We performed a comparison between Meraki MX and ShieldX 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 multi-tenancy feature is most valuable. It integrates very well with FortiManager and FortiAnalyzer."
"The features that we have found most valuable are the SSL VPN and the User Portal."
"What's most important is the ease of use."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiGate are the ease of use and there are several operating systems that can include the hardware capacities. In the newer releases, the resources were more useful because they were included in the operating system."
"Fortinet FortiGate's ease of management is the most valuable feature."
"The IPsec tunnels are very easily created, and quite interoperable with devices from other vendors."
"From the firewall perspective, the rules and policies are very sufficient and easy to use."
"You can create multiple Virtual Domains (VDOMs), which are treated as separate firewall instances."
"It's flexible, easy to configure, and easy to manage."
"Deployment takes no more than one working day."
"It is very fast to implement."
"It has very good features; it's easy to use, configure, set up, and deploy."
"We work also with domain control (DC) from Microsoft or Amazon. We use a whole virtual appliance with Meraki."
"Site to Site VPN: The device can establish a VPN connection to multiple sites in a mesh environment in seconds, and without complex VPN knowledge."
"The dashboard is very intuitive and easy to understand."
"It prevents us from being hacked and delivers information about who and where the attack came from."
"The most valuable feature is the automatic scaling. With its microservices, it scales both up and down, depending on traffic and throughput."
"We were able to see what devices are talking to each other, giving us more visibility."
"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."
"It has helped us tighten our security posture. Now, staff can only access things that they should be accessing."
"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."
"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."
"MTBF: Hardware failure is more common when compared to SonicWall or Cisco ASA."
"They should offer special pricing to premium partners and customers."
"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."
"If they could extend their fabric towards other vendor environments for integration, that would be great."
"The feature which gives us a lot of pain is ASIC architecture."
"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."
"One issue that I have had is that sometimes I need to monitor the traffic, so I need to filter it according to the user and which user is using it the most. I experience a bottleneck most of the time, particularly at the peak time when the number of contracts and users are at maximum."
"There are a lot of bugs I have found in the solution and it is difficult to upgrade. These areas need improvement."
"Right now, you can postpone the update but eventually, if you don't do the update, it will install the updates automatically for you and that's something that is not working for me."
"MX can only be managed via a web interface, but I'm accustomed to using a CLI or a graphical interface. I would also like to see more reporting features. It doesn't provide enough information for me to know precisely about some clients."
"It would be great if the Meraki devices let us see, in real time, the internet demand on a single device."
"The IPS, the Intrusion Prevention System, can be improved."
"The product is quite complex to set up."
"We do not have account managers in our region for the solution. Some governments don't use the product since it is attached to the internet."
"I do not have the kind of feature I need for SSL decryption in Meraki MX. It would be great to see the SSL decryption feature in Meraki MX."
"Expensive licensing and firewall stops immediately working if the license is not renewed at expiration date."
"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."
"I would like better reports and in-depth reporting."
"We are having some issues with their LDAP and integrating it with the Active Directory. We can't seem to set it up."
"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."
"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
Meraki MX is ranked 2nd in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 57 reviews while ShieldX is ranked 46th in Firewalls. Meraki MX is rated 8.2, while ShieldX is rated 9.2. The top reviewer of Meraki MX writes "Cost-effective, simplified, easy to manage, and reliable with advanced security features and granular visibility". 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". Meraki MX is most compared with Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Cisco Secure Firewall, Sophos XG, SonicWall TZ and Netgate pfSense, whereas ShieldX is most compared with . See our Meraki MX vs. ShieldX report.
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