"The most important feature is the intensive way you can troubleshoot Cisco Firepower Firewalls. You can go to the bit level to see why traffic is not handled in the correct way, and the majority of the time it's a networking issue and not a firewall issue. You can solve any problem without Cisco TAC help, because you can go very deeply under the hood to find out how traffic is flowing and whether it is not flowing as expected. That is something I have never seen with other brands."
"You do not have to do everything through a command line which makes it a lot easier to apply rules."
"The customer service/technical support is very good with this solution."
"Another benefit has been user integration. We try to integrate our policies so that we can create policies based on active users. We can create policies based on who is accessing a resource instead of just IP addresses and ports."
"Firepower NGFW has improved my organization in several ways. Before, we were trying to stamp out security threats and issues, it was a one-off type of way to attack it. I spent a lot of manpower trying to track down the individual issues or flare-ups that we would see. With Cisco's Firepower Management, we're able to have that push up to basically one monitor and one UI and be able to track that and stop threats immediately. It also gives us a little more granularity on what those threats might be."
"Provides good integrations and reporting."
"Firepower has reduced our firewall operational costs by about 25 percent."
"There are no issues that we are aware of. It does its job silently in the background."
"The most valuable feature is the Posture Assessment."
"The feature that I have found the most useful is that it meets all our requirements technically."
"Using Palo Alto Networks Panorama, we were able to deploy a single point of management and visualization of the firewall infrastructure in cloud, on-premise and integrated with Azure to automate scale up. Its security features, i.e. anti-malware, threat prevention, URL Filtering, VPN, and antivirus are the most valuable. The ID-User integrated with AD and 2FA features are also very useful to provide secure access to servers and some users in the company. "
"Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is very easy to use."
"With the improved visibility we now have, the traffic is being properly monitored, which means that we are better able to manage it. These are improvements that we saw very quickly."
"The VM series has an advantage over the physical version because we are able to change the sources that the machine has, such as the amount of available RAM."
"The most valuable feature is that you can launch it in a very short time. You don't have to wait for the hardware to arrive and get it staged and installed. From that perspective, it is easy to launch. It is also scalable."
"The Palo Alto VM-Series is nice because I can move the firewalls easily."
"Sangfor NGAF works accordingly with our customers. The solution has good performance, easy to use, and integrates well with the endpoints."
"While the features are not dissimilar to other brands, configuration is much more simple, which works out great for Indonesian people."
"We've found the technical support to be helpful."
"Sangfor has the best capabilities for securing connections, securing web browsers, securing servers, and general threat protection."
"Sangfor NGAF specializes in ransomware detection and helps to protect our network from ransomware threats and malware."
"The most valuable features are the WAN optimization, the internet access gateway (IAG), and the central console, which allows us to implement on their firewall."
"Sangfor is a good solution that provides a WAF and firewall solution. Most other vendors, like Sophos and Fortinet and Cisco, only provide one solution. That's a valuable feature of Sangfor."
"In four steps one can configure the entire firewall."
"The initial setup can be a bit complex for those unfamiliar with the solution."
"One of my colleagues is using the firewall as an IPS, but he is worried about Firepower's performance... With the 10 Gb devices, when it gets to 5 Gbps, the CPU usage goes up a lot and he cannot manage the IPS."
"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."
"Cisco Firepower is not completely integrated with Active Directory. We are trying to use Active Directory to restrict users by using some security groups that are not integrated within the Cisco Firepower module. This is the main issue that we are facing."
"I think they need to review their whole UI because it feels like it was created by a whole bunch of different teams of developers who didn't fully talk to each other. The net policy screen is just a mess. It should look like the firewall policy screen, and they should both act the same, but they don't. I feel like it's two different buildings or programming, who don't talk to each other, and that really annoys me."
"Report generation is an area that should be improved."
"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."
"Cisco makes horrible UIs, so the interface is something that should be improved."
"Integrative capabilities with other solutions should be addressed."
"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."
"The user interface could use some improvement."
"The one issue that I didn't like is that the SNMP integration with interfaces didn't record the interface counters."
"In the next release, I would like to see better integration between the endpoints and the firewalls."
"They made only a halfhearted attempt to put in DLP (Data Loss Prevention)."
"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."
"Palo Alto is that it is really bad when it comes to technical support."
"An area for improvement would be the number of ports defined on the box. In the next release, I would like them to develop their provisioning stage of enrolling end devices."
"The firewall system needs gradual improvements because there are more threats and challenges every day."
"I believe that IAM and NGFW need to merge into a single box, instead of there being two separate box solutions."
"Lacks consistency in terms of filtering certain websites and applications."
"Sangfor could improve their interface capacity on the 5100 series model and upgrade their hardware from one gig to 10 gig. This would improve the overall throughput."
"They need to increase the number of ports in the firewall."
"The web interface needs to be improved, making it more user-friendly."
"The solution has too many bugs and these slow down the implementation."
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Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is ranked 10th in Firewalls with 13 reviews while Sangfor NGAF is ranked 23rd in Firewalls with 9 reviews. Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is rated 8.6, while Sangfor NGAF is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Palo Alto Networks VM-Series writes "An excellent solution for the right situations and businesses". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sangfor NGAF writes "A scalable and comprehensive solution that specializes in ransomware detection". Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is most compared with Azure Firewall, Cisco ASA Firewall, Fortinet FortiGate, Juniper SRX and Check Point CloudGuard Network Security, whereas Sangfor NGAF is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate, Sophos XG, Fortinet FortiOS, Sophos UTM and Meraki MX. See our Palo Alto Networks VM-Series vs. Sangfor NGAF report.
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