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Palo Alto Networks VM-Series vs Symantec Advanced Threat Protection comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 1, 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

Palo Alto Networks VM-Series
Ranking in Advanced Threat Protection (ATP)
13th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
66
Ranking in other categories
Firewalls (13th)
Symantec Advanced Threat Pr...
Ranking in Advanced Threat Protection (ATP)
24th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
16
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) category, the mindshare of Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is 2.5%, up from 2.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Symantec Advanced Threat Protection is 2.1%, up from 1.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Palo Alto Networks VM-Series2.5%
Symantec Advanced Threat Protection2.1%
Other95.4%
Advanced Threat Protection (ATP)
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Dennis O'Reilly - PeerSpot reviewer
Cyber SecOps Principal at Dotcom Security
Provides end-to-end antivirus protection and has good stability
Symantec Endpoint Protection provides end-to-end protection. Along with antivirus protection, it has a lot of key areas, including intrusive prevention, firewall features, and application and device control. It can integrate with other Broadcom solutions, such as Symantec Messaging Gateway and Symantec DLP. If you want to send an email, it gets scanned through endpoint protection and DLP. We get all Symantec functionality in a single pane.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We use the product on our Azure network firewalls."
"The product provides more visibility into our traffic."
"The VM-Series reports how much bandwidth a particular IP is using. You don't need to regularly log into a website, like a Cisco command, to see what kind of ACL it's getting. There isn't an ACL use portal event. You can go there and see how much my ACL has been getting me."
"Palo Alto is easy to use. The UI is very easy to understand and does not require any certification or highly skilled technician to handle the firewall. It is very user-friendly and straightforward out of the box."
"In AWS, Palo Alto provides us a better view than flow logs for network traffic."
"The most valuable features are web control and IPS/IDS."
"Palo Alto Networks VM-Series's most valuable feature is the visibility of the environment."
"If you do not have a Next-Generation Firewall, Palo Alto is a good choice, it is reliable and the support is very good."
"This is a good solution, and whatever our requirement is, all of the features are there."
"They have a very simple and easy implementation; they have been around for a long time, and they have been very easy to deploy, support, and manage."
"The Application Control code and the easy integration are valuable features."
"You don't have to buy a separate email security platform. You can enable that using their endpoint, and I like that. You don't have to have two agents running on the same box."
"The product integrates well with our systems, and we have not encountered any problems."
"They manage to solve detection quite nicely, with rather elaborate detection compared to other providers, and Symantec also provides a useful set of information linked to each of the attacked computers."
"All of the solution's features are quite valuable for us, and we especially like the threat protection it provides."
"Overall, the product supports everything already feature-wise, because it has email protection, monitoring detection, network intrusion detection, and advanced threat protection."
 

Cons

"The interface is all Java-based. I would prefer an HTML5 interface."
"The scalability could be improved further."
"Palo Alto Networks VM-Series needs to improve its order process."
"It would be good if the common features work consistently in physical and virtual environments."
"All areas need improvement: manufacturing, education, financial, etc."
"Enhancing the ease of accessing technical support would be useful."
"Technical support is good for Palo Alto Networks VM-Series, but sometimes for new feature requests, we are facing challenges."
"The web interface is very slow, and it needs to be faster."
"The support team that Symantec offers didn't know how to solve issues even though they referred to themselves as "engineers"."
"Scalability could be better."
"There are limits with respect to blocking files by hash value or blocking IP addresses, and these limits should be removed."
"The endpoint protection looks old."
"Symantec appliances need improvement. The whole appliance environment is a robust system and it needs a massive amount of storage space. If you have to increase or speed up the background storage it's a pretty complicated process. The scalability and sizing is critical, and if you do it wrong you run into issues pretty quickly."
"An improvement could be made on the reporting because then it would be easier to collect information and submit it for compliance."
"They could enhance the solution to work across all devices, including Android, iOS, and Mac, and make it more user-friendly."
"The administration interface needs a lot of improvement. It should be UI based, and simple. They need to improve it. It's pretty much not that friendly compared to what we were using as Bitdefender before. It's okay but is improving, actually."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is an expensive product."
"Because the solution was getting deployed on AWS, it was the best place to go and it was available there."
"Sometimes, it's cheaper to buy a new firewall with licensing instead of renewing the licenses of an old firewall."
"The license fee is slightly high."
"The product is cheaper than the on-premise version."
"The price is not bad. They have a yearly renewal fee, and the pricing is exactly where we expect it to be."
"This is not the cheapest firewall but it's not the most expensive of the options on the market."
"It is not the cheapest on the market. The total cost for two firewall instances is $75,000. This includes licenses, deployment fees, and support for two years."
"Symantec Advanced Threat Protection's pricing is comparable."
"Pricing is good. It is nice to have a great product at a fair price."
"The price is quite expensive."
"Symantec Endpoint Protection has an average price."
"The pricing of this solution is inexpensive and affordable."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Outsourcing Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Marketing Services Firm
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business31
Midsize Enterprise15
Large Enterprise24
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise13
 

Questions from the Community

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...
Ask a question
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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Warren Rogers Associates
ECI
Find out what your peers are saying about Palo Alto Networks VM-Series vs. Symantec Advanced Threat Protection and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
913,683 professionals have used our research since 2012.