We performed a comparison between Meraki MX and ShieldX based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Firewalls solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The feature I like most is the SD-WAN. It allows you to manage more than one ISP at the same time. And there is a high-availability mode, so if one of your ISPs is down, you still have a backup."
"FortiGate is flexible and easy to use."
"FortiGate Secure SD-WAN includes best-of-breed next-generation firewall (NGFW) security, SD-WAN, advanced routing, and WAN optimization capabilities, delivering a security-driven networking WAN edge transformation in a unified offering."
"The next-generation firewall is great."
"The most valuable features are simplicity, management, and that it's constantly evolving."
"Fortinet has a very good solution for Secure SD-WAN. One very good feature is that they have robust and simple FortiOS through which they provide all solutions. That's their strength. There's not much complexity involved with the Secure SD-WAN solution of Fortinet as compared to Cisco's solution, which has a lot of flexibility but complexity also comes with that flexibility."
"I have found Fortinet FortiGate to be scalable."
"The most valuable features are SD-WAN, application control, IPS control, and FortiSandbox."
"It is very easy to configure."
"What I like best about Meraki MX is that it's easy to deploy remotely. The product works. It has automatic updates. I also like that Meraki MX is a brilliant device. You turn it on, stick the key in there, activate it, and then you're done. Meraki MX does what my customers need at the end of the day, so I also like that."
"Ease of management is the best thing about the solution."
"Easy to deploy with a simple configuration."
"The cloud management system is really valuable."
"I am happy with the technical support for the solution. I rate the technical support a ten out of ten."
"Its ease of configuration and management is very useful for us and for other companies that don't have an onsite IT person. It is easy to configure and easy to manage. It is easy to configure the VPN with the Auto VPN feature."
"The security level of our organization has changed by using Meraki MX Firewalls. We didn't have the UTM before, but now we have sandboxing, tray scanning, attack preventions and monitorization. Our security level has improved."
"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."
"It has helped us tighten our security posture. Now, staff can only access things that they should be accessing."
"...It takes the exact same policies that you would apply to your on-premise environment and enables you to simply apply them to the cloud. It becomes one policy for both on-prem and for the cloud."
"The most valuable feature is the automatic scaling. With its microservices, it scales both up and down, depending on traffic and throughput."
"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."
"We were able to see what devices are talking to each other, giving us more visibility."
"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."
"The graphical user interface of Fortinet's FortiGate product does not function well with text-based interfaces."
"Its reporting can be improved. Sometimes, I don't get proper reports."
"If I had any criticism that I would give FortiGate, it would be that they need to stop changing their logging format. Every time we do a firmware upgrade, it is a massive issue on the SIM. Parsers have to be rebuilt. Even the FortiGate guys came in and said that they don't play well in the sandbox."
"I would like to see more advanced developments of a wireless controller in the future."
"The platform's interface could improve."
"The Web-filter in this solution is not very good."
"One of the features that I would like to have is to do with endpoint production, it should be integrated. For example, the firewall gets notified of any kind of forensic event that needs to be done, such as if there is a ransomware attack and how it originated, all those records have to be available from the firewall, which is not."
"The license renewal process, annual renewal price, and the web application firewall features should be improved."
"You cannot use switching behaviors as you see on the Meraki switch."
"Load balancing options and ability to manage a couple of Internet connections."
"We have been having a problem with the VPN. When the energy goes down and is back again, the VPN link doesn't get established. We have to manually turn off the modems and other pieces of equipment and manually establish the VPN. It has been around one month since we have been having this problem, and we don't have enough support from Meraki to solve the problem."
"You can only have one tunnel in the whole infrastructure — one tunnel with one device."
"The product is quite complex to set up."
"Management can be improved in Meraki MX."
"As far as what needs to be improved — nothing really comes to mind. It does what we need it to do."
"We could have more reporting options and the ability to send alarms to the administrator."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"I would like better reports and in-depth reporting."
"We are having some issues with their LDAP and integrating it with the Active Directory. We can't seem to set it up."
Earn 20 points
Meraki MX is ranked 2nd in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 57 reviews while ShieldX is ranked 47th in Firewalls. Meraki MX is rated 8.2, while ShieldX is rated 9.2. The top reviewer of Meraki MX writes "Cost-effective, simplified, easy to manage, and reliable with advanced security features and granular visibility". On the other hand, the top reviewer of ShieldX writes "Proactively monitors, blocks, and reports what it has blocked; and self-updates meaning there is zero maintenance". Meraki MX is most compared with Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Cisco Secure Firewall, Sophos XG, SonicWall TZ and Netgate pfSense, whereas ShieldX is most compared with . See our Meraki MX vs. ShieldX report.
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