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Check Point IPS vs Cisco Sourcefire SNORT comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 19, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Check Point IPS
Ranking in Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS)
3rd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
69
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Cisco Sourcefire SNORT
Ranking in Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS)
14th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
20
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) category, the mindshare of Check Point IPS is 3.7%, down from 4.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco Sourcefire SNORT is 3.1%, up from 2.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Check Point IPS3.7%
Cisco Sourcefire SNORT3.1%
Other93.2%
Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS)
 

Featured Reviews

GR
Support at a security firm with 51-200 employees
Real-Time Blocking Improves Response and Reduces Manual Logs
The best feature in my experience with Check Point IPS is the real-time prevention because it uses thousands of preventive protections based on both known exploit signatures and behavioral analysis to detect and block threats before they reach vulnerable systems. I find the behavioral analysis feature of Check Point IPS to be a most valuable feature because it can detect sophisticated threats that do not match known signatures. For example, when I need to view anomaly detections, instead of relying solely on known attack patterns, Check Point IPS monitors network traffic for unusual behavior such as unexpected protocol use, abnormal data flows, or suspicious command sequences. Check Point IPS impacts my organization positively because it has had a strong positive impact by strengthening our network defense, reducing manual work, and improving our incident response times.
reviewer2772102 - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud Architect at a consultancy with 1-10 employees
Logging and customizable rules have helped improve threat monitoring and detection
The logging is mainly what I consider one of the best features with Cisco Sourcefire SNORT. Being able to log and store it in a file allows you to push it to a centralized repository. The logging and reporting help improve incident response. You should always be logging threats, any sort of misconfiguration, and anything that could be an issue. It's important to at least log and monitor it. The basic rules provide a good baseline in assessing Cisco Sourcefire SNORT's ability in providing real-time analytics for threat detection, but as a professional, you should look to constantly modify that baseline. They provide extensive customizability so you can define your own rules. The customizability allows it to be adaptable in protecting against diverse network threats to the constant change.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Check Point Intrusion Prevention System has great profiles, and we can continuously create, modify, activate, deactivate or configure any specific setting to allow the profile to focus on just one thing or for certain attacks."
"Check Point IPS services give our organization peace of mind; we know that the solution will be running and constantly updated thanks to the integrated Check Point services."
"It is also worth noting that many IPS signature comes with detailed background about the vulnerability, and potentially how the vulnerability would affect the network security."
"The integration of IPS with the firewall is quite efficient."
"Basically, it is easy to use and offers a wide variety of protections through all kinds of software, services, appliances, and IoT-Devices."
"The possibility of customizing the rules is great."
"What I like best about Check Point IPS is that it can prevent attacks. I also like that it has a log feature."
"Check Point offers DDoS and endpoint protection called EDR or XDR, so it provides a holistic security architecture for any organization."
"It has a huge rate of protection. It's has a low level of positives and a huge rate of threat protection. It's easy to deploy and easy to implement. It has an incredible price rate compared to similar solutions."
"We primarily use this solution as an intrusion prevention system for external firewalls and deploy the solution on-premises."
"With Cisco Sourcefire SNORT, we've been able to prevent and detect intrusion in our network and actually decrease our SLA (Service Level Agreement)."
"I would recommend this solution; it's reliable and scalable, with easy installation and integration."
"The product is inexpensive compared to leading brands such as Palo Alto or Fortinet."
"Users have access to intelligent security automation as one of the features, which can easily automate your event impact assessment so your IPS policy tuning can be done as well as your network behavior analysis, and you can do real-time contextual awareness with correlation of events created on your applications, user devices, operating systems, or vulnerabilities, with all of this real-time data captured including your apps and port scans."
"The most valuable feature is reliability, and this solution is better than Check Point."
"The whole solution is very good, and stable."
 

