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Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls pros and cons

Vendor: Palo Alto Networks

4.3 out of 5

194 reviews
96% willing to recommend

1,265 followers

Pros & Cons summary

Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls deliver comprehensive security with application-based controls and advanced threat detection through features like WildFire. They offer high scalability for data centers and reliable performance. Integration with third-party services provides adaptability to evolving threats. However, these firewalls are costly and complex, requiring expert management and better documentation. Technical support shows responsiveness issues, and scaling requires new hardware, impacting flexibility.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls offers comprehensive security features, including advanced threat prevention, application control, and antivirus capabilities.

The system provides strong performance with scalability, ensuring stability and reliability in various environments.

The ability to integrate seamlessly with third-party services and offer a unified platform enhances network security management.

Deep packet inspection and URL filtering functionalities help pinpoint and block potential threats effectively.

Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls' single-pass architecture optimizes packet processing, providing efficient network throughput.

CONS

Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls face criticism for their high cost, making them less competitive compared to other firewall options in the market.

The scalability of Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is challenged, requiring hardware changes to accommodate increased connection needs.

Integration with third-party technologies and systems, including Cloud and IoT, is not seamless in Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls.

The technical support for Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls has been subpar, with slow response times and inadequate solution delivery.

Configuration and management of Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls are considered complex, demanding significant expertise and knowledge from administrators.

Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls Pros review quotes

Solutions Architect at NTT Global Networks Incorporated

Oct 6, 2020

This is arguably the best security protection that you can buy.

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Security Architect at a educational organization with 201-500 employees

Jul 17, 2022

One of the key features for us is product stability. We are a bank, so we require 24/7 service.

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President at JTS Network Consulting, LLC

Nov 21, 2022

One of the simple features I like about Palo Alto firewalls is that it's extremely easy to find out what's happening in the network. The reporting is phenomenal, and it's easy to find which threats have been detected and what traffic is going through the box. When a customer notices something is wrong, you can quickly check the amount of traffic going through the firewall around that time. If there is anything out of the ordinary, you can decide it needs to be investigated further.

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Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls

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Learn what your peers think about Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: May 2025.

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GH

CyberSecurity Network Engineer at a university with 5,001-10,000 employees

Sep 23, 2021

When we put it on the border, it was blocking everything that we were getting ahead of time, and we weren't getting any hits. This includes URL filtering, spam prevention, and anti-virus.

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Security Architect at University Corporation for Atmospheric Research

Aug 16, 2022

The WildFire reporting and Cortex XDR platform have huge infrastructures in the cloud that secures the network against threats. So, we have the potential on the system, specifically for users, where we take care of this since the user is the most dangerous. We get reports back from WildFire on a minute-by-minute basis, rather than a daily or weekly update like I used to with different AV vendors. These features can detect viruses and malware more quickly, which is super important.

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Senior Service Delivery Engineer at Netdata Innovation Center

Jun 19, 2022

The first time I came across these firewalls, what surprised me the most was their web user interface. It is complete and gives you a lot of information. You can do 80% of the things related to your network and firewall through the web UI. In some of the other devices, the UI is not as complete. App-ID is also very valuable in customer networks. When you're seeing a lot of traffic in your network, you can see in your web UI which users have the applications that are consuming the most bandwidth. You have a broad context, which is very good.

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reviewer2152974

Senior Network Administrator at a financial services firm with 11-50 employees

Apr 24, 2023

Application layer firewalling has been the most valuable feature because it gives thousands of application IDs that we can use to control traffic into and out of our environment. The second most important feature has been the GlobalProtect VPN feature.

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President at Margate Net

Aug 10, 2022

It helps the organization function better by virtue of cleaner and more predictive Internet access and usage being conducted by the employees and constituents of the company. It helps ensure that they have a stronger security posture. It is preventive medicine If you have DNS Security in place. You will be happy you had it. If you don't have it, you may never need it. However, if you did need it, and didn't have it, you will wish that you did. It is one of those things, like insurance.

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ES

Network Analyst at a recreational facilities/services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Dec 21, 2021

With its single pane of glass, it makes monitoring and troubleshooting a bit more homogeneous. We are not looking at multiple platforms and monitoring management tools. It is more efficient from that perspective. It is more of a common monitoring and control system for multiple aspects of what used to be different systems. It provides efficiency and time savings.

