Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

FireMon Security Manager vs Palo Alto Networks Panorama comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 4, 2024

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

FireMon Security Manager
Ranking in Firewall Security Management
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
56
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Palo Alto Networks Panorama
Ranking in Firewall Security Management
4th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
90
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Firewall Security Management category, the mindshare of FireMon Security Manager is 16.6%, up from 16.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Palo Alto Networks Panorama is 7.9%, down from 10.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Firewall Security Management
 

Featured Reviews

Ganesh-Khutwad - PeerSpot reviewer
Rapid policy insights with robust dashboards and cross-vendor automation
FireMon Security Manager is excellent for real-time compliance management. It allows us to quickly retrieve any policy needed for testing and easily analyze it for loopholes. If a loophole exists, FireMon provides comprehensive details within the policy manager. It alerts us to firewall rule additions or changes that violate compliance policies. It supports various firewall platforms, including Checkpoint, Zscaler, Fortinet, Cisco, and AWS, and provides centralized management for all configured policies through a single console. FireMon Security Manager provides many features, like whether my firewall is compatible with required standards such as NTP and SNMP. Each compliance included in our RFPs is shown in the UI of FireMon. It gives robust and clear dashboards, making it easier to understand risks because the policies have ratings showing usage, and the number of hit attacks. It streamlines our compliance reporting processes by providing comprehensive risk and compliance assessments. It offers a range of features, including verification of firewall compatibility with protocols like NTP and SNMP, and detection of signal charges. FireMon effectively addresses all compliance requirements outlined in our RFPs. For instance, it can determine if firewalls or proxies within a stack are configured in Secure Mode or Active-Active mode. FireMon Security Manager enables us to generate reports on all these aspects, ensuring thorough compliance monitoring and documentation. FireMon Security Manager is robust and can help automate firewall policy changes across large multi-vendor enterprise environments. FireMon Security Manager helps automate firewall policy changes across various environments, including on-premises, cloud, hybrid, SASE, and SD-WAN. It also simplifies cleaning up firewall rules in our environment. The time required to accurately create, approve, and deploy firewall policy rules has been reduced. Tasks that took 30 minutes can now be completed in just five minutes using FireMon. FireMon provides immediate visibility into our policies through a robust and clear dashboard, making it easy to identify errors or misconfigurations based on the policy rating.
Kim Ejby Lorentzen - PeerSpot reviewer
Unified firewall management streamlines operations across branches with prompt support services
The primary use case for this solution is the management of the entire firewall portfolio across various branches Palo Alto Networks Panorama has simplified management by providing a unified interface for firewall management and configuration. One of the key advantages of Palo Alto Networks…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Vendor agnostic when it comes to integrating with other product."
"Policy test, access path analysis, and change reports."
"The most valuable feature for me is its capability for cleanup and managing the complexity of security products."
"The technical support is very good. They've always been helpful."
"It provides us with a single pane of glass for our on-prem environment, to see configuration. We have not implemented into the cloud yet. We can search for an object group and see where it lives on any firewall in the enterprise or find security rules, no matter what firewall they're on."
"The most effective feature is the general reporting on compliance."
"I've been using the reports to see what is going on, and that is a helpful feature. We can track down unused rules, which helps with compliance. We can see rules that have not been used or that are duplicates or overly permissive."
"The most valuable feature is the Firewall reviews for our company compliance."
"The compliance features are very effective at identifying things that need to be properly hardened."
"The most valuable features of Palo Alto Networks Panorama are centralized management. We can manage all our firewalls."
"On the one or two occasions that I had to make use of technical support, I felt it to be pretty good."
"The initial setup isn't very complex, it's user-friendly."
"I find this solution valuable for full monitoring, centralized control for reporting, and centralized management."
"I like the quality of this product, and it performs. It's the best solution in the IT business."
"Palo Alto Networks Panorama has a lot of features."
"It is great that the records go back to 30 days."
 

