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Hillstone E-Series vs Palo Alto Networks VM-Series comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 16, 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

Fortinet FortiGate
Sponsored
Ranking in Firewalls
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
581
Ranking in other categories
Secure Web Gateways (SWG) (2nd), 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 E-Series
Ranking in Firewalls
39th
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
SSL VPN (9th), Enterprise Infrastructure VPN (24th)
Palo Alto Networks VM-Series
Ranking in Firewalls
12th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
66
Ranking in other categories
Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) (11th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Firewalls category, the mindshare of Fortinet FortiGate is 18.7%, down from 20.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Hillstone E-Series is 0.4%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is 1.5%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Firewalls Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Fortinet FortiGate18.7%
Palo Alto Networks VM-Series1.5%
Hillstone E-Series0.4%
Other79.4%
Firewalls
 

Featured Reviews

Vasu Gala - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager, Information Technology Operation/Presales at TechMonarch
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.
TahirMahmood - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager at Zubair Feeds
Offers good features like URL filtering, IPS, and IDS to users
We received an update for the tool in July. The update was provided for the tool as there was a problem with the firewall, where too much memory was consumed, and the firewall was hanging a lot. When we updated the tool's features, everything became okay. The tool only had some memory-related problems. It took the tool a month to fix the issues.
AV
Cyber security consultant at L&T Technology Services
Enhance cybersecurity for large enterprises using advanced threat management
An improvement could be the integration of security intelligence with Palo Alto cloud via APIs. This would allow IOCs, domains, and hash values to be automatically entered, reducing manual entry. Integration with CSIRT across all use levels would make it easier for administrators to stay updated on the blocked entities without manual intervention.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"There is an easy process for configuring it, and it is straightforward to implement the device from scratch."
"I would advise others considering or evaluating the Fortinet FortiGate to buy it."
"It is a stable solution compared to other vendors."
"Fortinet FortiGate has positively impacted our organization by preventing hackers from accessing our network."
"The price-to-performance ratio for using Fortinet FortiGate is always better compared to any other competitor, so they are rated better than the likes of Check Point or Palo Alto."
"It is a good product. It does what we want it to do so. I didn't find many false-positives or things like that. We mainly use the IPS and URL filtering features, and they are pretty good."
"The most valuable features are SD-WAN, application control, IPS control, and FortiSandbox."
"The initial setup of Fortinet FortiGate was straightforward."
"Five out of five ROI."
"The most valuable feature of the Hillstone E-Series is its user-friendliness."
"Working with the Hillstone E-Series has, from a remote perspective, allowed me to give my clients a secure connectivity."
"The installation is easy, we have not had any complaints from our customers."
"I am impressed with the application filtering feature."
"The most valuable features of the Hillstone E-Series are its hardware capacity, innovation, and the throughput that the hardware can take."
"This solution has two main features that we find very valuable; a threat-intelligence option, and a web/application filtering option. The technical support team are very good and very quick."
"The initial setup was straightforward. It only took a few hours to deploy."
"It provides complete security posture from end-to-end. This has given us better visibility into what our security aspects are."
"App-ID and User-ID have repeatedly shown value in securing business critical systems."
"It is very stable. It is fairly easy to use."
"Centralized management is valuable because it allows us to configure settings in one location and apply them across all three locations."
"The tool's cloud version makes application migration easy."
"The most valuable feature is the Posture Assessment."
"It is nice to have a rock solid security platform that we can count on."
"It offers robust solutions, making it valuable to my customers."
 

