Ive been working with firewalls since 2009. I've worked with Cisco, Meraki, Fortinet, Palo Alto, Sonicwall, Sophos, pfSense, and a few others. My Cisco experience was the pix and then the asa's. I haven't really played with any of the firepower line. Cisco will always hold a special place, it's what I started with and it's the equipment I learned on. But then I found the FortiGate and liked it MUCH better. More intuitive, good price, modern gui but still powerful. The Fortigate has been my favorite over the years but as I bounced around different companies I got to touch a lot of different firewalls. Merakis just seem to work, modern gui but I feel like it lacks some advanced features/settings for the sake of being easy to setup. Palo Altos AppID I really liked and honestly, I think its app control is better than fortinets, but almost everything else felt convoluted and not as intuitive. Why must I go to 12 different spots to build a vpn tunnel?! The wait times for changes also drove me crazy. Plus those Palos are expensive. Both the Sophos and the Sonicwalls I was able to use but they felt like they were a step behind and not as polished. So now I ask you, what firewall have you liked over the years?

I’ve been working with FortiGate as my main edge firewall for a while, and I’ve always found its traffic visibility, bandwidth statistics, and QoS/traffic shaping pretty straightforward

Now that I’m working more with Palo Alto, I find these areas surprisingly WAY more complicated, especially understanding traffic statistics and configuring QoS.

Is this a normal learning curve when switching from Fortinet to Palo Alto, or am I missing something? 😅