Report:

Magic Quadrant for Hybrid Mesh Firewall

Top Vendor Products for Hybrid Mesh Firewall in 2025

• Check Point
• Fortinet
• Palo Alto Networks

Hybrid Mesh Firewall Vendor Product Comparisons 2025

• Check Point - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Sales execution: Check Point has a strong track record of delivering transparent product pricing for many years. It is the only vendor offering a publicly available pricing portal for all its hybrid mesh firewall products and other product lines. The vendor also offers a flexible subscription-based licensing model covering hardware appliances.
  • Market responsiveness: Check Point offers open API playbooks with prebuilt automation workflows for common use cases and utilization of a GenAI-based natural language converter to create or modify playbooks.
  • Vertical strategy: Check Point has a strong vertical focus, with financial services, telecom, OT/ICS being the key verticals. The vendor shows strong OEM and integration partnerships along with a focus on different regulations and standards specific to these verticals.
  • Product: Check Point offers advanced 5G support and security. Check Point supports quantum-safe encryption. It also offers partnerships and features to protect digital assets against blockchain and Web3 attacks.

  Cons:

  • Marketing execution: The visibility of Check Point in newer HMF deals is low compared to direct competitors. Clients are often not aware of new offerings and product enhancements, creating a market gap.
  • Client feedback: Check Point scores low in ease of administration, with surveyed clients and client inquiries reporting complexities around initial setup and operational complexity when using the tool for troubleshooting incidents.
  • Offering: Check Point does not offer containerized firewalls. The vendor lacks remote browser isolation and advanced SD-WAN capabilities compared to direct market competitors.
  • Market responsiveness: Check Point introduced its SASE offering later than direct market competitors, reducing its appeal for those looking for a centralized cloud-based manager for HMF and SASE implementations.


• Fortinet - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Market understanding: Fortinet offers its FortiOS fabric as part of its HMF, extending integrations to other product lines, including FortiSASE managed through FortiManager Cloud. Advanced reporting is available through FortiAnalyzer.
  • Market responsiveness: Fortinet has introduced PQC support for IPsec key exchange, enabling FortiGate devices to use quantum-resistant algorithms to secure VPN tunnels in FortiOS version 7.6.1. This provides protection against "harvest now" and "decrypts later" threats against IPsec VPN traffic.
  • Product offering: Fortinet offers on-FortiGate AI processing for FortiAI-Assist as an agentic AI assistant, which can autonomously analyze security events, triage alerts, conduct threat hunting and perform root-cause analysis at the FortiManager Cloud.
  • Sales execution: Fortinet's points-based licensing, called FortiFlex, helps make HMF an operationally flexible solution after initial setup, allowing customers to change form factors over time as their use-case-driven needs change.

  Cons:

  • Customer experience: Fortinet disclosed vulnerabilities in its products, and Gartner clients and surveyed customers have expressed concern over the number and severity of bugs and exploitable vulnerabilities. The vendor has made some VPN-related announcements impacting end users, such as phasing out SSL VPN tunnel mode for IPsec VPN and discontinuing support for agentless VPN on certain models.
  • Product execution: The demo went through several different UIs to meet the requirements: The number of steps required to complete one end-to-end task requires multiple tabs, interfaces and back and forth as per Gartner's analysis and client feedback. In addition, clients mention limited logging visibility within the firewall.
  • Sales strategy: Some surveyed customers express frustration with the lack of visibility into Fortinet's HMF roadmap, making it difficult to evaluate short- and medium-term product vision versus competition.
  • Marketing execution: Fortinet is more desirable as an appliance-based vendor. Although the vendor offers a mature cloud firewall with orchestration capabilities, visibility of FortiGate for cloud firewall use cases is lower compared to direct competitors.


• Palo Alto Networks - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Product strategy: Palo Alto Networks' HMF security services leverage AI methods, such as deep learning and GenAI, to continuously train on a wide range of data sources. AI/ML models assess the severity of threats based on the risk and policy enforcement decisions are made based on the severity levels.
  • Marketing execution: Palo Alto Networks is the most visible vendor for HMF use cases in inquiries. The vendor is a desirable choice for HMF clients seeking unified cloud management along with SASE and SSE through its Strata Cloud Manager.
  • Product: The vendor offers advanced IoT posture management capabilities within Strata Cloud Management compared to competitors. The vendor's IoT approach uses continuous traffic monitoring and crowdsourced intelligence to identify and baseline normal behaviors of IoT devices.
  • Market responsiveness: The vendor has a strong focus on AI runtime security and the 5G security use case. Strata Cloud Manager offers advanced orchestration capabilities such as predictive analysis and policy recommendation. The vendor supports visibility and control over PQC usage in encrypted traffic.

