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Check Point NGFW vs Zscaler Cloud Firewall comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 13, 2025

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

Fortinet FortiGate
Sponsored
Ranking in Firewalls
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
403
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) Solutions (1st), WAN Edge (1st)
Check Point NGFW
Ranking in Firewalls
5th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
325
Ranking in other categories
Unified Threat Management (UTM) (1st)
Zscaler Cloud Firewall
Ranking in Firewalls
25th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
8.0
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Firewalls category, the mindshare of Fortinet FortiGate is 20.8%, up from 17.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Check Point NGFW is 3.0%, down from 3.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Zscaler Cloud Firewall is 0.4%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Firewalls
 

Featured Reviews

Vasu Gala - PeerSpot reviewer
A stable solution with an intuitive interface and quick customer service
I have been working with Fortinet FortiGate, WatchGuard, Sophos, and SonicWall. I'm not as comfortable with SonicWall because of their UI and limitations. I prefer Fortinet above all other options. When it comes to configuration, I am confident in my ability to handle various tasks, including creating policies such as firewall rules, web policies, and application policies. Additionally, I can configure VPNs and implement load balancing, among other tasks. Overall, I feel much more comfortable working with Fortinet. Fortinet has made significant improvements by integrating AI with firewalls for threat analysis and prevention. In the past 2-3 years, they have launched FortiSASE and SIEM, and they also provide SOC services. Both Palo Alto and Fortinet FortiGate are excellent. While Fortinet FortiGate comes at higher prices, the functionality and support justify the cost. They promptly resolve firmware issues and inform all support providers about configuration changes.
Hailemichael Yigrem - PeerSpot reviewer
Advanced security features enhance threat detection and prevention
Check Point NGFW provides granular application control and detailed visibility over application and user activity. It integrates with the ThreatCloud ecosystem, enabling real-time threat detection and prevention. The User Identity Awareness blade integrates with Active Directory, identifying user traffic sources. Check Point NGFW is highly scalable and has centralized management through SmartConsole, which manages policies, logs, and threat data. It reduced our incidents and decreased the time to analyze cyber threats by 70 percent.
Bhaskar Rao - PeerSpot reviewer
Though it helps deal with web traffic or any malicious traffic, it needs to work on its DC performance issues
The product's initial setup phase is moderate in level, so it is neither very complex nor very easy. For the deployment, my company first needs to gather all the requirements of the users and the domain names and consider how many users there are in the company. In the implementation and planning part, my company needs to consider what kind of policies we will create while ensuring that the policies are created based on the requirements of the users. There is a need to segregate the users' requirements since there are separate departments in the company, like the HR department, sales department, IT department, and manufacturing department, so that our company can create policies depending on their requirements. On-site, if you want a GRE tunnel, our company can handle GRE tunnel traffic routing and Zscaler Cloud Firewall, after which Zscaler will take action based on the policies created by our organization. For the deployments and maintenance, a team of five members consisting of two managers and three engineers is required.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Web filtering and two-factor authentication are great features."
"They are very affordable compared to Palo Alto and other vendors, offering a great solution for networking and SD-WAN with extremely good protection."
"The impact of SD-WAN on the network performance has been significant."
"Easy to use support and licensing portal as well as activation process."
"Fortinet FortiGate helps improve my organization since it's quick and easy to install, and we don't have to call support frequently."
"The FortiGate controls the user's activities and maximizes my bandwidth use overall."
"The dashboard I have found the most valuable in Fortinet FortiGate."
"The solution can scale well."
"The Check Point API let me make 100 net rules in just 10 minutes, which saved us time."
"While not being cheap, their pricing models are competitive."
"I have to say that it was Application Control and web filtering are excellent."
"It secures my organization. With the application blade, I can make security as application based and the custom application is also very useful. With identity awareness blades we get insights on our local users who are accessing/passing through the respective rule as users. We also use the DLP, IPS, and VPN features."
"The initial setup is easy."
"Check Point NGFW generates very helpful reports based on the logs of the activated features."
"The AntiSpam/Mail blade was also one of the main reasons we went with this product since we hosted our email server locally. This was an extra layer of protection on top of the existing solution."
"Some of the most valuable features are URL filtering, web filtering, and content filtering."
"Since it is really customizable, I can use it and avoid enabling access to the full network."
"Most of the features that Zscaler has to offer, we will deploy."
"The visibility and log availability offered are highly valued for troubleshooting purposes, and this is a key factor driving customer interest in the firewall module."
"The product’s firewall and VPN package are fantastic compared to any other solution."
"It helps a lot of companies to reduce their downtime. Also, It helps businesses in terms of being secured and protected from any threats."
"The solution is scalable."
"Zscaler provides effective protection against various cyber threats ensuring a safe environment"
"It is a stable solution."
 

