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."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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
Earn 20 points
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 .
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