Cons

"Out of the box, the number of built-in reporting and dashboards related to the IPS logs and events has room for improvement."
"I would like to have the possibility of adding features to this IPS solution in the future."
"One area that could be improved in Check Point IPS is the user interface for managing IPS policies, which can be a bit complex for new users, along with the need for faster signature updates for emerging threats and more seamless integration with third-party tools."
"Check Point IPS can be improved by addressing false positive and tuning overhead."
"The only thing they could maybe improve is that we notice right away that the performance decreases when we enable the IPS, especially beyond the CPU and memory usage. If you want to enable the IPS and you have a lot of traffic, it can have an impact. The performance could be improved."
"There is an issue with precision."
"Check Point IPS can be improved by addressing false positive and tuning overhead."
"This is an expensive solution, higher than other products on the market."
"While the alerts they offer are good, it could improve it in the sense that they should be more detailed to make the alerts more useful to us in general. Sometimes the solution will offer up false positives. Due to the fact that the alerts aren't detailed, we have to go dig around to see why is it being blocked. The solution would be infinitely better if there was just a bit more detail in the alert information and logging we receive."
"The solution's approach to managing traffic blocking is confusing and impractical."
"With the next release, I would like to see some PBR, so that you can do the configuration with the features."
"The price of this solution could be improved."
"The cloud can be improved."
"I want to see a better dashboard for the product. The dashboard can be a bit modified or enhanced."
"If the price is brought down then everybody will be happy."
"I don't think this solution is a time-based control system, because one cannot filter traffic based on time."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I give the price of the solution a five out of ten."
"My company pays for the yearly licensing of Check Point IPS. It is a very expensive tool."
"I rate the product price an eight on a scale of one to ten, where one means it is very cheap and ten means it is very expensive. The product is expensive."
"The pricing is quite reasonable."
"Enabling IPS does not require any additional license purchase from OEM, as it comes by default with the NGFW bundle."
"I think that the price of support is around $40,000 USD or $50,000 USD per year."
"The tool's licensing model is good. The licensing costs are yearly. I rate it an eight out of ten."
"The pricing model can be more competitive."
"If one is an extremely expensive product, and ten is cheap, I rate the tool's price as a five."
"The cost is per port and can be expensive but it does include training and support for three years."
"We have a three-year license for this solution."
"I don't know the exact amount, but most of the time when I go to a company with a proposition, they will say, "This thing that you are selling is good, but it's expensive. Why don't you propose something like FortiGate, Check Point, or Palo Alto?" Cisco device are expensive compared to other devices."
"Licensing for this solution is paid on a yearly basis."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
10%
Security Firm
6%
University
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Construction Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business49
Midsize Enterprise23
Large Enterprise23
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise7
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Check Point IPS?
The most valuable feature of the solution is called tunneling. Tunneling is one of the major security features that hackers cannot penetrate through.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Check Point IPS?
I have saved around two or three hours a week since I started using Check Point IPS. My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Check Point IPS is great, and I have no problem with t...
What needs improvement with Check Point IPS?
Check Point IPS is working well for our organization. In the future, more automated and more AI-based intelligence could be fed into Check Point IPS, and that would be helpful for us.
What do you like most about Cisco Sourcefire SNORT?
The product is inexpensive compared to leading brands such as Palo Alto or Fortinet.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco Sourcefire SNORT?
If one is an extremely expensive product, and ten is cheap, I rate the tool's price as a five. There are some other tools in the market that are more expensive than Cisco. There are no additional c...
What needs improvement with Cisco Sourcefire SNORT?
I have not had much experience with the community-driven rule set while utilizing Cisco Sourcefire SNORT. I don't have experience with recognizing zero-day vulnerabilities, but based on my knowledg...
 

Also Known As

Check Point Intrusion Prevention System
Sourcefire SNORT
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Morton Salt, Medical Advocacy and Outreach, BH Telecom, Lightbeam Health Solutions, X by Orange, Cadence, Nihondentsu, Datastream Connexion, Good Sam, Omnyway, FIASA, Pacific Life, Banco del Pacifico, Control Southern, Xero, Centrify
CareCore, City of Biel, Dimension Data, LightEdge, Lone Star College System, National Rugby League, Port Aventura, Smart City Networks, Telecom Italia, The Department of Education in Western Australia
Find out what your peers are saying about Check Point IPS vs. Cisco Sourcefire SNORT and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
886,011 professionals have used our research since 2012.