  Cons:

  • Sales execution: Gartner clients often highlight frustration and concern over higher renewal costs, forcing them to sign short-term contracts rather than multiyear deals. The total cost of ownership of Palo Alto Networks HMF is relatively higher than direct competition and is one of the key reasons clients tend to migrate away.
  • Pricing: Gartner finds Palo Alto Networks ELAs and ESAs complex and lacking clarity. Gartner clients often struggle to understand these proposals and describe them as complex and time-consuming.
  • Offering: At present, there is a feature disparity between Strata Cloud Manager and Panorama. As a result, Gartner clients cite that they will have to run both Panorama and Strata Cloud Manager for at least a year before they can fully move to Strata Cloud Manager. The CN-Series is not managed through Strata Cloud Manager either, but it is supported via Panorama.
  • Customer feedback: Gartner clients and surveyed customers mention that the hardware firewalls can have performance-related issues, such as slow boot times and high resource requirements. Customer support around such issues can be inconsistent.


• Cisco - Visionary
  

  Pros:

  • Product strategy: The vendor offers multiple flexible firewall deployment types to support hybrid environments compared to direct competitors. Cisco Hypershield offers advanced distributed deployment for cloud. Cisco is the only HMF vendor with agent-based microsegmentation, which is offered through Cisco Secure Workload.
  • Geographic and vertical strategy: Cisco offers technical support in the greatest number of regional languages. The vendor has strong partnerships with CPS vendors as a strategy aligned with the manufacturing vertical.
  • Market responsiveness: Cisco shows a strong focus by responding to the growing demand for cloud firewall use cases. The vendor offers advanced cloud firewall orchestration capabilities through Cisco Security Cloud Control and Cisco Multicloud Defense.
  • Product: Gartner scores Cisco high in secure remote access features. The vendor offers VPN posture management, a single interface to manage ZTNA, IPsec and SSL VPN through Cisco Security Cloud Control with extensive third-party MFA authentication support.

  Cons:

  • Marketing execution: Cisco continues to sell multiple product lines for similar deployment types, creating confusion around product positioning. Clients often indicate that these overlapping products are confusing and are a factor in moving away from the vendor.
  • Customer experience: Clients rate Cisco low in ease of management compared to its direct competitors. The vendor lacks single policy creation through a single screen and requires multiple steps to create an end-to-end firewall rule.
  • Sales execution: Cisco is rarely seen in stand-alone HMF and cloud firewall shortlists despite a mature offering. The vendor displays one of the lowest new customer acquisition volumes in this market.
  • Marketing strategy: A large part of Cisco's network security value proposition is focused on Cisco infrastructure as a fabric, including switching, targeting network and data center teams. This creates a disconnect with the chief information security officer teams as the primary buyers and negatively impacts the network security brand.


• HPE (Juniper Networking) - Challenger
  

  Pros:

  • Product: HPE Juniper Networking offers a mature cloud-based manager. The Security Director can integrate with Juniper security analytics to provide advanced threat correlation. The security director offers visibility of VPCs and advanced cloud-native policy orchestration.
  • Product execution: Security director offers an easy-to-manage interface. It offers mature orchestration capabilities for cloud firewall use cases. It also offers advanced IoT tagging and categorization information, enabling IoT device posture management capability.
  • Market understanding: HPE Juniper Networking has a focus on cloud use cases and offers a mature containerized firewall that can be fully managed by the security director. The company's approach includes simplifying licensing by bundling hardware, software and management into a single SKU.
  • Geographical strategy: The company has a global presence with a diverse industrial and vertical focus. The vendor offers multilingual technical support. It offers a network of regional partners across the globe, focusing on regional customer support.