Cons

"The cost of the solution is pretty expensive. It would be ideal if they could work on their pricing."
"I don't like that it comes with bugs, constant issues, and limited functionality."
"The advanced features are complex in setting up the rules."
"It comes as a Linux appliance on a server and we're not a Linux shop, we're more of a Windows shop. It would be great if they could automate or integrate the backups into it and other things through their GUI interface, just to make the management of Linux a little more transparent."
"When it comes to real-time compliance management, something that is missing is alerting on certain, predefined controls. It would be good to have a predefined set of controls which, if not complied with in a newly set up rule, would create an alert for us. That is something that is missing, out-of-the-box."
"When it comes to identifying risk in our environment and prioritizing fixes, it is really about the different priorities within the organization. FireMon is not so smart that it can tell what's important to us. It's up to us to figure that out."
"Sometimes, there is a problem related to the sizing itself. If we have many devices added or if the firewall complexity is huge, we might experience some lag in processing. It may relate to the hardware specifications."
"Policy Planner requirements section is good, but could use some improvement to allow flexibility to enter different types of requests (modifying an existing policy, object or service group, for example) in a structured task format that can be auto-verified."
"This would be a better solution if it were more tightly integrated with the firewalls."
"From a storage perspective, I would like to see an improvement where logs can be compressed to make some space available."
"Sometimes technical support is slow to respond."
"The product could offer more integration with other solutions."
"The implementation is not that easy."
"The solution requires more flexibility and quicker response times."
"In our version, there is no feature to transfer or upload a database of third-party vulnerabilities or signatures so that Panorama can convert them into its own database. This kind of feature might already have come in version 10."
"It can take a few minutes to test to see if any changes are successful or not. This needs to be improved. A commit change should take a second, not a minute or more."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's a good value. From a licensing standpoint... it's very simple to understand, and gives us a good bang for the buck."
"The pricing is very good, very straightforward. It also came in cheaper than AlgoSec and Tufin."
"This is an expensive solution. The cost of three modules for three years was approximately one million."
"Pricing model seems fair."
"Pricing is reasonable."
"FireMon is cheaper than AlgoSec."
"We pay for it yearly."
"FireMon is very expensive. I think that they charge a premium. In general, they are very pricey. Compared to their competitors, they cost a little more than the other solutions that we evaluated."
"It is very affordable when compared to more expensive firewalls."
"Its licensing is yearly and multi-yearly. It is not expensive."
"With the URL filtering, we probably went down from around four hours in response time to about five minutes."
"The price of Palo Alto Networks Panorama is expensive."
"Sometimes the company prefers to give a license to test the product in our environment before we go to the customer. But the customer should buy his own license, and that's the system here. The system is different between one country and another. Some countries say that the IT solutions provider should provide the license."
"There is a license needed to use Palo Alto Networks Panorama. The cost is not that important, what is important is meeting all the requirements and security features."
"Pricing for Palo Alto Networks Panorama is always high. If you're going to sell the product, you always have to talk about the technology because it should be about the solution rather than the price."
"The pricing is pretty average. On a scale of one to ten, I would rate it a five."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Firewall Security Management solutions are best for your needs.
851,604 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Healthcare Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about FireMon?
I like the Security Manager console where we can see any changes that have been made or pull the results of an assessment and control the policies that we implement.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for FireMon?
Comparatively, FireMon has a very good price and is below the general competition in cost. I have not seen any additional fees beyond the general contract fees for the usage I have. So, I have not ...
What needs improvement with FireMon?
For one company I work with, I use Fortinet, and FireMon is not able to understand the zones that Fortinet uses. Part of that compliance piece does not provide me with the necessary information. An...
What do you like most about Palo Alto Networks Panorama?
The most valuable aspect of Palo Alto Networks Panorama for me is the centralized management of multiple firewalls.
What needs improvement with Palo Alto Networks Panorama?
The solution requires more flexibility and quicker response times. High-speed replies are crucial. Additionally, the AI module should be on-premises, not in the cloud. It should support more flexib...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Convey, MGM Resorts International, Southwest Airlines, Alkami, Costco, Aetna, IBM, Verizon, Wells Fargo
University of Arkansas, JBG SMITH, Temple University, Telkom Indonesia
Find out what your peers are saying about FireMon Security Manager vs. Palo Alto Networks Panorama and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
851,604 professionals have used our research since 2012.