Cons

"Fortinet FortiGate SWG's costs need improvement."
"The main aspect of FortiGate that could be improved is load balancing. Our management team does not want to buy another appliance for only load balancing."
"Fortinet FortiGate SWG can be expensive for some customers."
"In terms of pricing, Fortinet needs to do more to compete effectively."
"To stay ahead of the competition Fortinet FortiGate IPS needs to think about how to adjust pricing."
"They could improve the response time and quality of support."
"We also have FortiAnalyzer deployed here, so we want to enable the soft functionality of FortiGate and built-in compression for a firewall VPN use case. We want the ability to deploy a gateway for HTTPS enabled on this firewall. It is currently only for use in our headquarters."
"The support team for Fortinet FortiGate needs to be more customer friendly."
"The tool provides just a general report. It does not provide a granular report. Hence, the tool should work on its reporting feature."
"The current usage reporting is very basic."
"Having frequent live webinars on a monthly basis would really help."
"The tool only had some memory-related problems."
"I am not sure if this solution offers active directory integration. Adding that feature will definitely be an advantage."
"The tool needs to improve its price."
"Support from Hillstone E-Series has a shortcoming that needs improvement."
"SSL VPN license cost is not cheap."
"In the next release, I would like to see better integration between the endpoints and the firewalls."
"It would be good if the common features work consistently in physical and virtual environments. There was an integration issue in the virtual deployment where it didn't report the interface counters, and we had to upgrade to the latest version, whereas the same thing has been working in the physical deployment for ages now. It seems that it was because of Azure. We were using VMware before, and we didn't have any such issues. We do see such small issues where we expect things to work, but they don't because of some incompatibilities. There also seems to be a limitation on how to do high availability in a virtualized environment. All features should be consistently available in physical and virtual environments. It is not always easy to integrate Palo Alto in the network management system. We would like to be able to compare two network management systems. They can maybe allow monitoring an interface through the GUI to create a reference or do a baseline check about whether your network monitoring system is actually giving you the correct traffic figures. You need traffic figures to be able to recognize the trends and plan the capacity."
"It would be helpful if we had a direct number for the support manager or the supporting engineer. That would be better than having to email every time because there would be less wait."
"There is no proper support channel to follow up on cases."
"We feel that the setup was complex. So, we asked the tech team about the setup process. They explained how to deploy it in the right way, which made it very simple."
"There are some deficiencies in Palo Alto Networks VM-Series. Having those features missing, we are not proposing Palo Alto Networks VM-Series to all customers."
"Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is a complex product to work with."
"There are some delays that I have observed when my company communicates with Palo Alto's support engineers."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price for the Fortinet FortiGate is reasonable. Secure SD-WAN is free of charge. If you have their firewall, it's free of charge. It's very tempting."
"If you purchase a one-year subscription with the hardware and then you want to renew for the second year, it is very costly."
"Its pricing is good. The advantages of Fortinet FortiGate over its competitors include good pricing and meeting our requirements at a lower cost."
"There is a license to use Fortinet FortiGate."
"Fortinet is reasonable in pricing and licensing. Overall, FortiGate is affordable. The licensing fee can be a little high, depending on the budget for your project."
"The value is the capability of having multiple services with one unique license, not having the limitation per user licensing schema, like other vendors."
"The price of Fortinet FortiGate is reasonable."
"I think price-wise, the solution is totally reasonable since it has many products to serve, starting from small homes to massive scale sites."
"The tool's pricing is reasonable. It depends on the model. The product's pricing is around 600 USD. You need to buy a software license to activate the features. You need to pay around 150 USD for that."
"Hillstone's pricing is economical and neither very high nor very low."
"The licensing model is very complex with many subcategories of licenses you can purchase. They could make it more simplified for customers to understand."
"The cost per year for licensing, and hardware, is approximately $850 for the basic plan."
"Palo Alto definitely needs to be more competitive compared to other products. The problem that I have faced is that the price of licensing is very high and not very competitive."
"Sometimes, it's cheaper to buy a new firewall with licensing instead of renewing the licenses of an old firewall."
"The box, if you do not want to buy the threat prevention license in the box, you can buy it only with the support license. It is for the support of the hardware. It works like a simple firewall. It integrates what it calls user IDs and application IDs. If you do not buy any other license, only the firewall, Palo Alto will also help you improve a lot of your security."
"For what you get, it does do what it says. It is a good value for an enterprise firewall.​"
"I know Palo Alto is not cheap. They have been telling me, the members of the finance team, it is not a cheap solution. It is a solution whose target is that no matter how big your organization is, small, medium, or large, it is about the maturity of your security team or infrastructure team whom you want to work with."
"Because the solution was getting deployed on AWS, it was the best place to go and it was available there."
"The pricing and licensing of this product on AWS should be from $1.28/hr or $4,500.00/yr. Then, it would be a good price for the performance that it delivers."
"We found purchasing process the product on the AWS Marketplace to be very good."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
12%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
6%
Comms Service Provider
16%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Educational Organization
7%
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
University
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business357
Midsize Enterprise133
Large Enterprise189
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise1
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business29
Midsize Enterprise17
Large Enterprise24
 

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 ...
What needs improvement with Hillstone E-Series?
We received an update for the tool in July. The update was provided for the tool as there was a problem with the fire...
What is your primary use case for Hillstone E-Series?
I use the solution in my company for site-to-site VPN, SSL VPNs, URL filtering, IPS, IDS and all the other features w...
What advice do you have for others considering Hillstone E-Series?
Our company did not use the tool's micro-segmentation features. There were no issues while integrating the tool. I ha...
Features comparison between Palo Alto and Fortinet firewalls
In the best tradition of these questions, Feature-wise both are quite similar, but each has things it's better at, it...
How does Azure Firewall compare with Palo Alto Networks VM Series?
Both products are very stable and easily scalable. The setup of Azure Firewall is easy and very user-friendly and the...
 

Also Known As

Fortinet FortiGate Next-Generation Firewall
No data available
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
Bank of China Macao, Instituto Tecnológico Bolivariano, Ministry of Labor in San Salvador, FEDCO
Warren Rogers Associates
Find out what your peers are saying about Hillstone E-Series vs. Palo Alto Networks VM-Series and other solutions. Updated: February 2026.
881,665 professionals have used our research since 2012.