Check Point NGFW Reviews

I'm a consultant at a Check Point partner. I have deployed a lot of Check Point firewalls and support Check Point firewalls for our customers. Our customer environments are different. I have deployed standalone, cluster, and two-layered firewalls.

Check Point firewall products include a lot of modules including Application Control, IPS, Email security, Mobile access, Content Awareness, URL Filtering, Antivirus, Antibot, and DLP. 

Check Point meets our customers' requirements at the perimeter with an all-in-one solution. For example:

• The IPS blade prevents attacks with updated signatures.
• URL filtering policy control customers' users' internet activity.
• Antivirus and antibot blade controls malicious activity and files.
• Mobile access blades allow customers to access their sites from anywhere securely.

There are a lot of features that I have found valuable for our customers.

For example, active/active and active/standby high availability features are very useful. If you want to share traffic loads to both cluster members, you can use the active/active feature, whereas if you don't want to share traffic loads then you can prefer active standby. Your connections sync on both cluster members for either highly available choice, so your connections never lost.

One of the most valuable features is performance improvement, wherewith ClusterXL and CoreXL, you can improve performance.

Check Point should include additional management choices; for example, Check Point does not offer full management support via browser.

You should use Check Point Smart Console for management, although it is an EXE and is supported only on the MS Windows platform. If you are using Linux or Mac, you cannot manage Check Point. Instead, you need to use a virtual PC with the Windows OS installed, running inside Linux or Mac. Check Point states that this is a decision made for security reasons, but that certain management features can be done through the browser, although not fully.

I have been using the Check Point firewall for more than 20 years.

This solution is very stable for all of our customers.

One of our customers has more than 200 branch offices, which are protected by Check Point SMB appliances. All of these appliances are managed by Check Point SmartProvisioning. This customer has one Check Point cluster that secures server segments and another Check Point cluster to secure the client segment.

The latest product, Maestro is very good and scales well.

Check Point support is very good and we are very satisfied.

My company is working with different firewall products but I am a Check Point expert and only support their products.

The initial setup is straightforward.

All implementation is handled by our team.

There are different ROIs for each customer but our customers' ROIs are high, as expected.

The pricing is high compared to competitors.

Our customers evaluate other products but a lot of them prefer Check Point.

We primarily use this solution for routing and the protection of our internal corporate network.

The most valuable feature is the management using the Single Pane of Glass.

The user interface for management could be improved.

In the future, I would like to see support for SD-WAN capabilities.

I have been working with the Check Point Next-Generation firewall for four years.

I would like to see better stability in newly-released versions.

The scalability is very good.

Dealing with the support team in Israel can be a struggle because of the difference in working hours, holidays, and priorities.

I would with firewall solutions from several vendors including Palo Alto, Fortinet, and Meraki.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this solution is to ensure that they have good support from local experts. The biggest lesson that I have learned from using this product has to do with the capabilities of the smallest models. Care should be taken to select the appropriate one for your environment.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We have proposed and deployed Check Point in a university environment that has multi-layer firewall protection for different zones, including DMZ, a server zone, Wi-Fi, a staff zone, a student hostel zone, guests, etc. Each zone is guarded by a firewall.

We need the NGFW to protect and secure the campus networks for more than 50,000 users. One of the key points is it is cost-effective and scalable to expand the throughput capacity. We expect the solution is possible to protect the networks for at least five to eight years without replacing the hardware investment. 

The solution provides better stability and some interesting features such as the ease of throughput expansion (or we can say the load sharing).

The scalability helps to offload the high traffic volume during school time. It also enhances redundancy. 

The load sharing capabilities using ClusterXL is possible to switch over the cluster mode to load sharing or Maestro. I also appreciate how easy it is to scale this product.

It is also great that the Check Point community (CheckMates portal) has a lot of helpful guidance. It helps us to work better and ease to find unfamiliar configurations on the new features, it is great for larger organizations as well as very small ones.

They offer very scalable solutions to extend computing resources if needed. We can expand the capacity in a very short time. 

The threat analysis reporting from their management console is very comprehensive and easy to use. 

Their web-based dashboard is well designed and offers much out-of-the-box reporting, and provides admins extensive customizations. 

