Cloudflare vs. Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewalls - PA Series

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Cloudflare
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
Cloudflare’s connectivity cloud is a unified platform of cloud-native services designed to help enterprises regain control over their IT environments. Powered by an intelligent, programmable global cloud network, it is built to offer security, performance, visibility, and reliability.
$20
per month
Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewalls - PA Series
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Palo Alto Network’s Next-Generation Firewalls is a firewall option integrated with other Palo Alto security products. Released in late 2023, the PA-7500 ML-Powered NextGeneration Firewall (NGFW) enables enterprise-scale organizations and service providers to deploy security in high-performance environments.
$1.50
per hour per available zone
Pricing
CloudflarePalo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewalls - PA Series
Editions & Modules
Pro
$20
per month
Business
$200
per month
Free
Free
Enterprise
Contact sales team
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
CloudflarePalo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewalls - PA Series
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsUsers may also choose to pay per gigabyte of data used starting at .065/GB. Note that prices listed here reflect installations via Amazon Web Services. Pricing may differ if other service providers are used.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
CloudflarePalo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewalls - PA Series
Features
CloudflarePalo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewalls - PA Series
Firewall
Comparison of Firewall features of Product A and Product B
Cloudflare
-
Ratings
Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewalls - PA Series
8.7
27 Ratings
0% above category average
Identification Technologies00 Ratings9.127 Ratings
Visualization Tools00 Ratings7.626 Ratings
Content Inspection00 Ratings9.527 Ratings
Policy-based Controls00 Ratings9.727 Ratings
Active Directory and LDAP00 Ratings9.026 Ratings
Firewall Management Console00 Ratings8.827 Ratings
Reporting and Logging00 Ratings8.327 Ratings
VPN00 Ratings8.727 Ratings
High Availability00 Ratings8.826 Ratings
Stateful Inspection00 Ratings9.026 Ratings
Proxy Server00 Ratings7.413 Ratings
Best Alternatives
CloudflarePalo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewalls - PA Series
Small Businesses

