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Check Point Quantum Force (NGFW) vs ShieldX comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 25, 2026

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 Quantum Force (...
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
346
Ranking in other categories
Firewalls (7th), Unified Threat Management (UTM) (2nd)
ShieldX
Average Rating
9.2
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
Microsegmentation Software (10th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Network Security Systems solutions, they serve different purposes. Check Point Quantum Force (NGFW) is designed for Firewalls and holds a mindshare of 3.0%, up 2.9% compared to last year.
ShieldX, on the other hand, focuses on Microsegmentation Software, holds 2.2% mindshare, up 0.3% since last year.
Firewalls Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Check Point Quantum Force (NGFW)3.0%
Fortinet FortiGate14.5%
OPNsense8.2%
Other74.3%
Firewalls
Microsegmentation Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
ShieldX2.2%
Illumio Segmentation23.7%
Akamai Guardicore Segmentation19.6%
Other54.5%
Microsegmentation Software
 

Featured Reviews

DS
Network Security Engineer at Connecting Cyber Networks
Advanced threat prevention has protected our perimeter and simplifies daily security operations
Check Point Quantum Force (NGFW) can be improved in several areas. First, the interface could be a little more intuitive for new users. The Smart Console is powerful, but it has a steep learning curve when you start using it. Some simple functions for common tasks would help. Second, the initial setup and configuration take quite a bit of time and expertise. It would be helpful if there were more guides, wizards, or templates to speed that up. Third, the price model could be more transparent and flexible. The license cost can add up quickly, specifically when you want to add more advanced features. Finally, I would appreciate seeing better integration with some third-party security tools we use. Right now, we have to do a lot of manual work to make everything talk to each other. Overall, these are minor things. The core product is really solid and does what it is supposed to do very well. The documentation could be more comprehensive in some areas. When we run into issues, the documentation does not have clear answers, so we end up contacting support. Speaking of support, the response time could be faster sometimes. We have had cases where we need help with a certain security issue, and it takes longer than we would prefer to get a response. As for features, it would be nice to have more general reporting options so we can customize reports for different teams and stakeholders without having to do manual work afterward. One more thing, better mobile access to the dashboard would be helpful. Sometimes we need to check on security alerts when we are away from the office, and the mobile experience is not as smooth as it could be. Again, these are improvements that would make it even better, not issues with the core product itself.
MP
IT Director at park holidays uk
Proactively monitors, blocks, and reports what it has blocked; and self-updates meaning there is zero maintenance
The most valuable feature is the automatic scaling. With its microservices, it scales both up and down, depending on traffic and throughput. The traffic through our website depends on holiday bookings. It's very quiet in November through January, and then our traffic picks up quite rapidly and, at our peak, we will take in excess of a million pounds of business a day through our website. The UI was also one of the huge selling points. My web development manager was blown away with the detail and the granularity that you can get out of the UI. It is a very strong and informative UI, with the amount of data it provides. Uptime on the system has been 648 days and we do very little to it because it self-updates and alerts. It does everything that we need it to do, so the administration side of it is zero. One of the beauties about ShieldX is that it's such a good "fire-and-forget" product.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The scalability is very good."
"In terms of protection, we passed from none to one of the most advanced protections in the market."
"Check Point NGFW has helped us to significantly reduce our risk of cyberattacks by providing comprehensive protection against a wide range of threats, including malware, viruses, ransomware, phishing attacks, and zero-day threats."
"Primarily, Check Point played a very vital role in protecting our whole network infrastructure."
"Even though Check Point NGFW provides a set of security features that enforce protection on the network, the most valuable aspect is also the most used feature: the plain and simple firewall component. This is the core of the product and works to a great extent without the need for all other available bells and whistles."
"The firewall's default behavior of blocking all traffic, including a cleanup rule that blocks everything from external to internal sources, is highly valuable for protecting our network."
"Check Point Quantum Force (NGFW) provides numerous features such as threat emulations, anti-bots, and the most outstanding feature is ElasticXL."
"The threat emulation blade and user identity awareness feature has helped us a lot in terms of perimeter security and have given us granular visibility of user access."
"ShieldX makes it a lot easier and a lot simpler to define your policies and define your rules, and that greatly reduces the opportunity for user error."
"ShieldX has been designed from the very beginning to work well in cloud environments. It understands autoscaling, automation, and auto-configuration. These are the things which are important in today's operating environment."
"The Adaptive Intention Engine is fantastic. It allows us to develop security policies using the language of our internal customers. It's machine-learning applied to security workflows. That allows us to much more easily construct the policies that will protect those workflows."
"Once you install it you can virtually forget about it; it's very low-maintenance and high-protection."
"It has helped us tighten our security posture. Now, staff can only access things that they should be accessing."
"The most valuable feature is the automatic scaling. With its microservices, it scales both up and down, depending on traffic and throughput."
"The UI was also one of the huge selling points. My web development manager was blown away with the detail and the granularity that you can get out of the UI. It is a very strong and informative UI, with the amount of data it provides."
"Very often, when new challengers come in, what they do is they end up coming in at a lower cost with more functionality."
 

