Our take
What our shortlists say about each one.
- Fortinet FortiGate Next-Generation Firewall
Best for: Companies wanting SD-WAN and ZTNA built into the firewall
FortiGate earns its spot by folding SD-WAN and ZTNA into the firewall, so many branches can run on one box per site. That fits mid-market and enterprise networks with lots of offices. If you already run separate SD-WAN or ZTNA products, decide first whether you want to merge them.
From Best Next-Generation Firewall Solutions for Business, Fall 2026
- Palo Alto Networks Software Firewalls
Best for: Enterprises running workloads across multiple cloud platforms
Management through Strata Cloud Manager gives you centralized visibility across physical and virtual deployments. The trade-off is that Strata is another pane of glass to learn and maintain. If your team is already deep in the Palo Alto ecosystem, this is a natural fit. If you're evaluating Palo Alto for the first time, budget time for the learning curve. The 15-30 day trial is enough to validate the architecture but not enough to get comfortable with policy tuning.
From Best Next-Generation Firewall Solutions for Business, Fall 2026
Reviewed by Nika (Nikoloz) Kokhreidze.
