We performed a comparison between Azure Firewall and Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Based on the parameters we compared, while Azure Firewall is certainly a solid option, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is equally good. Users of both products have been happy with the ROI results. What differentiates the two products is the stark difference in pricing, which may ultimately sway an organization’s purchasing decision.
"From the firewall perspective, the rules and policies are very sufficient and easy to use."
"I appreciate FortiGate's flexibility, which allows for centralized management through FortiManager."
"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."
"Some of the valuable features are the firewall, IPS, web filter, and gateway capabilities. Additionally, it is easy to use and flexible."
"Provides good firewall security and has great VPN features."
"The CLI and GUI do a good job of putting a lot at your fingertips."
"The management console is pretty simple, so anyone who understands networking can initially deploy the solution."
"The reporting you receive out of this appliance is excellent. You will not need an external management system."
"It provided ease of maintenance. If a new firewall was needed, we only had to run the pipelines for this. So, the maintenance was very easy."
"It's helped us improve our security posture."
"Microsoft's technical support is very good. They're quite knowledgable and responsive."
"I like its order management feature. It doesn't have the kind of threat intelligence that Palo Alto has, but the order management makes it much simpler to know the difference."
"Among the most valuable features are the DDoS protection that protects your virtual machines, the threat intelligence, and traffic filtering."
"I think that one of the best features is definitely the premium version, along with the IDPs in terms of the intrusion detection and prevention system."
"Great security and connectivity."
"The most valuable feature is the integration into the overall cloud platform."
"Palo Alto NGFW’s unified platform has helped our customers eliminate security holes. With a unified platform, customers can deploy the NG Firewall both in the data center edge, inside the data center, and in the product/public cloud environments. They have the same user interfaces and platform, so they can be maintained by a single unified platform called Panorama. Customers can use Palo Alto Network NG Firewalls in all the places where they need to protect their environments. This helps to decrease security holes."
"The key aspect of this solution that provides the most value is its next-gen capabilities, which represented a significant change for us."
"Some of the valuable features in this solution are traffic monitoring, GUI functionality, and it very easy to troubleshoot if there is any problem that happens."
"In my opinion, Palo Alto has consistently been one of the best firewalls for enterprise security."
"The most valuable feature is advanced URL filtering. Its prevention capabilities and DNS security are also valuable. It pinpoints any suspicious activities and also prevents the users from doing certain things."
"Ability to log each and every application."
"There are plenty of features available in this solution, such as attack blocker and spam blocker. Additionally, it is very robust and in-depth."
"The sandboxing is valuable and they are frequently updating their signature database. We get new updates every five minutes. That makes it easy to detect new and unknown attacks."
"They are doing good, but they can improve the distributor assignment. The availability of the product and the timeline of delivery are the main things. The distribution should be swift, and the distributor should not reach out to end customers directly. They should work as a distributor. There should also be one more local distributor. Currently, there is only one distributor in Pakistan, and the rest of them are in UAE. It is difficult to work with only one distributor. Sometimes, you don't get along with the same distributor, and that's why they should have one more distributor. Their licensing should also be improved. The activation or renewal of the product should be done from the date of renewal, not from the date on which the license expired."
"A lack of integration between our data centers."
"One of the problems I was having was with user mapping, and it is an issue for which I have escalated tickets with Fortinet support."
"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."
"The pricing could always be better."
"The user interface could be improved to make it less confusing and easier to set up."
"There are a lot of bugs I have found in the solution and it is difficult to upgrade. These areas need improvement."
"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."
"There is room for further integration of AI into the system."
"Azure Firewall should have a free trial version for new users so that they can evaluate it before deploying it."
"The solution doesn't offer the same capabilities of Fortinet. It should offer intrusion prevention and advance filtering. These are two very useful features offered on Fortinet that Azure lacks."
"This solution is not mature when it comes to handling perimeter traffic like internet browsing."
"There are a number of things that need to be simplified, but it's mostly costs. It needs to be simplified because it's pretty expensive."
"The solution should incorporate features similar to competitors like split tunneling."
"It would be nice to be able to create groupings for servers and offer groups of IP addresses."
"The development area and QA area could be improved. With those improvements, we can improve projects and take even less time to implement them."
"Technical support could be faster."
"There has been a recent change in the graphical interface. For the monitoring part, they could have a better UI."
"The cloud could be improved. I would like to have more visibility of the vulnerabilities of the network as well."
"The solution could be more cost-effective."
"I would like to see some Machine Learning because I have observed new types of attacks that are able to bypass existing security rules."
"The only problem that I see with the Palo Alto NGFW being an all-in-one appliance is that because of the different features that are being put into a single appliance, the OS tends to be beefier. Over the eight years, we have seen that the number of features or analyses being put into the appliance itself has a tendency to slow down the appliance, especially at the time of bootup. So, any time we are doing maintenance work, the time required for the appliance to boot up and be fully functional again is significantly longer than eight years ago. They could find a way to make this all-in-one appliance faster."
"It's too expensive."
"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."
More Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls Pricing and Cost Advice →
Azure Firewall is ranked 21st in Firewalls with 33 reviews while Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is ranked 6th in Firewalls with 162 reviews. Azure Firewall is rated 7.2, while Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Azure Firewall writes "Easy to use and configure but could be more robust". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls writes "We get reports back from WildFire on a minute-by-minute basis". Azure Firewall is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate-VM, Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Palo Alto Networks VM-Series, Check Point NGFW and Cisco Secure Firewall, whereas Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is most compared with Check Point NGFW, Meraki MX, Sophos XG, Netgate pfSense and Cisco Secure Firewall. See our Azure Firewall vs. Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls report.
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