In the operational GUI, Check Point provides rich customization methods to allow us to easily visualize/categorize objects in different colors. It makes operating the firewall much easier.

Under the same capacity requirements, Cheak Point is a bit higher than Fortinet yet much cheaper than Palo Alto. Although using Quantum Maestro to enhance scalability expansion is very helpful to cut down the total cost, it is still an issue for most of the company. Check Point is not a cheap solution and it's always painful to see exactly how much we need to spend on this. 

The upgrade process is not as easy as may be expected. If there is something that goes wrong, it causes the internet service to go down for the whole campus network. I am not happy with that situation since the upgrade process is a very common process. The outcome is not acceptable.

It is scalable and very easy to expand the throughput and resources.

Check Point firewall provide a very cool feature using Quantum Maestro Hyperscale Orchestrator, it provides on-demand cloud-like scaling of our on-premises security gateways. By using Maestro, we can aggregate multiple mid-level Check Point appliances to provide a high throughput volume. It is very useful to scale up to 52 appliances. If we use other firewall solutions, they can only aggregate up to TWO firewalls with same model in clustering or purchase a more high end model firewall. 

For a long term planning, we can expand the throughput by reusing the existing Check Point hardware investment and adding new appliances to.

The deployment is straightforward, however, the ongoing upgrades are not satisfactory.

We are using Check Point NGFW as a firewall for our organization. All the internet traffic goes through it.

The separate management feature of Check Point NGFW is very convenient.

I have been Check Point NGFW for approximately five years.

The solution is stable when it is running incapacity, if it goes beyond it can be not stable. There could be more stability by having more ports or CPU power.

The solution is scalable.

The technical support is really poor. We have to wait for approximately 48 hours sometimes for a simple solution.

The installation is not straightforward.

We needed help from the Check Point expert experts because we deployed it in the HA. It's a bit different from the other firewall vendors. You need a Check Point expert to deploy it initially.

We have a five-person technical team for the maintenance of the solution. We use managers, admins, engineers, and developers.

I rate Check Point NGFW an eight out of ten.

I work for a systems integrator and have designed and deployed solutions over many years with Check Point components. Problems solved with Check Point NGFWs have included securing the edge, data center segregation, SWG replacement, Remote Access, and many others.

I have designed and installed Check Point deployments from a single SMB appliance to multiple highly available chassis, running numerous virtual systems. Numerous different use cases include appliance form-factors, running modules, and licenses.

I have always found that Check Point's fully integrated management provides significant improvements to organisations where I have deployed them. As management has always been integral in the Check Point deployment, all functionality and visibility is natively baked into the management platform, which provides a single point to configure and monitor every function. Alternative vendors have added centralized management functionality as a secondary feature and therefore have never been able to compete on this front.

Management integration is holistic as centralized management has been core to the solution for decades. Where other vendors have bolted management on over time, Check Point has always made it central to everything that they do.  

I find that this is one of the most significant and valuable features of Check Point. In addition to that, many new features that eventually become the standard across the industry end up being first introduced by Check Point - sometimes years ahead (such as Threat Extraction which allows active content to be stripped from files being downloaded and a "clean" copy to be provided in near real-time, while sandbox inspection is being performed).

Product-wise, I have no real complaints. 

Potential improvements could be made around simplifying VPN functionality and configuration.  

The main area that the organization can improve is around the lack of local, in-state technical support. Competitor vendors have a strong presence in the Adelaide Market, however, Check Point has always been limited with its commitment to staffing local technical resources. If this focus is made, I could see Check Point returning to the strength that it once had in the Adelaide market.

I've used the solution for 17 years.

Primarily, we implement the solution at a couple of sites around the world and have created five site VPNs across it. We are running a pretty decent policy to make sure internally our infrastructure is secure.

The product offers excellent security. How open they are with new risks and new vulnerabilities is very helpful in the task of keeping our company safe from malicious attacks.

Newer versions are much more stable.

The UI could use some improvement. It's not as clean or seamless as it could be. 

It's my understanding that the initial setup is a bit complex. There's a bit of a learning curve if you're trying to set it up for the first time and you aren't familiar with the product.

Older versions were a bit unstable. 

