Our security team tested various firewalls and it came down to FortiGate and Palo Alto and they found Palo Alto was quite suitable for the network.

Beyond Palo Alto, we evaluated two or three other products. Two of them that I can recall are Fortinet and the Microsoft Azure Firewall.

We did some extensive reviews and some extensive testing and what we found is that for the price, Palo Alto gave us the best options. It had the best set of security features. It wasn't the cheapest product but it was the best solution that fit our requirements.

I have used Juniper. Palo Alto’s next-generation features are better than Juniper’s.

Palo Alto’s compatibility and integrations are better than Juniper's. Zscalrer’s Zero Trust solution is better than Palo Alto’s. We recommend Palo Alto over Fortinet, Juniper, or Check Point. Palo Alto is less complicated.

We evaluated quite a few solutions before choosing Palo Alto Networks VM-Series.

We also evaluated Check Point, Fortinet, and Azure Firewall. We needed a single point to manage the on-premises firewall and cloud firewall. Our focus was simplicity without losing the security.

Fortinet is growing in the industry. Many companies in Chile are adopting this brand. Our company has not yet adopted this solution.  Our maintenance teams don't know this technology, which would have been a problem.

Check Point is a good brand. Their product is robust, but we found an issue in using their firewall manager with the hybrid architecture like ours, where we have both on-premises and on-cloud deployments.

Both are also a leader in Gartner Quadrant and Forrester together with Palo Alto.

Azure Firewall needs to improve.

When compared with FortiGate, Palo Alto has more security products. However, Palo Alto did not publish the security profile for the end-users or partners. They must explain to their end users why they are better than FortiGate.

We evaluated FortiGate, Cisco, and the stuff that we are using. Compared to other products, we found it a very useful part of our compliance requirements and liked its format on the graphical interface. It is also a more secure firewall compared to other existing ones in the market. Based on our evaluation, it matched our compliance requirements.

Cisco is pretty complex in nature to deploy. It is helpful to have a skilled person with at least two years of experience. 

We considered using Cisco ASA, but we chose Palo Alto because it can also act as a proxy for your hub site. Palo Alto is more advanced than the Cisco solution.

For on-premise, we evaluated Check Point and Fortinet.

We have worked with firewalls like Sophos, FortiGate, and Cisco ASA. We have dealt with almost all of the vendors but at this point, our experience with Palo Alto has been the best one. Palo Alto has been doing what it claims to do, whereas the other vendors' products have various shortcomings.

For example, some vendors do not have the performance that they claim in terms of throughput. Sometimes, the user interface is complex, or the device needs to restart whenever you make changes. With Palo Alto, it's simple to use and easy to get things done.

We also evaluated Fortinet and some other competitors.

We chose Palo Alto because we had institutional experience and knowledge that we could bring over.

I make recommendations for clients so I have to be familiar with the firewalls that I work with. In essence, I evaluate them all the time.  

I work from home and I have two Cisco firewalls. I have a Fortinet. I have the Palo Alto 500 and I have a Palo Alto 5201. I have a Sophos. My F5 is out on loan. I usually have about eight or nine firewalls on hand. I never go to a client without firing up a firewall that I am going to recommend, testing it, and getting my fingers dirty again to make sure I have it fresh in my mind. I know my firewalls.  

The VM-Series are nice because you can push them into the cloud. The other nice thing is whether you are running a VM-Series or the PA-Series, we can manage it with one console. Not without hiccups, but it works really well. Not only that, we can push other systems out there. For instance, for VMware, we are pushing Prisma out to them. VMware and the Palo Alto VM-Series do really well with Prisma. The issue I have with it is — and this is where Palo Alto and I are going to disagree — they are not as good at SASE (Secure Access Service Edge). I do not care what Palo Alto says. They do a poor job of it and other products do it better.  

Palo Alto claims it is SASE capable, but even Gartner says that it is not. Gartner usually has the opinion that favors those who pay the most, and Palo Alto pays them well. So when Gartner even questions their Secure Access Service Edge, it is an issue. That is one of those places where you want the leader in the field.  

From my hands-on experience, Fortinet's secure access service edge just takes SASE hands down.  

We looked at Palo Alto, Check Point, Fortinet, and some other vendors.

We chose Palo Alto because its features, especially its advanced features from the IDS and IPS. We were existing customers with Palo Alto from the on-premise side along with the integration aspects of its hardware.

We evaluated VanGuard for their Next-Generation Firewall.

We chose between Check Point and Palo Alto for their support teams. Check Point is very bad for support. We switched from Check Point to Palo Alto.

We also evaluated Fortinet, but Palo Alto is sort of the new up and coming product. There were a lot of good recommendations from other security experts.

In addition, Palo Alto is easier to configure when you are building policies on applications. 

The solution is cost effective in comparison to others. 

When I joined the company, the VM-Series firewall was already in-place.

We evaluated Check Point, Fortinet, and others.

In each case, it depends on the expectations of the customer. 

I have worked with Fortinet, Cisco, and Check Point. However, once I began to work with the Palo Alto Networks, it became my preference for cyber security.

Compared to Cisco, Palo Alto is a much better product.

We had a look at Check Point firewalls, as well as Huawei. 

• With Check Point, it was a feature-rich product, but it was a bit more expensive. 
• With Huawei, it was not really a valuable solution or as advanced as the other two, so we discounted them straight away.