McAfee Total Protection for Data Loss Prevention vs WatchGuard Firebox comparison

McAfee and WatchGuard are both solutions in the Data Loss Prevention (DLP) category. McAfee is ranked #27 with an average rating of 8.0, while WatchGuard is ranked #11 with an average rating of 7.6. Additionally, 76% of McAfee users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 95% of WatchGuard users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Aug 5, 2025

McAfee Total Protection for Data Loss Prevention and WatchGuard Firebox compete in the security software category. WatchGuard appears to have an advantage due to its comprehensive feature set, including threat detection and layered security, justifying its higher cost.

Features: McAfee Total Protection for Data Loss Prevention provides strong data protection, effective user control, and virtual machine security with its USB control and incident reporting features. WatchGuard Firebox offers intuitive management, robust VPN capabilities, and strong security measures like URL filtering and intrusion detection complemented by seamless integration abilities.

Room for Improvement: McAfee requires improvements in pricing and support. Its interface can be considered confusing and resource-intensive, needing better modern virtual desktop integration and enhanced threat detection. WatchGuard could improve its reporting features and user interface, offering more third-party integration options and simplifying its cloud-based management.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Both products offer versatile deployment options, with WatchGuard standing out for additional cloud deployment flexibility. McAfee’s support experiences mixed reviews, often requiring third-party assistance, whereas WatchGuard provides consistent support and ease of deployment, which enhances its integration in various environments.

Pricing and ROI: McAfee Total Protection for Data Loss Prevention is viewed as expensive with layered costs, despite some users reporting good ROI. In contrast, WatchGuard Firebox is considered competitively priced for small to midsize businesses, offering good ROI through effective security management, despite its initially higher cost.

To learn more, read our detailed McAfee Total Protection for Data Loss Prevention vs. WatchGuard Firebox Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

McAfee Total Protection for Data Loss Prevention vs. WatchGuard Firebox

September 2025

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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

Featured Reviews

Vasu Gala

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.

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Kamal Abdelrahman

Country Manager at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Has provided strong data protection capabilities while offering valuable policy customization options

I find unique value in McAfee Total Protection for Data Loss Prevention specifically in controlling the application from a DLP perspective; when a computer downloads a package, you can understand where it downloaded this package from, and you can create a policy regarding the source of the download. This is actually an important and valuable feature, specifically in enterprises where they download, upload, and export critical reports from their business applications. I appreciate the customized policy features in McAfee Total Protection for Data Loss Prevention because we didn't find these features in other competing applications. This may be a requirement from business customers who have important or critical applications; they expect to understand that these are critical files because this is a critical application. This cannot be done although we are with Trellix or McAfee solution.

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Rajesh Makwana

Regional Pre-Sales Engineer at Roundrobin Tech

Efficient bandwidth management and secure network access with a strong firewall

The primary use case of the Firebox mainly revolves around bandwidth management, unnecessary web blocking, application control, and protection against brute force attacks. It is also implemented for load balancing, SD-WAN, and branch-to-branch connectivity from one location to another. We also use…

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution is stable."

"It is easy to manage, and it doesn't need much knowledge from the team. It is a stable device, and there are many features that are included out of the box."

"Provides good firewall security and has great VPN features."

"The reliability of Fortinet FortiGate is through the roof, we're experiencing 99.999% availability consistently."

"The overall features of Fortinet FortiGate SWG are good."

"We purchased Fortinet because of the pricing, its functionality, because it met our requirements, and the total cost of ownership over five years was quite reasonable. In the market, Fortinet is rated quite well."

"It is very flexible to use."

"There are great templates, so you don't have to customize them if you don't want to. You do have the option to custom create some folders and some reports, however, with what is there, you don't really need to go through extra effort, as they already give you a lot of predefined views of reports and so forth."

More Fortinet FortiGate pros

"The most valuable feature is the ability to control access to USB drives and other external devices."

"This solution has a rich set of policies."

"It can scale."

"The solution is very user-friendly and valuable."

"Enables customization of file types and for different scenarios."

"The most valuable feature of McAfee Total Protection for Data Loss Prevention is data loss prevention."

"What I like about McAfee Total Protection is that it's working. I also like that it doesn't require any specific knowledge to set up."

"The overall features of McAfee Total Protection for Data Loss Prevention are very good."

