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Check Point Quantum Force vs Palo Alto Networks VM-Series comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 22, 2026

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

Check Point Quantum Force
Ranking in Firewalls
30th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.7
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Palo Alto Networks VM-Series
Ranking in Firewalls
16th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
66
Ranking in other categories
Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) (18th)
 

Featured Reviews

Abnet Tsegaye Belay - PeerSpot reviewer
Cybersecurity Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Has strengthened perimeter security through AI-driven protection and unified management
I have noticed some limitations with Check Point Quantum Force. There is a limitation in integrating with existing infrastructure, such as orchestration and logging, specifically with VPNs. VPNs are hard and sophisticated to deploy on this firewall. However, it is improving currently. Some performance aspects need higher resources. If you do not give it higher resources, it will slow down your network. It is a trade-off - if you have higher resources, you will have good performance. The complexity of configuring a VPN needs to be improved because we need to go back and forth to configure VPNs. It has to be simpler to understand.
MuhammadNadeem - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Network Engineer at a tech services company with 1-10 employees
Has supported urgent deployments and enabled inline threat protection but pricing and features could be more flexible
I am not using Palo Alto Networks VM-Series mostly, but based on my experience, there are some deficiencies in Palo Alto Networks VM-Series. Having those features missing, we are not proposing Palo Alto Networks VM-Series to all customers. However, for urgency and for some solutions that customers need for some of their other sites and subdivisions, we are providing the same.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The security features and layered security features are better compared to others."
"The outcomes from Check Point Quantum Force firewall gave us the ability to be fit and secure from the cyber world."
"The most valuable features I find in Check Point Quantum Force are the security policy features, including all security features that are provided by firewall, IPS/IDS."
"In performance and threat prevention, it has benefited my cybersecurity strategy."
"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."
"You already can scale it if you put it in Auto Scaling groups. If you put it in a load balancer, it should already be able to scale."
"We use Palo Alto to provide remote access, and we've been able to provide access for hundreds of users with a very short build out time."
"Scalability is a strength of Palo Alto VM-Series."
"The filtering feature is good."
"Palo Alto offers excellent security, with features such as email scanning, malware protection, and efficient VPN and antivirus capabilities."
"It offers robust solutions, making it valuable to my customers."
"It has the ability to create Palo Alto VM-series using software."
 

Cons

"I see good competition which is less expensive."
"The complexity of configuring a VPN needs to be improved because we need to go back and forth to configure VPNs."
"I have observed weaknesses in Check Point Quantum Force, particularly when configuring tunnels from any point product to a peer, which has very complex configuration requirements."
"Check Point Quantum Force does not have strong local support. We are based in India, and Check Point Quantum Force does not have extensive local support in our region."
"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."
"It would be helpful if we had a direct number for the support manager or the supporting engineer. That would be better than having to email every time because there would be less wait."
"The only minor issue we've faced is with the app's ID configuration, which requires specific matching for application filtering."
"The firewall itself is very complex. You have to do a lot of research, look through all the documentation, consult, and figure out how to use it."
"From time to time, maybe twice a year, they have released content updates which have some issues; when they release content updates, the applications with these updates give us false positives."
"The user interface could use some improvement."
"Just sometimes it can be a bit sluggish navigating through pages. That is just purely because of Java.​"
"The tool is very costly."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is the most expensive tool among competitors"
"Regarding pricing, I initially downloaded the product for feature comparison purposes, not specifically due to pricing concerns. However, the current licensing model can be a sore point as we're paying for features we're not fully utilizing. Simplifying the pricing structure would be beneficial, especially given the duplication of services in some cases, leading to increased costs."
"The solution is a little bit expensive compared to other vendors."
"The product is cheaper than the on-premise version."
"It is a little bit of crazy if you compare it to Vanguard, Sophos, or even Cisco. The newest version of Cisco, the Next-Generation Firewall of Cisco, is less expensive than Palo Alto. It is more comparable to Check Point."
"Palo Alto definitely needs to be more competitive compared to other products. The problem that I have faced is that the price of licensing is very high and not very competitive."
"Do not buy larges box if you do not need them. Rightsizing is a great task to do before​hand."
"One of the factors for selecting Palo Alto was they had flexible pricing. They had a pay-as-you-go model. Comparable to other products, such as Check Point, the price point was definitely a plus."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Outsourcing Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Construction Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business31
Midsize Enterprise15
Large Enterprise24
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Check Point Quantum Force?
In terms of pricing, setup cost, and licensing, many users and clients say that the pricing is high. The license structure, with which blades and features are included and what extra licenses you n...
What needs improvement with Check Point Quantum Force?
I would assess Check Point Quantum Force's real-time threat intelligence in guarding against ransomware as not effective. I have not used its real-time threat intelligence. I am not very familiar w...
What is your primary use case for Check Point Quantum Force?
I am dealing mostly with firewalls and I am working with Check Point Quantum Force. I have utilized the capability to secure only the on-premises environments and not in cloud.
Features comparison between Palo Alto and Fortinet firewalls
In the best tradition of these questions, Feature-wise both are quite similar, but each has things it's better at, it kind of depends what you value most. PA is good at app control, web filtering a...
How does Azure Firewall compare with Palo Alto Networks VM Series?
Both products are very stable and easily scalable. The setup of Azure Firewall is easy and very user-friendly and the overall cost is reasonable. Azure Firewall offers a solid threat awareness, can...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Palo Alto Networks VM-Series?
The pricing is more on the expensive side, but it is justified due to its functionality, reliability, and throughput, even with all features enabled. In comparison to FortiGate ( /products/fortinet...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Warren Rogers Associates
Find out what your peers are saying about Check Point Quantum Force vs. Palo Alto Networks VM-Series and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
908,877 professionals have used our research since 2012.