We performed a comparison between Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls and Zscaler Internet Access 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 most valuable feature of FortiGate is FortiView which provides proactive monitoring."
"Whenever I need something, Fortinet improves and updates the software for me."
"Fortinet has a very good solution for Secure SD-WAN. One very good feature is that they have robust and simple FortiOS through which they provide all solutions. That's their strength. There's not much complexity involved with the Secure SD-WAN solution of Fortinet as compared to Cisco's solution, which has a lot of flexibility but complexity also comes with that flexibility."
"It enables our organization to become more productive. Also, it protects our NEtWare from viruses and malware."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiGate are the APIs. They are the most widely known."
"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."
"The multi-tenancy feature is most valuable. It integrates very well with FortiManager and FortiAnalyzer."
"The most valuable feature is the interface, which is very user friendly. We are utilizing most of the features, like content filtering. The firewall is powerful."
"The GUI is simple and the solution is straightforward."
"The most important thing is that it's really user-friendly. I have almost stopped using the CLI because I like the graphical interface. You can do whatever you want on a single screen, including all the configuration and implementation, using Panorama. You don't have to switch from one place to another."
"Provision of quality training material and the reporting is very good."
"The most valuable aspect of this solution is pre-sales and post-sales because of the support and relationship building."
"The first time I came across these firewalls, what surprised me the most was their web user interface. It is complete and gives you a lot of information. You can do 80% of the things related to your network and firewall through the web UI. In some of the other devices, the UI is not as complete. App-ID is also very valuable in customer networks. When you're seeing a lot of traffic in your network, you can see in your web UI which users have the applications that are consuming the most bandwidth. You have a broad context, which is very good."
"Security is the biggest thing nowadays, including threat response, incident response, and root cause. We found that a lot of the logging and dashboard capabilities offered by Palo Alto fill the missing skill gap that you run up against. It makes it easier for our tier-two staff to get involved in some of the deeper root cause analysis. The dashboards, logs, and reports make it easier for our staff to dive right in and not get lost in what tools they should use. It's easy because they're all right there."
"We have found the DPI ability to understand web applications and build access rules on web application categories first to be a great feature."
"DNS Security is a good feature because, in the real world with web threats, you can block all web threats and bad sites. DNS Security helps to prevent those threats. It's also very helpful with Zero-day attacks because DNS Security blocks all DNS requests before any antivirus would know that such requests contain a virus or a threat to your PC or your network."
"We use ZIA for outbound internet connectivity. The internet traffic of on-prem users will be directed to the ZIA cloud for security checks and web filtering."
"Zscaler Web Security protects our users in remote locations from internet threats - even if they are not connected to our network."
"Zscaler Internet Access's roaming user feature is most valuable and is much better compared to other secure web gateways."
"The solution offers a distributed organization to master and to control all of the endpoints."
"One on the main benefits is protection all time from anywhere."
"Tech support is good."
"The most valuable feature is bandwidth control."
"The users are at different locations, and Zscaler helps us to put the organization's central security controls on these roaming users."
"There are some cloud-based features that could be much more flexible than they currently are."
"It's my understanding that more of the current generation features could be brought in. There could be more integration with EDRs, for example."
"The solution could be more user friendly."
"Fortinet FortiGate could improve the user interface. There should be more functionality and options through the GUI."
"If I had any criticism that I would give FortiGate, it would be that they need to stop changing their logging format. Every time we do a firmware upgrade, it is a massive issue on the SIM. Parsers have to be rebuilt. Even the FortiGate guys came in and said that they don't play well in the sandbox."
"It is stable, but its stability can be improved."
"Scalability is one of the disadvantages. When it comes to scalability, you have to actually change the box. If you want to upgrade it, you need to actually change the existing box and probably you take the system off to other sites."
"It should have a better pricing plan. It is too expensive. It should also have a more granular view of the attack. I don't have FortiAnalyzer, and it is difficult for me to have a complete view when there is an attack on my server."
"This is a difficult product to manage, so the administrator needs to have a good knowledge of it, otherwise, they will not be able to handle it properly."
"There is a web-based GUI to do management, but you need to know how the machine or firewall operates. There are hundreds of different menus and options. I have used other firewalls before. Just implementing or designing a policy with Palo Alto, if you want a certain port to be open to different IP addresses, then that could take 20 to 25 clicks. That is just testing it out. It is quite complex to do. Whereas, with other places, you tell it, "Okay, I want this specific port open and this IP address to have access to it." That was it. However, not with Palo Alto, which is definitely more complex."
"The advanced manual protection needs to be improved a little bit because they used to make a cloud manual analysis for the cloud."
"The cost has room for improvement."
"Support should be improved, wait times can be long."
"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."
"The built-in machine learning features provide some automation, but I think there should be an option for manual review because nothing replaces the human eye."
"In terms of what could be improved, comparatively the price is very high. That would be the one thing."
"Sometimes, support isn't available."
"Zscaler Internet Access could improve by adding a VPN feature."
"The tool should improve the predefined dictionaries."
"What could be improved in Zscaler Internet Access is its price. It could be cheaper."
"The reporting functionality could be a bit easier to use. There is a reporting function, but it's quite hard to do any good reporting, from a user-management perspective. For example, if a department manager wants to know how his department is using the web, there is a way to get the data, but it's quite cumbersome to get it and show it well. And that's true for comparing between departments."
"The pricing is an issue. It is expensive if you have all of your users in the same location. It is expensive compared to other firewalls on the market."
"They should enhance the audit reporting feature."
"The solution can be improved by advancing some of the newer technologies such as the DLP feature, and adding email security."
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Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is ranked 6th in Firewalls with 161 reviews while Zscaler Internet Access is ranked 2nd in Secure Web Gateways (SWG) with 46 reviews. Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is rated 8.6, while Zscaler Internet Access is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls writes "We get reports back from WildFire on a minute-by-minute basis". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Zscaler Internet Access writes "Provides integrated CASB and file sandboxing but could be less expensive ". Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is most compared with Check Point NGFW, Azure Firewall, Meraki MX, Sophos XG and Netgate pfSense, whereas Zscaler Internet Access is most compared with Cisco Umbrella, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, Netskope , Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks and Appgate SDP. See our Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls vs. Zscaler Internet Access report.
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