No answers on this topic

pfSense
pfSense
Score 8.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
IBM Cloud Internet Services
IBM Cloud Internet Services
Score 9.0 out of 10
Quantum Firewalls and Security Gateways
Quantum Firewalls and Security Gateways
Score 9.3 out of 10
Enterprises
Akamai App & API Protector
Akamai App & API Protector
Score 8.5 out of 10
Palo Alto Networks Virtualized Next-Generation Firewalls - VM Series
Palo Alto Networks Virtualized Next-Generation Firewalls - VM Series
Score 9.1 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
CloudflarePalo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewalls - PA Series
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(185 ratings)
9.0
(43 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.2
(4 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Usability
8.6
(8 ratings)
8.5
(8 ratings)
Availability
9.1
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
9.1
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
7.8
(149 ratings)
8.4
(9 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.6
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Configurability
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
9.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
9.1
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
7.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
8.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
CloudflarePalo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewalls - PA Series
Likelihood to Recommend
Cloudflare
Cloudflare works well as security measure that gives peace of mind without needing to work too hard to get it functioning well. It provides great tools to customize the security experience as well. This is all the same for the caching tools as well. They have a lot of built in tools that make using the caching easy right out of the box, but they provide the customization options to get things just right for your site.
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Palo Alto Networks
It is well-suited for a company needing strong edge security with ease of administration. It comes standard with many features such as VPN, Application ID and "Day-1 Config" that make the networks it protects secure from the very start. Palo is definitely a premium product and is much more expensive than other firewalls, but the value is realized immediately. The robust options for firewall rules/policies allow the administrator to apply security in new and creative ways to hit the sweet spot between security and usability.
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Pros
Cloudflare
  • The best part is the content delivery network. Cloudflare has a large network of data centres around the world that helps cache and delivers content quickly to our customers.
  • Cloudflare offers us with a fast and reliable DNS service and with the world class features such as Cloudflare workers, SSL verification, certificate management and web application firewall. When all of these are combined together, it provides very strict security for our organization.
  • One of the most important feature that we use is the analytics and threat detection. It provides us with the real time insights of all the threats originating from multiple locations and landing on our websites.
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Palo Alto Networks
  • The PA handles VPN connectivity without missing a beat. We have multiple VPN tunnels in use for redundancy to cloud-based services.
  • The PA has great functionality in supporting failover internet connections, again with the ability to have multiple paths out to our cloud-based services.
  • The PA is updated on the regular with various security updates, we are not concerned with the firewall's ability to see what packets are really flowing across the network. Being able to see beyond just IP and port requests lets you know things are locked down better than traditional firewalls.
  • It is a great overall kit, with URL filtering and other services that fill in the gaps between other solutions without breaking the bank.
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Cons
Cloudflare
  • In some cases, using Cloudflare can actually lead to slower website speeds if the network is congested or if the website's traffic is particularly heavy.
  • Some website owners may find that the level of customization offered by Cloudflare is limited, especially in comparison to other solutions.
  • While Cloudflare is easy to set up and manage, it may be too complex for users who are not familiar with web technologies.
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Palo Alto Networks
  • Setting up certain things can be somewhat complicated due to the numerous options and abstractions involved.
  • It would be nice to have somewhere to get simple canned reports easily.
  • It would be nice to be able to remove options we never use from various setup dialogs.
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Likelihood to Renew
Cloudflare
lower cost
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Palo Alto Networks
The PA5220s have far exceeded what we have expected out of them. It was a bit of a learning curve coming from another vendor, but everything falls into place now with ease. The capabilities of the solution still surprise us, allowing us to remove other costly hardware and providing a single point of management needed
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Usability
Cloudflare
Everything is extremely concise and all settings apply immediately and take effect globally. There is no reason to explicitly plan/think in terms of individual regions as one would have to traditional cloud offerings (AWS, OCI, Azure). All Cloudflare products integrate seamless as part of a single pipeline that executes from request to response.
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Palo Alto Networks
It can be a little tricky at first if you have never used the product or a firewall before. If you have experience with firewalls in general, it does not take long to learn the Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewalls - PA Series interface. They offer great training resources and knowledge base articles to help get up to speed.
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Reliability and Availability
Cloudflare
In 6+ years of relying on Cloudflare, I think we experienced one or two brief outages that were Cloudflare's fault.
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Palo Alto Networks
No answers on this topic
Performance
Cloudflare
Their Argo for the global network is the core feature we love.
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Palo Alto Networks
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Cloudflare
Excellent product, Cloudflare is a true pioneer of the modern Internet, providing tools, services, and expertise that vastly improve the performance and security of web services. Any issues are resolved quickly with detailed RCA and follow-ups published publicly. I'm thankful to Cloudflare and use their services both at work and at home.
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Palo Alto Networks
We've run into a couple undocumented bugs, but that seems to happen with every brand and technology. Any time we've had to engage Palo Alto support they've always been professional, knowledgeable and prompt. In almost all cases we've been able to resolve our issues without having to escalate our tickets.
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Implementation Rating
Cloudflare
Very well executed implementation where our team was able to handle the implementation with guidance.
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Palo Alto Networks
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Cloudflare
They have the most generous free offering, and after the free offering limit is reached - you're still getting plenty of value for the buck.
They have very good reputation.
They have an ever expanding list of tools that can support multiple scenarios under one roof.
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Palo Alto Networks
We are using Cisco ASA before in our environment but when it comes to deep scanning & layer 7 security it doesn't have that capability. After using Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewall we are using sandboxing & advance malware protection that provides high-level end-user security. Also after implementing it we can easily monitor user-level traffic.
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Scalability
Cloudflare
They are built for scale and have the capacity to handle all the traffic we could ever expect to get.
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Palo Alto Networks
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
Cloudflare
  • Immediate ROI on Registrar and DNS hosting while giving a single plane of glass to managing both with domain registrations at cost, and no cost DNS hosting
  • WAF helped us move at risk servers/applications into a protected state allowing us to perform remediations at a measured pace and get them done right instead of band aide solutions.
  • CDN proxying increase the speed of our website while simultaneously reducing server load.
  • DMARC management and report interpretation allow use to identify weak points in our email systems, remediate and move to stricter policies without significantly increasing staff time spent managing it.
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Palo Alto Networks
  • We used to outsource our Firewall and it's management. Not only did we find their SLA's to be lacking, in general, but communication between us was horrible. Many times we could not understand them and that resulted in less than desirable rule creation or troubleshooting.
  • Since we no longer have to pay a company for 24/7 management (and SLOW SLA's) we are saving a ton of money each year. Also our fellow employee's are much happier that things can be resolved in a timely manner.
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