More McAfee Total Protection for Data Loss Prevention pros

"Some of the most valuable features of the Firebox include web blocking, application control, protection against brute force attacks, load balancing, SD-WAN, and VPN support. These features help us manage and secure our network efficiently."

"Their centralized console simplifies management for organizations with multiple Fireboxes."

"The most valuable feature, in my opinion, is the dimension logging platform and the network traffic filtering."

"This product offers great protection using the default settings."

"All of the features have been valuable. There's nothing on my M270 that I'm not using. If you have remote access, you can see how many users are coming from the outside world to be connected to the systems, through the virus systems that we have behind the firewall, in order to gain access to their files and do their work. We can also see how long they stay online and whether these connections are closed forcefully or for any other reasons, such as a glitch or some kind of misbehavior, to see if internet traffic is optimized and if that particular traffic is under company policies, concerning which websites were visited."

"The pricing of the solution is okay. It's not the most expensive option."

"Because we bought two firewalls... we need a central place to manage the policies and deploy them to both devices. It's good that it provides a system management console that is able to manipulate and manage policies in one place and deploy them to different locations."

"I like intrusion detection the most."

More WatchGuard Firebox pros

Cons

"Fortinet FortiGate could improve the user interface. There should be more functionality and options through the GUI."

"One drawback of Fortinet FortiGate is that they provide two types of models: one with a hard disk and another without. The model without a hard disk has very low ROM where you can store very few logs, after which you need to upload it to the cloud or purchase a firewall with SSD. That's the only drawback."

"One issue is that they have retired SSL VPN for existing devices. This causes significant effort for us to change customer setups."

"Its reporting can be improved. Sometimes, I don't get proper reports."

"There are some tiny bugs that sometimes affect the operations. In the past revision of it, there was a bug. Because of the bug, we had to downgrade the version. It happened only with the last revision."

"Fortinet's support team consists of a huge networking team, because of which there is a delay in response at times."

"The built-in logging and reporting is limited without FortiAnalyzer."

"The tool is expensive for small businesses, making it an area where the tool can improve the product by making it available at a cheaper rate."

More Fortinet FortiGate cons

"The solution needs an easier integration in heterogeneous and dynamic environments."

"The product fails to offer automatic classification capabilities to its users."

"The solution needs to be a one-stop protection shop. And yet, the DLP isn't strong. Anyone can break it quite easily."

"The UI needs to be simplified."

"The licensing cost for McAfee Total Protection could be cheaper, but apart from that, I don't need anything else. The software has what I need."

"The product uses a lot of resources and because of this it is not always a good solution for every situation."

"The user interface is messy and could be simplified."

"When this solution is used it requires a lot of administration because the users can have difficulties using it and require assistance. The administrators are continuously modifying the policies for the users. Technical support will be used frequently."

More McAfee Total Protection for Data Loss Prevention cons

"The performance of the solution's processor needs to be faster."

"There are a couple of things I wished that it would do, but I can't think of those off the top of my head."

"The solution can improve by adding a feature to tag a MAC address of a computer system in the policy and more IP configuration settings."

"They could expand the amount of applications that are on the list, but it's pretty intensive anyway, so it's pretty good."

"It's very difficult to find a reseller of WatchGuard Firebox to purchase a license"

"One other shortcoming is that there is no backup for it. We really haven't figured out how we might solve that problem. We may want to put a duplicate in... With WatchGuard, we just have the one box. If that were to fail, we'd probably be really hurting."

"Websense is an application that monitors and filters internet traffic. Websense was derived from WatchGuard. But when you go to WatchGuard to actually implement that particular feature, you have to use some type of additional feature and you have to pay for it, unfortunately. I think it should be free or free in the WatchGuard box itself, as an option. It would be nice if they didn't charge us for that."

"The solution isn't what I would consider feature-rich."

More WatchGuard Firebox cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is affordable. Palo Alto is much more expensive than Fortinet."

"The solution could be better priced."

"This is not a cheap solution but it isn't expensive, either. It's a good solution for the right price."

"It's one of the more expensive brands. The 100 series costs around $4,000. They are similar in pricing to what you might get from Cisco solutions and probably other similar ones. They're not more expensive than other similar solutions, but they're certainly not cheaper either."

"The license is too expensive to renew. The license renewal process is also complex."

"It is an inexpensive solution."

"The licensing costs are very competitive."

"The product is expensive compared to one of its competitors."