  Cons:

  • Overall viability: There has been a constant decline in Juniper's firewall market share due to factors such as constrained past investments and uncertainty of future investments following the HPE acquisition. This has led to its decline in the HMF shortlist compared to the direct competitors.
  • Marketing strategy: The vendor lacks dedicated security branding and marketing. Overall marketing is directed more toward integrated infrastructure promoting convergence between HPE Juniper Networking products, making it more desirable for network and infrastructure teams than security teams.
  • Marketing execution: Gartner has very low visibility of HPE Juniper Networking firewalls being shortlisted for stand-alone HMF use cases. Despite a mature cloud firewall offering, Gartner does not see its cloud firewall shortlisted for cloud use cases.
  • Offering: At the time of assessment, HPE Juniper Networking does not have a SASE offering as per Gartner SASE market definition. This makes it less appealing to HMF customers who desire a centralized cloud-based manager for managing HMF and SASE.


• Forcepoint - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Product: Forcepoint offers advanced VPN orchestration capabilities, rated highly by users. The centralized manager offers centralized real-time visibility and management of VPN connections through a single click, making it easy to manage. The vendor also offers API-based CI/CD pipeline integration.
  • Sales strategy: Forcepoint's growth is in multiyear enterprise agreements (EA) in regulated industries and government sectors. Gartner observes Forcepoint HMF offerings bundled within comprehensive enterprise licensing agreements (ELA).
  • Product strategy: The focus is on flexible deployments, including clustering for high availability and scalability. The product emphasizes user and data-centric security, with deep user activity monitoring and DLP integration.
  • Geographic strategy: Forcepoint offers multilingual support and has a strong focus in EMEA, government and the OT vertical. As a result, the vendor offers regional compliance support and local language support for the region. It collaborates with system integrators and technology partners to meet diverse security needs.

  Cons:

  • Marketing execution: The vendor primarily focuses on perimeter firewall and distributed office use cases. Gartner does not see adoption of Forcepoint in cloud firewall use cases in client inquiries, making it less likely to be shortlisted as an HMF vendor compared to other competitors.
  • Offering: The vendor lacks a SASE offering, reducing its appeal for those looking for centralized cloud-based management of HMF and SASE implementations.
  • Customer experience: Forcepoint scores low in cloud management capabilities. Some advanced configuration and troubleshooting features still require local console access despite Forcepoint's push toward full-featured cloud management.
  • Vertical strategy: Forcepoint's focus on regulated and government sectors can limit visibility and adoption in the commercial midmarket.


• H3C - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Product: H3C's product supports flexible deployment both in the cloud and on-premises. The vendor offers containerized firewalls with AI runtime security features and focuses on CPS security, offering NetFlow analysis for advanced threat detection.
  • Product strategy: H3C has a large security portfolio as well as network, servers and other offerings. It is chosen by many enterprises seeking vendor consolidation. H3C offers products such as SecCenter CSAP-iSOC for security operations, making it a desirable vendor for consolidation in China.
  • Sales execution: H3C offers affordable products compared to other vendors. Product pricing has been stable over the past few years, which is an advantage for clients who are experiencing budget constraints.
  • Customer experience: Surveyed clients highlighted technical support as very responsive. Clients also appreciated cost-effective pricing and easy licensing.

  Cons:

  • Product strategy: Some of H3C's product interfaces are only available in Chinese, like the LLM-powered AI assistant.
  • Product execution: H3C lacks a unified cloud manager for its overlapping security products. The cloud manager lacks maturity and often redirects users to different management consoles, increasing operational complexity. Additionally, H3C doesn't have a clear plan to consolidate.
  • Geographic strategy: As a regional vendor, H3C has a heavy focus on domestic cloud platforms (e.g., AliCloud, Tencent Cloud) and lacks support for global cloud platforms, limiting its international competitiveness for cloud firewall use cases.
  • Sales strategy: The majority of H3C's sales are to the Chinese market and a few parts of Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa. It lacks sales presence in other regions, especially North America and Europe.


• Huawei - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Product: Huawei offers orchestration for branch deployment, security policy modification, one-click configuration in Huawei Cloud, support for multiple enforcement types, MFA authentication, IPsec and SSL VPN connectivity, as well as advanced risk scoring for enhanced security management.
  • Sales execution: The vendor has a strong focus on high-throughput appliances with competitive pricing for large enterprises. The vendor has maintained its list price for a few years, providing pricing stability.
  • Product strategy: The vendor supports multiple firewall enforcement types, including cloud firewall out-of-box deployment, one-click purchase, automatic route synchronization and fine-grained permission configuration. The platform includes an intelligent policy recommendation feature with policy self-learning to refine original policies without manual intervention.
  • Vertical strategy: Huawei offers technical support in various regional languages to its customers globally. It has a strong vertical presence in manufacturing, government and carrier in China. The vendor also has a large MSSP presence.

