

    Check Point NGFW is a next generation firewall that enables safe usage of internet applications by blocking malicious applications and unblocking safe applications. Check Point NGFW, which uses deep packet inspection to identify and control applications, has features such as application and user control and integrated intrusion prevention (IPS), as well as more advanced malware prevention capabilities like sandboxing.

    Check Point NGFW includes 23 firewall models optimized for running all threat prevention technologies simultaneously, including full SSL traffic inspection, without compromising on security or performance.

    Benefits of Check Point's Next Generation Firewall

    • Robust security: Check Point NGFW delivers the best possible threat prevention with SandBlast Zero Day protection. The SandBlast protection agent constantly inspects passing network traffic for exploits and vulnerabilities. Suspicious files are then emulated in a virtual sandbox in order to detect and report malicious behavior.

    • Security at hyperscale: On-demand hyperscale threat prevention performance provides cloud level expansion and resiliency on premises.

    • Unified management: Check Point's SmartConsole makes it easy to manage and configure network security environments and policies. With the SmartConsole, users can manage all the firewall gateways and access logs and install databases from one location. Unified management control across the network increases the efficiency of security operations and reduces IT costs.
    • Continuous logging: Check Point NGFW’s Threat Management feature detects vulnerabilities and logs them. Using the logged data, users can easily create and implement efficient security policies.

    • Remote access: The remote access VPN provides a seamless connection for remote users.

    Check Point NGFW is suitable for organizations of all sizes, from small businesses to larger enterprises.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Check Point NGFW stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its intrusion prevention feature as well as its centralized management, which makes it very easy to deploy firewall policies to many firewalls with one click.

    Shivani J., a network security administrator, writes, "Check Point has a lot of features. The ones I love are the antivirus, intrusion prevention, and data loss prevention."

    G., a network administrator at Secretaría de Finanzas de Aguascalientes, writes, “Within the organization, the inspection of packages has given us great help in detecting traffic that may be a threat to the institution. The configuration of policies has allowed us to maintain control of access and users for each institution that is incorporated into our headquarters.”

    Arun J., a senior network engineer, notes, “The nicest feature is the centralized management of multiple firewalls. With the centralized management, we can easily use and operate multiple firewalls as well as create a diagram of them.”

    The ShieldX Elastic Security Platform dynamically scales to deliver comprehensive and consistent controls to protect data centers, cloud infrastructure, applications and data no matter where they are or where they go to make the cloud more secure than on-premise deployments. Our frictionless approach leverages agentless technology as well as the ShieldX Adaptive Intention Engine which autonomously translates and enforces intention into a set of comprehensive controls - microsegmentation, firewall, IPS and more - making security the easiest thing you do in the cloud.

    Sample Customers
    1. Amazon Web Services 2. Microsoft 3. IBM 4. Cisco 5. Dell 6. HP 7. Oracle 8. Verizon 9. AT&T 10. T-Mobile 11. Sprint 12. Vodafone 13. Orange 14. BT Group 15. Telstra 16. Deutsche Telekom 17. Comcast 18. Time Warner Cable 19. CenturyLink 20. NTT Communications 21. Tata Communications 22. SoftBank 23. China Mobile 24. Singtel 25. Telus 26. Rogers Communications 27. Bell Canada 28. Telkom Indonesia 29. Telkom South Africa 30. Telmex 31. Telia Company 32. Telkom Kenya
    Control Southern, Optimal Media
    Iowa State University
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Comms Service Provider16%
    Computer Software Company9%
    Financial Services Firm8%
    Manufacturing Company7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization20%
    Computer Software Company15%
    Comms Service Provider8%
    Manufacturing Company6%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm22%
    Computer Software Company15%
    Comms Service Provider7%
    Manufacturing Company6%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization49%
    Computer Software Company8%
    Financial Services Firm5%
    Comms Service Provider5%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company15%
    Retailer15%
    Financial Services Firm10%
    Wholesaler/Distributor6%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business48%
    Midsize Enterprise23%
    Large Enterprise30%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business27%
    Midsize Enterprise32%
    Large Enterprise41%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business32%
    Midsize Enterprise19%
    Large Enterprise49%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business14%
    Midsize Enterprise57%
    Large Enterprise28%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business26%
    Midsize Enterprise9%
    Large Enterprise65%
    Buyer's Guide
    Firewalls
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Netgate, Fortinet, OPNsense and others in Firewalls. Updated: March 2024.
    765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Check Point NGFW is ranked 5th in Firewalls with 275 reviews while ShieldX is ranked 46th in Firewalls. Check Point NGFW is rated 8.8, while ShieldX is rated 9.2. 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 ShieldX writes "Proactively monitors, blocks, and reports what it has blocked; and self-updates meaning there is zero maintenance". Check Point NGFW is most compared with Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Sophos XG, Netgate pfSense, Cisco Secure Firewall and Azure Firewall, whereas ShieldX is most compared with .

    See our list of best Firewalls vendors.

    We monitor all Firewalls reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.