"Provides good integrations and reporting."
"Being able to determine our active users vs inactive users has led us to increased productivity through visibility. Also, if an issue was happening with our throughput, then we wouldn't know without research. Now, notifications are more proactively happening."
"There are no issues that we are aware of. It does its job silently in the background."
"Web filtering is a big improvement for us. The previous version we used, the AC520, did not have that feature included. It was not very easy for us, especially because the environment had to be isolated and we needed to get updates from outside, such as Windows patches. That feature has really helped us when we are going outside to pull those patches."
"If you compare the ASA and the FirePOWER, the best feature with FirePOWER is easy to use GUI. It has most of the same functionality in the Next-Generation FirePOWER, such as IPS, IPS policies, security intelligence, and integration and identification of all the devices or hardware you have in your network. Additionally, this solution is user-friendly."
"The dashboard is the most important thing. It provides good visibility and makes management easy. Firepower also provides us with good application visibility and control."
"We get the Security Intelligence Feeds refreshed every hour from Talos, which from my understanding is that they're the largest intelligence Security Intelligence Group outside of the government."
"The most valuable feature is stability."
"Operationally, it is easier, and the manageability and their security features are good."
"Palo Alto NGFW provides a unified platform that natively integrates all security capabilities, which is very useful. This prevents us from having to go to a lot of different systems, and in some cases, many different systems in many different regions, because we are a global company with 60 remote offices around the world in 30 different countries. Its centralized platform is really what we look for in all services, whether it be security or otherwise."
"The ease of use and the ease of configuration of our policies are the most valuable features."
"Its flexibility is the most valuable."
"Innovative, advanced threat protection is the most valuable feature."
"I like that they are more stable than the previous ones, and they allow a lot of other features."
"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."
"When we put it on the border, it was blocking everything that we were getting ahead of time, and we weren't getting any hits. This includes URL filtering, spam prevention, and anti-virus."
"One issue with Firepower Management Center is deployment time. It takes seven to 10 minutes and that's a long time for deployment. In that amount of time, management or someone else can ask me to change something or to provide permissions, but during that time, doing so is not possible. It's a drawback with Cisco. Other vendors, like Palo Alto or Fortinet do not have this deployment time issue."
"The initial setup was a bit complex. It wasn't a major challenge, but due to our requirements and network, it was not very straightforward but still easy enough."
"Report generation is an area that should be improved."
"Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall can be more secure."
"Implementations require the use of a console. It would help if the console was embedded."
"I believe that the current feature set of the device is very good and the only thing that Cisco should work on is improving the user experience with the device."
"This product is managed using the Firepower Management Center (FMC), but it would be better if it also supported the command-line interface (CLI)."
"It's mainly the UI and the management parts that need improvement. The most impactful feature when you're using it is the user interface and the user experience."
"It would be better to have more tools to control Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls. We don't have too many tools to access Palo Alto. For example, the IT team doesn't have access to it. We can see it physically and see if it's running or not. We need to contact a special team to receive that information. I would also like to see more reporting in the next release."
"There is a bit of limitation with its next-generation capabilities. They could be better. In terms of logs, I feel like I am a bit limited as an administrator. While I see a lot of logs, and that is good, it could be better."
"The whole performance takes a long time. It takes a long time to configure."
"The solution has normal authentication, but does not have two-factor or multi-factor authentication. There is room for development there."
"Its stability can be better. Their technical response from the support side can also be better."
"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."
"Its scalability for on-prem deployments can be better. For an on-prem deployment, the hardware has to be replaced if the volume goes up to a certain level."
"The VPN connectors should be better. We had some challenges in terms of the VPN with Palo Alto Networks NG Firewall, and that's one of the main reasons why we moved to Sophos. Its load handling can also be improved. There were challenges when traffic was high. During peak business hours, it did not function very well. There was a lot of slowness, and the users used to complain, especially when they were connecting from outside. We even reported this to the support team. Their support should also be improved. Technical support was a bit of a concern while using this solution. We didn't get very good support from the Palo Alto team."
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Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall is ranked 4th in Firewalls with 41 reviews while Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is ranked 7th in Firewalls with 71 reviews. Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall is rated 8.4, while Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall writes "The ability to implement dynamic policies for dynamic environments is important, given the fluidity in the world of security". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls writes "The product stability and level of security are second to none in the industry". Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate, Cisco ASA Firewall, Palo Alto Networks WildFire, Meraki MX and Check Point NGFW, whereas Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate, Azure Firewall, Sophos XG, Meraki MX and Check Point CloudGuard Network Security. See our Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall vs. Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls report.
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There are some major differentiators that make Palo Alto more preferable. First of all Palo Alto's Hardware is FPGA based, which has no parallel. Due to this capability it supports SP3 technology which provides single pass parallel processing architecture. This means PA processes traffic through all the engines i.e. application, IPS and others simultaneously. This improves resiliency and provides exactly the same throughput which committed in PA data sheet. PA has been in the leaders magic quadrant of Gartner for the 7th consecutive time in a row, which shows its block capability is above power. Moreover, it is very user friendly and easy for configure. Palo Alto provides all routing features plus IPsec tunnels without any license - license subscriptions are only required for security bundles. Palo Alto has on-box (without any additional license or cost) reporting capability that no other firewall has at the moment.
On the contrary, Cisco Firewall and its management center is not stable and lacks user friendly operations.
Well they are two leaders, one from US, another from Israel.
Checkpoint is the first well known firm to launch firewalls.
Palo Alto is certainly now the leader, but could be expensive in strong configurations. It supports virtualization very well and is number one for reporting.
Checkpoint NGFW is strong but under competition for high volumes when compared referred to a comparable appliance (Fortinet for instance). It needs perhaps more technical knowledge to administrate, in spite of an amazing choice of blades in the NGFW offering.
The reliability depends on your partner or integrator and a good definition of needs to have a proper sizing of your equipment.
Ease of Use
- GUI familiarities and adoption level can differ from user to user.
- Personally I found CISCO ASA interface is hard to comprehend compare to Palo Alto
- Command line interface is good, only challenge is past experience and correctness of commands to get error free results!
Performance of the Appliance
- Palo Alto VS CISCO - Palo Alto is better performing appliance.
Palo Alto is the market leader and a company with a very holistic approach to security. Firewalls are its mainstream business, whereas Cisco basically known as a networking company is trying to be one of the major players in providing security solutions. Things like advantages, disadvantages, usage and practices is a very vast topic. Generally companies already having Cisco infrastructure tend to choose Cisco firewalls from the integration point of view. Palo Alto firewalls could be more expensive.
Pick a product model for both vendors: Cisco & Palo Alto (refer to technical data sheets and whitepapers --) See the key differences on your target or specific needs).
Practical evaluation by a person who has both products under the belt and can share their experiences...
Anyone inputs, please?