"The most valuable features of this solution are advanced malware protection, IPS, and IDS."
"Since the product is stable, we do not have to spend additional money to buy other firewalls. Once deployed, we can use the product for a long time. Thus, it is cost effective."
"One of the nice things about Firepower is that you can set it to discover the environment. If that is happening, then Firepower is learning about every device, software operating system, and application running inside or across your environment. Then, you can leverage the discovery intelligence to get Firepower to select the most appropriate intrusion prevention rules to use for your environment rather than picking one of the base policies that might have 50,000 IPS rules in it, which can put a lot of overhead on your firewall. If you choose the recommendations, as long as you update them regularly, you might be able to get your rule set down to only 1,000 or 1,500, which is a significant reduction in a base rule set. This means that the firewall will give you better performance because there are less rules being checked unnecessarily. That is really useful."
"The deep packet inspection is useful, but the most useful feature is application awareness. You can filter on the app rather than on a static TCP port."
"It's got the capabilities of amassing a lot of throughput with remote access and VPNs."
"I'm a big fan of SecureX, Cisco's platform for tying together all the different security tools. It has a lot of flexibility and even a lot of third-party or non-Cisco integration. I feel like that's a really valuable tool."
"The most valuable feature is the Intrusion Prevention System."
"With Cisco, there are a lot of features such as the network map. Cisco builds the whole network map of the machines you have behind your firewall and gives you insight into the vulnerabilities and attributes that the host has. Checkpoint and Fortinet don't have that functionality directly on the firewall."
"The feature that I have found the most useful is that it meets all our requirements technically."
"The most valuable feature is the Posture Assessment."
"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."
"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 most valuable feature is that you can control your traffic flowing out and coming it, allowing you to apply malware and threat protection, as well as vulnerability checks."
"It has excellent scalability."
"Palo Alto’s Panorama centralized management system simplifies our security posture based on our requirements. Instead of manually pulling logs, then generating them into readable formats, it gives us the console in a readable format to view."
"What I like about the VM-Series is that you can launch them in a very short time."
"A very robust product."
"The most valuable features are the IPS, the firewall function, and the price."
"I like that it works fine. Stormshield is a very good solution."
"I like how you can configure the rules. There is the task for the rules and a task for the network configuration. It also provides SMD filtering, and it can be integrated with the active directory for the users, their mission, and the VPN configuration. We are here in Sudan, and Stormshield didn't work in Sudan for more than a decade. Stormshield is a very strong firewall and very easy to configure and maintain. I am just working with the firewall solution, and we don't have any other solutions like endpoint solutions or something like that."
"Most of the features don't work well, and some features are missing as well."
"We're getting support but there's a big delay until we get a response from their technical team. They're in the USA and we're in Africa, so that's the difficulty. When they're in the office, they respond."
"Implementations require the use of a console. It would help if the console was embedded."
"In a future release, it would be ideal if they could offer an open interface to other security products so that we could easily connect to our own open industry standard."
"It would be great if some of the load times were faster."
"The configuration in Firepower Management Center is very slow. Deployment takes two to three minutes. You spend a lot of time on modifications. Whereas, in FortiGate, you press a button, and it takes one second."
"The initial setup was a bit complex. It wasn't a major challenge, but due to our requirements and network, it was not very straightforward but still easy enough."
"Its interface is sometimes is a little bit slow, and it can be improved. When you need to put your appliance in failover mode, it is a little difficult to do it remotely because you need to turn off the appliance in Cisco mode. In terms of new features, it would be good to have AnyConnect VPN with Firepower. I am not sure if it is available at the moment."
"The product needs improvement in their Secure Access Service Edge."
"It'll help if Palo Alto Networks provided better documentation."
"The one issue that I didn't like is that the SNMP integration with interfaces didn't record the interface counters."
"Its web interface is a bit outdated, and it needs to be updated. They can also improve the NAT functionality. We have had issues with the NAT setup."
"The user interface could use some improvement."
"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)."
"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."
"Improvement is needed in terms of the technical support of the manufacturer."
"With Stormshield, there are difficulties joining things, and it can be complex depending on the architecture."
"The filtering configuration could be better. We have some difficulties with the filtering configuration and the filter extension. It's not that easy. It's not that straightforward. In the next release, I would like to see a reporting system. Stormshield doesn't have any tutorials on how to do the configuration and things like that. They just have documentation on the website. If you want to configure, for example, Cisco or Fortinet, you can find tutorials on YouTube. They show you how to configure the features, and so on. In Stormshield, there is nothing on social media or the internet on how to configure different things. The lack of documentation or the lack of material makes it difficult for others to adopt this solution."
"It could be better if it were more user-friendly. It's too complicated for us to use it. The price could be better as well."
More Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall Pricing and Cost Advice →
Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is ranked 10th in Firewalls with 13 reviews while Stormshield Network Security is ranked 8th in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 4 reviews. Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is rated 8.6, while Stormshield Network Security is rated 8.4. 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 Stormshield Network Security writes "Robust, provides a high level of security at a reasonable cost". 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 Stormshield Network Security is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate, pfSense, Cisco ASA Firewall, Sophos XG and Sophos UTM. See our Palo Alto Networks VM-Series vs. Stormshield Network Security report.
We monitor all Firewalls reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.