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Hillstone CloudEdge vs ShieldX comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
592
Ranking in other categories
Secure Web Gateways (SWG) (2nd), Firewalls (1st), Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) (1st), Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) Solutions (1st), WAN Edge (1st), ZTNA (1st), Unified Threat Management (UTM) (1st)
Hillstone CloudEdge
Average Rating
10.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.8
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
Firewalls (49th)
ShieldX
Average Rating
9.2
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
Microsegmentation Software (11th)
 

Mindshare comparison

Firewalls Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Hillstone CloudEdge0.4%
Fortinet FortiGate15.1%
OPNsense8.5%
Other76.0%
Firewalls
Microsegmentation Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
ShieldX2.0%
Illumio23.8%
Akamai Guardicore Segmentation20.4%
Other53.8%
Microsegmentation Software
 

Featured Reviews

PD
IT Consultant at a tech services company with 1-10 employees
Cloud features enhance security measures and simplify network management
I've dealt with many firewalls, such as SonicWalls, UniFi, pfSense, and Cisco. We found SonicWall very confusing for the average network engineer or network administrator. I don't recommend SonicWall due to its hard-to-find auditing process for exploits. Although they have fewer exploits, when they do occur, they're significant. With Fortinet FortiGate, you can access the whole firewall, with no hidden spots. pfSense is great, however, it requires a lot of manual work and has no Cloud Connect or easy management from an MSP's perspective. Palo Alto is another option that's great, but their price point isn't for everyone, especially for medium and small businesses; a $10,000 investment doesn't necessarily fit into most budgets. UniFi is another product we've started to use more alongside Fortinet FortiGate, as they have almost all features without a license, with advanced rules that are relatively inexpensive compared to Fortinet FortiGate's $1,500 a year. Fortinet FortiGate and UniFi are the two firewalls we primarily deal with. My opinion is that UniFi has better integration and oversight of the environments compared to Fortinet FortiGate.
Albert-Wang - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Consultant at SiS Technologies
Comprehensive cloud security with robust threat protection and VPN capabilities
Hillstone CloudEdge is compatible with all the mainstream public cloud providers, such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Alibaba Cloud. This solution has a unified OS system for security products, ensuring that the virtual firewall has similar features to the on-premise solutions. Important features include a VPN, VTech VPN, SSL VPN, QoS, antivirus, threat protection, and sandbox capabilities.
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 technical support in our region is excellent."
"Our company uses the solution to prevent traffic that is not supposed to be traveling through our firewalls, and when we find log issues, we easily fine tune the IPS to block that traffic so it cannot penetrate our environment."
"I like several features that this product has, such as antivirus and internet navigation inspection, and it is also simple to use."
"I think that the UTM features are the most value, as it truly protects my infrastructure."
"FortiGate SWG's most valuable feature is integration with vulnerability management."
"The system is very easy to scale."
"The most effective features for threat prevention are the IPS, content filter, and SD-WAN capabilities."
"Overall, this is a very good solution and I personally haven't had any problems with it."
"Hillstone CloudEdge is compatible with all the mainstream public cloud providers, such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Alibaba Cloud."
"I would recommend this product to any business that wants to protect its cloud environment, cloud server, or on-premises virtual servers."
"The solution is very easy to download and configure. The initial setup was very easy. The technical support is very good."
"I'd rate the solution nine out of ten."
"For other security professions who are looking for something which is low in cost that does microsegmentation, they should look at ShieldX."
"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."
"It has helped us tighten our security posture. Now, staff can only access things that they should be accessing."
"We were able to see what devices are talking to each other, giving us more visibility."
"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."
"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

"There were quite a few problems with the stability of the system."
"The price of FortiGate should be reduced because there are some other leading products that are cheaper."
"The union with the two technologies, endpoint, and firewall, doesn't work well."
"Overall, the integration could be better."
"It is somewhat expensive compared to other solutions such as Sophos."
"I would like some automated custom reporting."
"The integration with third-party tools may be something that they should work on."
"Its technical support could be better."
"There is room for improvement in AI features, particularly for zero-day attacks and providing maintenance guidance."
"The solution needs more granular level reporting on system usage."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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

"It's expensive, but compared to the competition it's okay."
"The pricing for this solution is reasonable."
"Easy to understand licensing requirements."
"The price is highly competitive when compared to other brands that offer similar functionality."
"The pricing depends on the FortiGate model we are using, ranging from $3,000 to $20,000 US dollars."
"The pricing is fair."
"A year or two years back, its price was competitive and reasonable. That was one of the reasons that people easily switched to Fortinet. Over the last two years, the prices have increased drastically. However, the prices of others have also increased. An advantage is there from the price point but not as much as it was previously."
"The solution is offered as an annual license."
Information not available
"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 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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Comms Service Provider
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
7%
No data available
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business369
Midsize Enterprise139
Large Enterprise195
No data available
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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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 ...
What needs improvement with Hillstone CloudEdge?
There is room for improvement in AI features, particularly for zero-day attacks and providing maintenance guidance. M...
What is your primary use case for Hillstone CloudEdge?
Our primary use case is to provide cloud-based security solutions for customers using public cloud platforms. We dist...
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Also Known As

Fortinet FortiGate Next-Generation Firewall
No data available
APEIRO, ShieldX APEIRO
 

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
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