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reviewer1400883

Chief Architect at a recruiting/HR firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Oct 8, 2021

Palo Alto NGFW provides a unified platform that natively integrates all security capabilities, which is very useful. This prevents us from having to go to a lot of different systems, and in some cases, many different systems in many different regions, because we are a global company with 60 remote offices around the world in 30 different countries. Its centralized platform is really what we look for in all services, whether it be security or otherwise.

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Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls Cons review quotes

Solutions Architect at NTT Global Networks Incorporated

Oct 6, 2020

The only real drawback to this product is that it is expensive. But you get what you pay for and there is no way to put a price on top-notch security.

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Security Architect at a educational organization with 201-500 employees

Jul 17, 2022

There are some advanced features that we aren't able to use, which include active IP authentication and app ID. We are facing challenges with implementing those two features.

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President at JTS Network Consulting, LLC

Nov 21, 2022

The reporting and visibility are phenomenal, but you don't get that information out of the box. They can email reports regularly, and the functionality is all there. However, a lot of it is based on an older model for email, where customers have in-house email servers. The small and medium-sized business customers I deal with are moving toward Office 365 or some other cloud-based mail and not maintaining their own internal mail servers.

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Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls

Free Report: Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: May 2025.

856,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.

GH

CyberSecurity Network Engineer at a university with 5,001-10,000 employees

Sep 23, 2021

From a documentation standpoint, there is room for improvement. Even Palo Alto says that their documentation is terrible.

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Security Architect at University Corporation for Atmospheric Research

Aug 16, 2022

The biggest thing that needs to be improved with them is their training. I took a training class for the 8.0 build, then I took it again for the 9.0 and 10 builds. They add new features every time that they do a new major release, but the training doesn't keep up. It is the same basic training that probably was with the 3.0 build, and they just change the screenshots. I would love to see them do some more work since they have all these bells and whistles, but we don't know how to use those features on a large scale.

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Senior Service Delivery Engineer at Netdata Innovation Center

Jun 19, 2022

Palo Alto can do a little bit better when it comes to the User-ID part. I've been facing problems related to double authentication. You have a computer user, but you also have a VPN user, and when you do a single sign-on to another page, these logs can sometimes generate a problem notification. It doesn't happen a lot, but in some networks, it could be a problem. It would be very helpful to have the ability to restrict the connections that you can have in your VPN. For example, if you have the credentials, you can connect with the same user account from different computers or devices. If you have the domain information, you can connect from different devices. That's a problem that they need to address and resolve. They should ensure that at any moment, only one person is connected through a specific user account.

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reviewer2152974

Senior Network Administrator at a financial services firm with 11-50 employees

Apr 24, 2023

The only problem that I see with the Palo Alto NGFW being an all-in-one appliance is that because of the different features that are being put into a single appliance, the OS tends to be beefier. Over the eight years, we have seen that the number of features or analyses being put into the appliance itself has a tendency to slow down the appliance, especially at the time of bootup. So, any time we are doing maintenance work, the time required for the appliance to boot up and be fully functional again is significantly longer than eight years ago. They could find a way to make this all-in-one appliance faster.

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President at Margate Net

Aug 10, 2022

The tech support was once great, but now it is poor. The tech support has gone south. It is really difficult. I had a Priority 1 case last a week in their queue, and after multiple complaints, I finally got somebody to take the case. These are things that are unacceptable in the business world. They could train their employees better.

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ES

Network Analyst at a recreational facilities/services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Dec 21, 2021

Once in a while, they have new features being released that can be buggy. My criticism is more general to all sorts of network or security devices. In general, everybody is releasing less-tested software. Then, it usually ends up that the first few customers who get a new release need to end up troubleshooting it.

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reviewer1400883

Chief Architect at a recruiting/HR firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Oct 8, 2021

When we looked at it originally, we needed to host the Panorama environment ourselves. I would prefer it if we could take this as a service. It might be that it is available, but for some reason we didn't choose it. The downsides of hosting are that we need to feed and water the machines. We are trying to move to a more SaaS environment where we have less things in our data centers, whether they be in our cloud data centers or physical data centers, which can reduce our physical data center footprint.

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Show 10 more reviews (out of 191)

Product Categories

Product Categories

Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW)

Firewall Solutions for Enterprises

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Product Categories

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Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW)

Firewall Solutions for Enterprises

Popular Comparisons

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Fortinet FortiGate vs Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls

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