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.
"It brings us the ability to work from anywhere and has allowed us to work remotely without having to incur a lot of other costs. If we didn't have this type of solution, since we have so many on-prem services that are required, we would have likely lost money and been unable to deliver. We have a video services team who helped build the content for our sporting events. When you are watching a Leaf game and those swipes come by as well as the clips and things, those are all generated in-house. Without the ability to access our on-premise resources, we would have been dead in the water. So, the return on that is pretty impressive."
"I like that Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall is reliable. Support is also good."
"The Inline Mode configuration works really well, and ASA works very impressively."
"With the pandemic, people began working from home. That was a pretty big move, having all our users working from a home. More capacity needed to be added to our remote VPN. ASA did this very well."
"The features that are most valuable within the firewall are the IPS as well as the Unified Communications. We also really like the dynamic grouping."
"This solution made our organization more secure and gave us better control."
"The main thing that I love the most is its policy and objects. Whenever I try to give access to a user, I can create an object via group creation in the object fields. This way, I am not able to enter a user in the policy repeatedly."
"The initial setup was not complex."
"The solution is stable."
"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."
"Among the most valuable features are the DDoS protection that protects your virtual machines, the threat intelligence, and traffic filtering."
"The solution should be capable of self-scaling, which is one of the features we like about it."
"In terms of the reporting, it's beautiful. It integrates with Azure monitoring and with Azure policies. That piece is a big help. You can set governing policies and you can use the application firewall, as well as the Azure Firewall, to enforce those policies."
"All its features are good. That's why we recommend it."
"The initial setup is straightforward; Azure Firewall does not have a complex implementation process. It is very simple; you just need to enable the service within Azure. It does not require any maintenance because it is managed by Microsoft, that is, it is a fully managed service."
"It is easy for me to protect certain ports or even the IP addresses, as well as do whitelisting, blacklisting, and the FQDN when we want virtual machines connected and to protect certain websites."
"The packet level inspection is the most valuable feature. The traffic restriction features allow us to restrict the sub-features of any platform."
"It is pretty important to have embedded machine learning in the core of the firewall to provide inline, real-time attack prevention, because all these different attacks and threats are constantly evolving. So, you want to have something beyond just hard pass rules. You want it to learn as it is going along. Its machine learning seems pretty good. It seems like it is catching quite a few things."
"Mechanically, all firewalls work in a similar fashion, but what makes Palo Alto different is that it also has some of the threat hunt capabilities. It is a little bit better than other vendors."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"URL filtering and WildFire features are most valuable. It is very user-friendly. It is a very solid product, and it definitely works."
"It would be great if some of the load times were faster."
"When we first got it, we were doing individual configuring. Now, there is a way to manage from one location."
"There is limited data storage on the appliance itself. So, you need to ship it out elsewhere in order for you to store it. The only point of consideration is around that area, basically limited storage on the machine and appliance. Consider logging it elsewhere or pushing it out to a SIEM to get better controls and manipulation over the data to generate additional metrics and visibility."
"Cisco still has a lot of work to do. You can convert an ASA over to a Firepower, but the competitors, like Palo Alto and Juniper, are coming in. And believe it or not, they are a little bit more intuitive. Cisco has a little bit more work to do. They're playing catch up."
"I would like to see improvement when you create policies on Snort 3 IPS on Cisco Firepower. On Snort 2, it was more like a UI page where you had some multiple choices where you could tweak your config. On Snort 3, the idea is more to build some rules on the text file or JSON file, then push it. So, I would like to see a lot of improvements here."
"One of the challenges we've had with the Cisco ASA is the lack of a strong controller or central management console that is dependable and reliable all the time."
"I have used Fortinet, Palo Alto, and Check Point previously and I prefer the process of everything working together."
"The ability to better integrate with other tools would be an improvement."
"It is a cloud service, but the lending speed for each region is not always the same. For example, in China, the speed is slow. They need to think about how to make sure that the service pace or speed is always the same in all regions. It would be a great improvement if they can provide the same pace worldwide."
"An Azure firewall is not a real firewall."
"Azure Firewall has limited visibility for IDPS, no TLS inspection, no app ID, no user ID, no content ID, no device ID. There is no antivirus or anti-spyware. Azure Firewall doesn't scan traffic for malware unless it triggers an IDPS signature. There is no sandbox or machine learning functionality, meaning we are not protected from Zero-day threats. There is no DNS security and limited web categories."
"For larger enterprises, they need to adjust the scalability."
"For large organizations, a third-party firewall would be an added advantage, because it would have more advanced features, things that are not in Azure Firewall."
"The reporting, logging, and monitoring features, as well as the flexibility of the policies, need to be improved."
"It would be much easier if the on-premises, firewall rules, had some kind of export-import possibility in place, which is not the case right now."
"It has fewer features than you can get from other firewalls, like anti-spam and anti-phishing. Those kinds of things are not included. It only includes IDS and IDB."
"The pricing could be improved. They need to work on the setup over the firewall, VLAN, and PPPoE."
"In terms of what could be improved, comparatively the price is very high. That would be the one thing."
"If you enable SSL you will face a problem. The throughput of the firewall will be degraded. SSL is a big issue on all firewalls. All products suffer from issues with SSL, but Palo Alto firewalls suffer more from it."
"The configuration part could be improved. It's very difficult to configure. It doesn't have a user-friendly interface. You have to know Palo Alto deeply to use it."
"This solution cannot be implemented on-premises; it's only a cloud solution. The price is high as well."
"The machine learning in Palo Alto NG Firewalls for securing networks against threats that are able to evolve and morph rapidly is good, in general. But there have been some cases where we get false positives and Palo Alto has denied traffic when there have been new updates and signature releases. Valid traffic gets blocked. We have had some bad experiences with this. If there were an ability, before it denies traffic, to get some kind of notification that some traffic is going to be blocked, that would be good."
"I would like to see it provide us with intelligent information from the data that it captures, within the same cost."
"We have a lot of the older firewall models, i.e., the PA-220. It seems that with newer operating systems the PA-220 is becoming slower than when I first bought it. It is not really an issue for users who are passing traffic through the firewall, but more from the management access of it."
More Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls Pricing and Cost Advice →
Azure Firewall is ranked 14th in Firewalls with 17 reviews while Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is ranked 5th in Firewalls with 74 reviews. Azure Firewall is rated 7.0, while Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Azure Firewall writes "Good value for your money, good URL filtering, supports intrusion prevention, and is stable". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls writes "Provides zero trust implementation, more visibility, and eliminated security holes". Azure Firewall is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate-VM, Palo Alto Networks VM-Series, Check Point NGFW, pfSense and Fortinet FortiGate, whereas Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is most compared with Check Point NGFW, Fortinet FortiGate, Meraki MX, Sophos XG and Sophos UTM. See our Azure Firewall vs. Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls report.
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