More Fortinet FortiGate pricing and cost advice

"I would rate the solution's pricing a six out of ten."

"I'm paying the license for McAfee Total Protection yearly. It could be cheaper, but it's fine."

"The price of the solution could improve."

"Licensing fees are paid on a yearly basis."

"McAfee Total Protection for Data Loss Prevention is an expensive solution."

"The price of McAfee Total Protection for Data Loss Prevention is expensive. It is not the most expensive solution but it is typically 15 to 20 percent higher than other solutions. There is no additional cost to using McAfee Total Protection for Data Loss Prevention."

"The pricing seems expensive both for the license and the support."

"The price is high for this type of product."

More McAfee Total Protection for Data Loss Prevention pricing and cost advice

"Each one, for the primary unit, was $8,600 and the High Availability unit was $2,000. That's with three years of subscription and support and the Total Security Suite."

"The solution's most valuable feature is its pricing."

"The primary reason that we went with Firebox was its cost. It is very economical and it provided us with all the security functions that we were looking for at the time. And the throughput was more than what we required, so it was a very cost-effective device to deploy on our network."

"Firebox is priced reasonably."

"It's fair pricing, but it could always be reduced."

"WatchGuard had a very competitive price. It was only 10 to 20 percent more than a single instance device but with that extra cost it provided a second load balancing device... unlike other brands whose method of hardware and software licensing would have doubled our cost."

"They license it. When we buy it, we buy it with a three-year license. That's the most cost-effective way to do it. So, if you're going to buy it, then buy it with the three-year licensing."

"The cost was somewhere in the vicinity of $2,000 to $3,000 for each one..."

More WatchGuard Firebox pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

15%

Comms Service Provider

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Retailer

Non Profit

Computer Software Company

14%

Comms Service Provider

11%

Retailer

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	350
Midsize Enterprise	129
Large Enterprise	187

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	18
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	7

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	91
Midsize Enterprise	25
Large Enterprise	15

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...

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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...

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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 ...

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What do you like most about McAfee Total Protection for Data Loss Prevention?

The tool focuses on endpoints rather than networks. Endpoints cover everything. It wouldn't be possible to steal conf...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for McAfee Total Protection for Data Loss Prevention?

McAfee Total Protection for Data Loss Prevention is expensive.

See all answers

What needs improvement with McAfee Total Protection for Data Loss Prevention?

The product’s pricing could be cheaper.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for WatchGuard Firebox?

We are providing our services to all WatchGuard customers in the region.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for WatchGuard Firebox?

We just use it as a secondary WiFi device. We're a small office and we needed to set up a WiFi device for a few of ou...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for WatchGuard Firebox?

We're a hospital and we use it for developing our incoming and outgoing policies, and we also use it for VPN.

See all answers

Comparisons

Sophos XG vs Fortinet FortiGate

Compared 17% of the time

Cisco Secure Firewall vs Fortinet FortiGate

Compared 11% of the time

Netgate pfSense vs Fortinet FortiGate

Compared 9% of the time

Cisco Meraki MX vs Fortinet FortiGate

Compared 4% of the time

OPNsense vs Fortinet FortiGate

Compared 4% of the time

More Fortinet FortiGate Competitors

HP Wolf Security vs McAfee Total Protection for Data Loss Prevention

Compared 82% of the time

Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention vs McAfee Total Protection for Data Loss Prevention

Compared 4% of the time

Forcepoint Data Loss Prevention vs McAfee Total Protection for Data Loss Prevention

Compared 4% of the time

Symantec Data Loss Prevention vs McAfee Total Protection for Data Loss Prevention

Compared 3% of the time

Digital Guardian vs McAfee Total Protection for Data Loss Prevention

Compared 3% of the time

More McAfee Total Protection for Data Loss Prevention Competitors

OPNsense vs WatchGuard Firebox

Compared 7% of the time

SonicWall TZ vs WatchGuard Firebox

Compared 5% of the time

Netgate pfSense vs WatchGuard Firebox

Compared 5% of the time

Sophos XG vs WatchGuard Firebox

Compared 5% of the time

Sophos XGS vs WatchGuard Firebox

Compared 4% of the time

More WatchGuard Firebox Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Fortinet FortiGate

