We performed a comparison between Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls and WatchGuard Firebox 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 pipe filter application is an outstanding feature."
"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."
"It's an easy solution to set up."
"The reporting and monitoring are very good."
"This is a quality product with ok support, and it is better than the competition we've tried."
"We've found the solution to be pretty stable."
"Fortinet FortiGate is a scalable solution."
"The wireless control is helpful."
"I typically get involved with it when it comes to audit and compliance and having to gather evidence of those firewalls, routers, and rule sets. The evidence that I typically need is there."
"It is critical that Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls embeds machine learning in the core of the firewall to provide inline, real-time attack prevention. In my environments, we have an integration with a third-party vendor. As soon as there is new information about new threats and the destination that they are trying to reach on any of our network devices, that traffic will be stopped."
"It has a solid network security with some robust tools. We can block unexpected attacks, especially zero-day attacks. Since they use the Pan-OS engine, they can collect attacks from all over the world and analyze them. They can then protect against zero-day attacks and unexpected attacks."
"The user ID, Wildfire, UI, and management configuration are all great features."
"It worked fine normally."
"This solution not only provides better security than flat VLAN segments but allows easy movement through the lifecycle of the server."
"It has a unique approach to packet processing. It has single-pass architecture. We can easily perform policy lookups, application decoding, and integration or merging. This can be all done with a single pass. It effectively reduces the amount of processing required to perform multiple actions. This is the main advantage of using Palo Alto."
"They have a good system operator in the firewalls and it provides many tools that they can use to protect their networks."
"Simple to move settings between WatchGuard boxes."
"Efficient to setup, run, and maintain. Saving man hours and cost in the process."
"The ports that I have assigned appear to be unattainable to outside 'mal-actors,' unless they have an address registered on the internet that this thing is expecting. That's a layer of security."
"All of the features have been valuable. There's nothing on my M270 that I'm not using. If you have remote access, you can see how many users are coming from the outside world to be connected to the systems, through the virus systems that we have behind the firewall, in order to gain access to their files and do their work. We can also see how long they stay online and whether these connections are closed forcefully or for any other reasons, such as a glitch or some kind of misbehavior, to see if internet traffic is optimized and if that particular traffic is under company policies, concerning which websites were visited."
"The most valuable feature of WatchGuard Firebox is the VPN. It's easy to connect to the VPN."
"If you just plan to use WatchGuard Firebox in your office and not publicly, then it is okay to purchase it. With WatchGuard Firebox, you can manage your users and permissions while also taking care of the basic setup phase in your office."
"The most valuable feature is the NAT-ing, the IP addresses... We can direct the traffic where it needs to go. We can control the traffic."
"There are no problems with the technical support. If a problem occurs it gets resolved immediately with our technical support partners."
"Backup can be improved."
"A lack of integration between our data centers."
"While FortiGate is cheaper than most other solutions, we're seeing increased license renewal costs. Most of our clients are asking for more significant discounts because the price is going up."
"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."
"The solution needs to improve its integration with cybersecurity."
"Fortinet doesn't provide multiple virtual firewalls which would facilitate end users and customers."
"Fortigate's hardware capacities could be improved."
"Due to its higher cost, Fortinet FortiGate can lead to increased operational expenses."
"In the last three years at least, they have been lagging behind their competitors. The main issue is the support that we can get... You have to wait for them to get back to you and sometimes it's random. And the biggest problem I have is that you have to wait hours on the line when you're calling them to get a hold of the next available engineer."
"Overall it is good. It is reliable and easy to understand. However, the monitoring feature could be improved."
"The advanced manual protection needs to be improved a little bit because they used to make a cloud manual analysis for the cloud."
"Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls don't provide a unified platform that natively integrates all security capabilities. It's missing some features for geofencing and understanding locations."
"Its stability can be better. Their technical response from the support side can also be better."
"The analytics could be improved."
"Palo Alto keeps coming out with antivirus and malware updates. When we have to integrate those updates we face some problems with the cloud platform, not the on-prem setup. The device works fine, but sometimes the sync doesn't happen on time."
"For an upcoming release, they could improve on the way to build security rules per user."
"The scalability of the solution needs improvement."
"What could use some significant improvement in WatchGuard Firebox would be its interface and policy management. An additional feature I'd like to see in the next release of WatchGuard Firebox is the ability to modify an existing policy instead of having to recreate a policy when changes are necessary. At the moment, there's no possibility to modify the policy. You have to delete the policy and recreate it."
"We use WatchGuard to manage our failover for internet. If a primary internet goes down, it does a failover to the secondary the internet. However, what it doesn't do so well is that if the primary internet has a lot of latency but it's not completely down, it doesn't do a failover to the backup in a timely manner."
"The level of support from WatchGuard is not as good."
"The solution can improve by adding a feature to tag a MAC address of a computer system in the policy and more IP configuration settings."
"Cloud-based central administration of all devices from one point would be nice"
"When working with WatchGuard, specifically in configuring Panda Security on the portal for the first time, it was challenging for me."
"It's sometimes not easy to understand and can require specialist assistance."
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Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is ranked 6th in Firewalls with 161 reviews while WatchGuard Firebox is ranked 13th in Firewalls with 78 reviews. Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is rated 8.6, while WatchGuard Firebox is rated 8.6. 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 WatchGuard Firebox writes "Offers a streamlined deployment, intuitive interface and robust security features". Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is most compared with Check Point NGFW, Azure Firewall, Meraki MX, Sophos XG and SonicWall NSa, whereas WatchGuard Firebox is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Sophos XG, OPNsense, SonicWall TZ and Stormshield Network Security. See our Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls vs. WatchGuard Firebox report.
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