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Palo Alto Networks VM-Series vs ShieldX 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
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
380
Ranking in other categories
Firewalls (2nd), Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) Solutions (1st), WAN Edge (1st)
Palo Alto Networks VM-Series
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
64
Ranking in other categories
Firewalls (13th), Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) (9th)
ShieldX
Average Rating
9.2
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
Microsegmentation Software (14th)
 

Mindshare comparison

Firewalls
Microsegmentation Software
 

Featured Reviews

Vasu Gala - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
RonnieYazdani - PeerSpot reviewer
User-friendly CLI and efficient dashboard streamline operations with robust security features
I find Palo Alto Networks VM-Series easy to deploy, and none of my customers have had significant complaints. My customers have high certifications provided by Palo Alto Networks. The friendly dashboard and the ability to easily command and use the CLI make Palo Alto Networks VM-Series a better product. It offers robust solutions, making it valuable to my customers.
MP
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

"I only deal with it from a security analyst's point of view. I don't really get into the features of the actual FortiGate. From the security point of view, it works, and it does its job."
"Fortinet FortiGate has a very simple configuration, is easy to set up, and includes SD-WAN features at no additional cost."
"I'm pretty happy with its reliability. It is also very scalable."
"The combined license for the network, the next-generation firewall, and the integration with SD-WAN for all branches are what I consider to be the best features. It's effective for multi-branch customers."
"The pricing is great and very reasonable."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiGate are its SD-WAN capabilities, such as dynamic routing, and other features, including security options such as antivirus, IPS, and IDS—all integrated into one device."
"There are lots of features and most of them are deployed for internet security. Users are protected if they accidentally go to some malicious sites."
"On a scale of one to ten, I rate this solution 10 out of 10."
"Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is very easy to use."
"I have not actually called their support line, because we have a direct contact to a senior engineer in the company for any issues that we handle with them. I will say they are very responsive, and they do give you the information you need when you need it.​"
"It has the ability to create Palo Alto VM-series using software."
"The solution enables organizations to enforce policies."
"It offers a single pane of glass for all the different types of installations."
"It provides complete security posture from end-to-end. This has given us better visibility into what our security aspects are."
"Palo Alto offers excellent security, with features such as email scanning, malware protection, and efficient VPN and antivirus capabilities."
"The tool's cloud version makes application migration easy."
"The most valuable feature is the automatic scaling. With its microservices, it scales both up and down, depending on traffic and throughput."
"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 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."
"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."
"It has helped us tighten our security posture. Now, staff can only access things that they should be accessing."
"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."
 

Cons

"The area that Fortinet may improve is customer support. When you have an incident, situation, or open a case, the support is not as good as Cisco or other platforms I have tested."
"The captive portal could be improved."
"Their support can be better, and there should be better policies for immediate replacement in critical situations."
"I would rate Fortinet support a six out of ten. The immediate response is not that good, particularly when raising a critical or P1 ticket; they lag in the immediate response."
"Application management can be improved."
"The feedback that I have received is that the performance could be better, and the user experience is not as good compared to a previous solution we used. It could be more user-friendly. Of course, it still works fine for our operations."
"The graphical user interface of Fortinet's FortiGate product does not function well with text-based interfaces."
"At the moment, the main concern is the pricing and the type of licensing. Fortinet offers different types of licensing, and my idea is that the best approach is to have only one, two, or a maximum of three types of licensing."
"In the next release, I would like to see better integration of multi-factor authentication vendors."
"The tool is very costly."
"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."
"People are less aware of Palo Alto."
"Palo Alto should update their documentation to make it more readable and provide easier-to-follow instructions through videos."
"I find it difficult to reach technical support at Palo Alto Networks. Most customers go for partner-enabled support, which involves multiple layers, leading to delays."
"The reporting part of the product is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"The solution needs to improve its visibility. It's not straightforward to use. Understanding the policies, authorizations, and initializing features requires careful review. The product needs to offer proper training."
"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."
"I would like better reports and in-depth reporting."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"For the performance that we get, the price is reasonable. There are cheaper options, but they may not deliver the same kind of performance that we want. For the performance they provide, the price is acceptable."
"The price is really low. It's cheap in comparison to the cost of Cisco or CheckPoint, for example."
"The price of Fortinet FortiGate is reasonable for an SME."
"It is cost-effective, and provides a good value for your money. The pricing, and license renewal, is very reasonable for us."
"Fortinet has one or two license types, and the VPN numbers are only limited by the hardware chassis make."
"The price of FortiGate is good."
"It was probably about $2,500 per firewall. It was all included. It included support, services, threat management software, and 24/7 FortiCare on it. Cisco products are more expensive."
"The license is yearly. We pay for the top end. It's called 360."
"​The licensing is pretty much like everyone else."
"The price is not bad. They have a yearly renewal fee, and the pricing is exactly where we expect it to be."
"When you have a client compare box against box, a lot of times Palo Alto is a bit more expensive, but its network firewalls have a very rich ratio."
"The pricing for Palo Alto is quite high compared to FortiGate, which is more affordable. I don't have the exact figures as my manager handles that, but from my research, Palo Alto's licensing costs are significantly higher."
"Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is an expensive product but the best one in the market."
"I rate Palo Alto Networks VM-Series pricing an eight out of ten."
"The price of this solution is very high for some parts of Africa, which makes it a challenge."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Educational Organization
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
6%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

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Also Known As

FortiGate 60b, FortiGate 60c, FortiGate 80c, FortiGate 50b, FortiGate 200b, FortiGate 110c, FortiGate, Fortinet 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
Warren Rogers Associates
Iowa State University
Find out what your peers are saying about Palo Alto Networks VM-Series vs. ShieldX and other solutions. Updated: December 2024.
861,490 professionals have used our research since 2012.