Cons

"My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Check Point NGFW is that the high subscription fees aren't easy to afford, and it's not recommended for mid-sized companies or businesses."
"The price is also a factor to take into account."
"The issues with Check Point Quantum Force (NGFW) are mainly related to reliability. It depends significantly on the hotfix version of the gateway."
"Check Point can improve in the VPN sector because I still have a problem using VPN in active-active with its R82 feature since it can only incorporate with active tunnel route mode to route mode and policy-based to policy-based."
"Support for customers really needs to improve."
"The NAT services part needs improvement. It's not sophisticated. It needs functions like range assignment for NATing. The way you assign a list of IPs for NATing is too simple. It just allows you to use pools."
"Currently, upgrades are quite cumbersome."
"The firewall throughput or performance reduces drastically after enabling each module/blade."
"They need to be consistent in performance and capabilities over time, given the fact that this is new and I want to see where this goes in the next year or so."
"We are having some issues with their LDAP and integrating it with the Active Directory. We can't seem to set it up."
"With any kind of tool like ShieldX, where you're in the cloud instead of a traditional firewall, you're using CPU resources in those environments to provide the protection. So there's a cost associated with CPU resources. I'm pressing upon them to make the product much more efficient and use less CPUs to do the same thing."
"I would like better reports and in-depth reporting."
"They need to be consistent in performance and capabilities over time, given the fact that this is new and I want to see where this goes in the next year or so. As the vendor continues to evolve and add future functionality, we want to make sure that we are still keeping up with the integrations, etc. Time will be the key factor here. The proper support for some of the latest technologies, Docker containers, etc. They need to keep up with threat landscape, so we will see how the security get layered. This is what we are going to be keeping an eye on."
"There should be a bit more customer care, with regular review meetings on it or regular reports. It would be nice to have a quarterly or biannual review of what ShieldX has blocked."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"Maybe the pricing is a bit high but you get the durability and the duration."
"It's reasonably priced, but competitors offer much cheaper options."
"While it may be slightly more expensive, when compared with competition it is reasonable."
"The pricing for Check Point depends on your environment."
"The technology itself is impressive, but I find the pricing a bit on the higher side."
"The cost of the pricing and licensing are okay. They are giving me a good product as far as I know. It is more expensive than Cisco, but cheaper than Palo Alto, which is fine. It has many good features, so it deserves a good price as well."
"Check Point offers the same applications and features as Palo Alto for roughly a third of the price."
"For a three-year deal we paid £55,000 plus tax... But, and this is a big "but," this was over two years ago. ShieldX had only just hit the market. We were the first company in Europe to buy ShieldX."
"We are actually expecting our costs to drop in the coming year, but it is just a matter of the licensing expiring. That is going to happen in the next six months or so. Then, we will start to see a decrease in overall spend."
"Security policies are now applied as applications are going up. Because it's automated, we don't have the three to four week delay. The insertion of applications in the cloud for us dropped from an average of three to four weeks to a couple of days."
"We are very happy with the pricing and licensing. It's about getting a site-wide license. One of the challenges that we've had with our previous vendor had been the cost of licensing."
"For other security professions who are looking for something which is low in cost that does microsegmentation, they should look at ShieldX. It might not be the big name out there, but it does everything that you are looking for in microsegmentation at a very low price."
"ShieldX ensures that we can have the separation needed for our environment to avoid drastically increasing the cost on the licensing side. From this perspective, it's been very positive and helpful."
"ShieldX also enables us to migrate to cloud environments faster. That is an important part of it for sure because it takes the exact same policies that we would apply to our on-premise environment and enables us to simply apply them to the cloud. It becomes one policy for both on-prem and for the cloud."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Construction Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business164
Midsize Enterprise94
Large Enterprise198
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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). -Check Point GUI is a bit complicated, -Application and Web filtering are better t...
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 cloud platform, autoscaling, and the ability for users to create virtual IP addr...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Check Point NGFW?
Our experience with pricing for Check Point Quantum Force (NGFW) has been mixed. The initial setup costs were fairly significant because we needed to buy the hardware appliances and then pay for th...
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Also Known As

Check Point NG Firewall, Check Point Next Generation Firewall
APEIRO, ShieldX APEIRO
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Control Southern, Optimal Media
Iowa State University
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