Cons

"With the reports, you can see it, and you can get good feelings so upper management can go, "Oh, wow. That looks pretty." However, it's very basic."
"The stability of Fortinet FortiGate could improve."
"The cloud management and automation capability could be improved."
"In an incident, after a restart, Fortinet FortiGate did not connect to FortiGuard servers. Due to that reason, on the customer end, all websites got blocked."
"The issue lies with features available in GUI versus CLI during configuration. When using GUI, I want to accomplish everything there, but sometimes it requires using CLI to ensure proper configuration."
"I would like to see a more intuitive dashboard."
"Its reporting and pricing need improvement."
"We'd like more management across other integrations."
"The client for the central tools is very big - maybe using web access in future releases, similar to other vendors should be possible."
"When installed on Windows, the system with low storage space slows down."
"Several security modules are based on HTTPS inspection, losing a relevant security capability if you don't implement it in your network."
"Log queries are slow and take time to load."
"The software licensing model is too complicated with all the various tiers of SKUs (i.e. per software blade). They need to simplify this for easier purchasing and renewing."
"Service support can be improved."
"Including some sort of menu or grouping for VOIP would help the small business area that has limited support."
"The main thing for a normal operations guy who is creating tools and firewalls, it is quite difficult to manage. It requires an expert level of knowledge in Check Point products to manage these scalable platform appliances and the virtual firewall that comes with it. We have to educate our guys and give them training on a regular basis to work on these products."
"The issue right now is probably that Zscaler is not providing web browser isolation. Another solution, Menlo, offers this. For one customer, we had to send traffic to Menlo to do the isolation for us. It was requested by the customer so that they could integrate any iframe. Zscaler needs to add this type of feature in their next release."
"If I can get rid of Jetscaler, I will use Twingate for sure."
"I don't have the visibility of a control dashboard or a network management system."
"There are some areas it could improve when it comes to blocking, we have to block some things manually. For example, if we block a top-level domain we have seen that the new IPs come through, the IPs are not blocked. There should be some more granular way of doing it. My only request is if you're blocking something at a top level, the sub-level sub-domains and all those other IPs should be blocked too automatically."
"When it comes to customer support, there is room for improvement in Zscaler's service."
"There are several areas for improvement. Firstly, the GUI is outdated, with noticeable lags and delays, especially when generating reports for past transactions."
"It would be nice to have some sort of a form factor, a physical form factor perhaps, or virtual machine that you could install on devices or on a cloud, and have some cloud computing."
"Because it's on cloud, it doesn't allow application of extra settings."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is too expensive for us. My organization is very small, and we have a total of ten users. We have three internal users and seven external users. The FortiGate 100D series is too expensive for renewing the licenses."
"The price is highly competitive when compared to other brands that offer similar functionality."
"We just pay a flat monthly fee to the vendor for the support."
"The pricing is fair."
"Fortinet FortiGate as a less expensive solution than Palo Alto."
"Its price is good."
"The price is fair for what we get with FortiGate."
"The price of FortiGate is reasonable as I plan to buy new switches. The initial gadgets are already booted, and the pricing seems normal on the market. As for additional costs, I haven't subscribed to many extra features, so I'm only using what I need. Last year, I renewed the support for three years, which can sometimes be expensive but depends on the security benefits and how it helps us."
"When it comes to the quality-price ratio, I've found that Check Point offers a competitive balance in the market."
"Check Point NGFW is expensive."
"Check Point offers the same applications and features as Palo Alto for roughly a third of the price."
"Check Point NGFW is a little expensive."
"One of the main reasons that we went with Check Point is that they provide a good solution for a firewall but at an affordable price. As a state agency, we can't afford Cisco Firepower. It's just out of our budget to be able to pay for something where licensing and hardware are so expensive. Check Point has really met our needs for a budget-friendly solution."
"I don't see that Check Point is very high, but it is geared more towards enterprises."
"We had to get separate licenses for the different blades. It would be nice to have a feature where we can get the multiple licenses all-in-one instead."
"The licensing includes the cost of support."
"It is not the most budget-friendly solution, but it's important to consider its overall value."
"The licensing is on a yearly basis. It is somewhere around 30 or 40 pounds per user for our organization."
"On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing an eight out of ten."
"It comes at a significantly reduced cost while ensuring control and effectiveness."
"There are different subscription models available."
"It is expensive for small businesses."
"Zscaler is priced too high compared to the cost of Fortinet."
"There are licensing costs, and I would not say that it's a cheap vendor."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
16%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
6%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Retailer
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Which is the better NGFW: Fortinet Fortigate or Cisco Firepower?
When you compare these firewalls you can identify them with different features, advantages, practices and usage a...
What is the biggest difference between Sophos XG and FortiGate?
From my experience regarding both the Sophos and FortiGate firewalls, I personally would rather use FortiGate. I know...
What are the biggest technical differences between Sophos UTM and Fortinet FortiGate?
As a solution, Sophos UTM offers a lot of functionality, it scales well, and the stability and performance are quite ...
How does Check Point NGFW compare with Fortinet Fortigate?
I have experience on both from Disti and channel experience. Please find below my comments (nothing new as such). -Ch...
Which would you recommend - Azure Firewall or Check Point NGFW?
Azure Firewall is easy to use and provides excellent support. Valuable features include integration into the overall ...
What do you like most about Check Point NGFW?
Check Point NGFW provides essential security, featuring no-obligation access for secure connections, strong intrusion...
Which lesser known firewall product has the best chance at unseating the market leaders?
Netscope, Zscaler if they continue route they are on now. FIrewalls needs great deal of automation on each end, datac...
What do you like most about Zscaler Cloud Firewall?
The product’s firewall and VPN package are fantastic compared to any other solution.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Zscaler Cloud Firewall?
Zscaler Cloud Firewall is quite expensive compared to competitors. However, it offered moderate value for money.
 

Also Known As

FortiGate 60b, FortiGate 60c, FortiGate 80c, FortiGate 50b, FortiGate 200b, FortiGate 110c, FortiGate, Fortinet Firewall
Check Point NG Firewall, Check Point Next Generation Firewall
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, IBM, Cisco, Dell, HP, Oracle, Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, Vodafone, Orange, BT Group, Telstra, Deutsche Telekom, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, CenturyLink, NTT Communications, Tata Communications, SoftBank, China Mobile, Singtel, Telus, Rogers Communications, Bell Canada, Telkom Indonesia, Telkom South Africa, Telmex, Telia Company, Telkom Kenya
Control Southern, Optimal Media
Zenith Live, Azure, Carlsberg Group
Find out what your peers are saying about Check Point NGFW vs. Zscaler Cloud Firewall and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
864,155 professionals have used our research since 2012.