We performed a comparison between Palo Alto Networks VM-Series and WatchGuard Firebox 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."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."
"FortiGate firewalls are user-friendly, and I like the security profiling features."
"The most valuable feature of Fortinet FortiGate is load balancing. It can provide central management and VPNA. Additionally, it has enhanced our security environment."
"I like Fortinet's cloud management. It allows me to manage all my devices in different branches for three cloud accounts. Even though I use on-prem devices, I can manage everything on the cloud."
"The most valuable feature of Fortinet FortiGate is security. They are known for efficiency and are on the top of Gartner Quadrant reviews. Fortinet FortiGate has an easy-to-use platform with a good graphical interface. The configuration is simple and the solution provides an overall good layer of security."
"This is a quality product with ok support, and it is better than the competition we've tried."
"It's super reliable. I don't think I've ever had a reliability issue with it."
"Fortinet offers the latest versions to cater to the needs of enterprises."
"We can monitor the traffic manually and detect threats. Additionally, we can block different IP addresses and URLs."
"It scales linearly with load and no issues."
"It is very stable. It is fairly easy to use."
"They now know the details about their network traffic that they did not know before: Applications that they are using and some application they did not know they were using."
"We use the product on our Azure network firewalls."
"The interface with Panorama makes it very easy to use."
"Embedding it into my application development lifecycle prevents data loss and business disruption, allowing the adoption to operate at the speed of my AWS Cloud."
"The solution strengthens our IT posture."
"The most valuable feature for small and medium businesses is the support for various protocol proxies."
"Easy to change the model if you need more performance, with good cohesion in the whole lineup of devices."
"The most valuable are the VPN and proxy features."
"The solution has increased productivity with our outside salespeople being able to connect into their computers and use those remotely."
"The most valuable features of this solution are live logging, rule setup and maintenance, and VPN creation."
"There are no problems with the technical support. If a problem occurs it gets resolved immediately with our technical support partners."
"What I found most valuable in WatchGuard Firebox is that it's a functional platform that works, and each of its features works well. The solution also has good reporting and dashboard capabilities. I also find the overall performance of WatchGuard Firebox great."
"As a whole, it has a very low requirement for ongoing interaction. It's very self-sufficient. If properly patched, it has very high reliability. The total cost of ownership once deployed is very low."
"The improvement is related to logs. Instead of the CLI, we should be able to have more insights into the logs of the firewall in the GUI."
"Fortinet needs more memory to save the log files. We need it to save the logs on the hardware and not in the cloud. I know this feature is available in FortiCloud, but if we need this log locally, it is not available."
"I would like to see better pricing in the next release, as well as a simplification of the installation."
"Fortinet FortiGate needs to improve to be on par with its competitors, such as Palo Alto and Sophos. They are the market leaders. Fortinet FortiGate needs to improve its capabilities. However, we are happy with Fortinet FortiGate."
"I would like reporting to be improved and should offer a lot more tools to monitor the products."
"NGN, reporting and controls."
"Performance and technical support are the main issues with this solution."
"Difficult to add or define, and not that easy to configure and manage."
"In the next release, I would like to see better integration of multi-factor authentication vendors."
"The tool is very costly."
"I would like to have automatic daily reporting, such as how many users have connected via SSL VPN."
"From time to time, they have released some content updates that have some issues, maybe twice a year."
"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."
"In the next release, I would like to see better integration between the endpoints and the firewalls."
"The DLP functionality or data classification can be improved in the solution's basic firewalling."
"The implementation should be simplified."
"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."
"I would like to have a little more control over access points and the ability to see the bandwidth that is passing through a specific access point. We are not able to see that. We can see what traffic is passing through the Firebox itself, but we can't identify if it is coming from a particular access point or not."
"Sometimes I would like to copy a rule set from one box to another box in a direct way. This is a feature that is not present at the moment in WatchGuard."
"The drawbacks are just sometimes not having the technical information that we need in order to easily make connections with all of our Internet-based clients."
"It's very hard to get information from their website, for exactly what I need to do. Sometimes I end up having to open a lot of support tickets... It's a navigational issue which makes it hard to find what I'm looking for and it's just so broad."
"We were able to take from an older configuration, build a new one quickly, and get it up and running, which didn't take long, but there was some pain around it."
"The data loss protection works well, but it could be easier to configure. The complexity of data loss protection makes it a more difficult feature to fully leverage. Better integration with third-party, two-factor authentication would be advantageous."
"I would like to see more tutorials on setting up the Firebox."
Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is ranked 10th in Firewalls with 50 reviews while WatchGuard Firebox is ranked 13th in Firewalls with 77 reviews. Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is rated 8.6, while WatchGuard Firebox is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Palo Alto Networks VM-Series writes "Many features are optimized for troubleshooting real-time scenarios, saving a lot of time". On the other hand, the top reviewer of WatchGuard Firebox writes "Rock-solid stability and easy to change the model". Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is most compared with Azure Firewall, Fortinet FortiGate-VM, Cisco Secure Firewall, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls and Juniper SRX Series Firewall, whereas WatchGuard Firebox is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Sophos XG, OPNsense, Meraki MX and SonicWall TZ. See our Palo Alto Networks VM-Series vs. WatchGuard Firebox report.
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