We've been using the solution for six or seven years so far. It's been a while. 

While this version seems to be quite stable, Check Point, in previous versions, had a lot of issues when we used to do firmware updates.

We have 200 people on the solution currently. 

I also have experience with Fortinet. I don't have too much, however. It's still very new to me, and therefore it's hard to compare the two solutions. 

While I didn't directly participate in the implementation, from the people that participated, I've heard that it's complicated if you don't know the product very well.

We hired a company to do the implementation. I don't remember the dynamics of the team. The last time it was set up, there were two people on the implementation team. 

While we don't have a direct relationship with the company, we do have business relationships with both Fortinet and Checkpoint partners.

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten.

We use this solution for perimeter security and data center security.

On the firewall side, the security efficacy is good. The interface for application filtering and application-based policies is also good. They have good roadmap on the cloud as well.

This solution requires management software that is sold separately; it's actually a different appliance altogether. For smaller customers or smaller environments, this becomes an added entity in the environment. Not to mention, they'll also have to invest a lot in the necessary management stations. If that came built-in, it would really benefit smaller businesses. 

The performance when you enable decryption could be improved. That's a CPU-intensive task. Many customers struggle if they try to implement decryption — it can really hamper the performance. It's probably something to do with the appliance or the hardware design. This needs to be examined further.

I have been using Check Point NGFW for roughly five years. 

This solution is quite stable. Performance-wise, I have seen customers using this solution for years without issue. 

There are different models available. Sizing can be done accordingly. They have a good range of versions available for small to large data centers. So, scalability is definitely there. 

As I am not an end-user, I haven't really had any contact with support. Still, none of my customers have had any complaints regarding support.

The initial setup was fairly easy. Still, compared to other vendors, the learning curve is a bit complex. 

Compared with Palo Alto and Cisco, the price of this solution is quite fair. Compared to Fortinet and other vendors, it's probably a little bit on the higher side. Really, it all depends on what you get at the end of the day.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of eight. 

I would definitely recommend this solution. It's a good platform for perimeter security. In an enterprise, you need good security. There's endpoint security, network security, and cloud security. Check Point's strongest point is network security; they still need to catch up on endpoint and cloud security. If you're interested in integrating all of these tools, then there are better products available. However, as far as network security is concerned, Check Point is really good.

The Check Point NGFW is the best product that I have ever used. It has pluses and minuses, as do others, but the usability, simplicity, and the configuration abilities are very user-friendly. After a while, other vendors just don’t come close to it.

The second thing is that is just works and it does it with ease. The upgrades and bug fixes are frequent and well documented. Also, the patches just work ;-)

There are some negatives but as I already said, they aren’t many and from my point of view, we can see past them.

It has made our lives and working in the company a lot easier. We have a better overview of the logs and what happens with the traffic in our company. Which means that the search for the certain logs is easy, quick and smooth. The overview of the logs is also very good as it is very detailed. The installation is allot quicker as it was before what also helps us with the implementation of the firewall rules. The rule consolidation is also very important as we have more than 60 fw rule change requests per day.

The rules are very easy to deploy and can be optimized pretty quickly. The R80 has a great feature on how the rules are processed, which costs less in terms of CPU and threads than it did before.

The features that are integrated into the firewall are very useful for our everyday use. Examples of these are the log manager, the firewall monitor commands, and the Linux commands. These are all very useful and helpful.

The VPN tunnels are easy to set up once you understand how they have to be configured.

One of the main features that need improvement is the rule filter export. All of the other vendors can export the filtered IPS as a PDF or CSV file, but with the smart dashboard, it’s just not possible. One can only export the whole rule base and then search for the IPS, which is super time-consuming as you can’t send the whole rule base to a customer. You would get weird questions about certain rules, why they are deployed or configured as they are, and maybe even get unwanted tips on how to change them.

We have been using Check Point NGFW for eight years.

In terms of stability, this solution is very good.

The scalability is high.

The technical support is very good.

We did not use another solution prior to this one.

The initial setup is very easy.

I implemented and deployed Check Point NGFW alone.

Maybe the pricing is a bit high but you get the durability and the duration.

We evaluated Palo Alto and Cisco ASA.