September 2025

Download Fortinet FortiGate product report

Buyer's Guide

McAfee Total Protection for Data Loss Prevention

August 2025

McAfee Total Protection for Data Loss Prevention report

Download McAfee Total Protection for Data Loss Prevention product report

Buyer's Guide

WatchGuard Firebox

August 2025

Download WatchGuard Firebox product report

Also Known As

No data available

McAfee Total Protection for Data, McAfee Total Protection for DLP, Total Protection for Data, Intel Security Total Protection for Data

WatchGuard Threat Detection and Response, WatchGuard Application Control, WatchGuard Data Loss Prevention, WatchGuard Gateway AntiVirus, WatchGuard Intrusion Prevention Service

Overview

Fortinet FortiGate excels in providing integrated VPN, firewalling, and Unified Threat Management (UTM) with centralized management and high availability. It supports remote access and comprehensive threat protection, making it a preferred choice for securing networks.

Fortinet FortiGate offers a robust security platform with features such as strong intrusion prevention, application control, and web filtering. Its integration with Active Directory and SD-WAN functionality provides scalable solutions for large networks. Users appreciate its ease of use through centralized management interfaces, ensuring robust security with flexible configurations. However, FortiGate could enhance its graphical interface and technical support responsiveness, address firmware bugs and costly licensing, improve logging, integrate better with third-party tools, and strengthen scalability and memory for log storage. Complexity in configuration and the need for intuitive features are noted challenges, and there's a demand for advanced security, zero-trust capabilities, and AI integration.

What are the key features of Fortinet FortiGate?

VPN: Secure remote access and connectivity.
Firewalling: Protects networks from unauthorized access and attacks.
UTM: Offers a comprehensive approach to threat management.
SD-WAN: Optimizes traffic routing for efficient network performance.
Web Filtering: Controls and monitors web access and ensures Internet security.

What benefits or ROI should be considered?

Centralized Management: Simplifies administration and monitoring.
High Availability: Ensures consistent security and network availability.
Scalability: Adapts to the needs of growing networks.
Comprehensive Threat Protection: Provides robust security measures.
Ease of Use: Minimizes the complexity of security management.

Fortinet FortiGate is widely implemented across industries like education, finance, and government. Companies use it for firewall protection, VPN, and SD-WAN capabilities, ensuring secure perimeter and data center security. It facilitates remote access management and traffic routing optimization, offering reliable security and connectivity solutions.

Fortinet

McAfee Total Protection for Data solution suite protects your data using a combination of powerful encryption, access control, and user-behavior monitoring.

McAfee

WatchGuard Firebox is a high-performance firewall known for its ease of setup, offering robust security with layered protection and centralized management capabilities.

WatchGuard Firebox stands out for its intuitive management and high throughput, addressing security needs with features like VPN, web filtering, and threat detection. Its centralized control and reporting abilities, along with Active Directory integration, make it popular among varied organizations. Its user-friendly interface and ongoing updates enhance usability and reliability. However, there's a call for better cloud-based administration, scalability, and improved integration with third-party vendors.

What are the key features of WatchGuard Firebox?

Ease of Setup: Quick and straightforward installation process.
GUI: User-friendly graphical interface for simplified navigation.
VPN Features: Secure and efficient virtual private network management.
Web Filtering: Advanced filtering for safer browsing experiences.
Threat Detection: Proactive monitoring and detection of cyber threats.

What benefits or ROI should be evaluated?

Centralized Control: Streamlined management from a single point.
High Throughput: Efficient data handling and processing capacity.
Stable Performance: Consistent and reliable operational functionality.
Active Directory Integration: Seamless connection with user directories.
Customer Service: Strong support service for customer inquiries.

WatchGuard Firebox is implemented across industries to secure internet gateways and protect data in multi-site businesses. Its applications span from Unified Threat Management (UTM) and intrusion prevention to compliance support in business environments requiring secure connectivity through VPNs.

WatchGuard

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

Kleberg Bank

Ellips, Diecutstickers.com, Clarke Energy, NCR, Wrest Park, Homeslice Pizza, Fortessa Tableware Solutions, The Phoenix Residence

Buyer's Guide

McAfee Total Protection for Data Loss Prevention vs. WatchGuard Firebox

September 2025

Free Report: McAfee Total Protection for Data Loss Prevention vs. WatchGuard Firebox

Find out what your peers are saying about McAfee Total Protection for Data Loss Prevention vs. WatchGuard Firebox and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.

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