  Cons:

  • Product strategy: Huawei scores low in public cloud use cases as its support is limited to Huawei Cloud only. The vendor lacks a mature SASE offering, limiting its appeal for those looking to extend HFM to SASE through a centralized cloud management.
  • Customer experience: Huawei offers multiple firewall product lines with dedicated managers. There are differences in features between Huawei's cloud-based manager and its on-premises/virtual firewall centralized managers, resulting in a lack of centralized management experience.
  • Marketing execution: Huawei firewalls are generally shortlisted as a part of larger infrastructure Huawei EA deals involving multiple products. Gartner does not see Huawei firewalls shortlisted for stand-alone HMF use cases.
  • Geographic strategy: Due to geopolitical constraints, Huawei has a limited global presence with no sales in some key countries, restricting its customer base. This also impacts its product strategy, partnerships and support for regional compliances.


• Sangfor - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Product: Sangfor offers cloud deception as a feature that enables Sangfor Network Secure/NGAF to integrate with cloud decoys without any third-party product deployment. The vendor also offers AI-based phishing detection using LLMs.
  • Sales execution: Sangfor has maintained its list pricing for a few years, making it a cost-effective offering that highlights its strong SMB and upper-midsize enterprise focus.
  • Product strategy: Sangfor's product strategy centers on ease of use and cost-effective pricing, delivering an intuitive and user-friendly interface that streamlines deployment and management for organizations of all sizes. The vendor emphasizes flexible deployment across hardware, virtual and cloud environments, ensuring scalability and high availability.
  • Geographic strategy: Sangfor maintains a strong focus on China and emerging markets. As a result, the vendor offers multilingual technical support for these regions and a growing network of local channel partners.

  Cons:

  • Sales execution: Gartner clients have reported the vendor's strong focus on selling bundled security suites, sometimes creating complexity in conducting focused product evaluations and licensing purchases for stand-alone HMF use cases.
  • Product strategy: Sangfor has less focus than the Leaders on dedicated HMF-based use cases and targets a wider product stack, including NGAF, IAM and cloud-based security services.
  • Product execution: At present, the Chinese version and English version of centralized cloud manager have feature disparity. Some advanced configurations and troubleshooting are dependent on direct access to local consoles or on-premises interfaces and other product interfaces.
  • Market responsiveness: Sangfor lacks advanced SASE and IoT management capabilities compared to the leaders. As a result, it lacks visibility in client shortlists seeking HMF and advanced SASE from the same vendor.


• SonicWall - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Product: SonicWall emphasizes DNS security features such as domain categorization, threat intelligence, DNS tunneling detection and sinkhole services. The platform provides unified management for firewalls, switches, access points, endpoint threat detection and secure service edge. The system supports autopolicy generation for low-scoring devices.
  • Sales execution: SonicWall offers easy-to-consume and cost-effective pricing models that are highly desirable for MSSPs and SMBs. The company continues to offer hardware, software subscriptions and management as a bundled solution, with cloud management included at no extra cost.
  • Marketing strategy: SonicWall's sales strategy emphasizes bundled offerings, such as free secure internet access and ZTNA licenses with three-year HMF bundles. It also offers new bundled subscriptions for CASB, ZTNA, SWG and SD-WAN use cases. It also offers an inclusive cyber warranty program through a third-party cyber insurance provider.
  • Vertical strategy: The vendor employs an MSP/MSSP-focused strategy, targeting education, healthcare, IT/service providers and retail sectors. It has a diverse global presence, offering technical support mainly in English, with other languages available regionally.

  Cons:

  • Marketing execution: SonicWall does not have direct end-user branding, as it is 100% MSP/MSS-focused. As a result, end users have limited awareness of SonicWall HMF, which limits marketing execution across all types of customers.
  • Market responsiveness: The vendor has been slow to extend HMF to fully integrated and cloud-managed capabilities, such as ZTNA, FWaaS, SASE or cloud firewall, making it less appealing to buyers who value higher levels of integration of these products.
  • Product strategy: SonicWall's product strategy is more focused on MSP/MSSP and SMB use cases and demands. The vendor's roadmap indicates closing product gaps and lacks innovation related to emerging HMF use cases.
  • Offering: The offering has feature gaps, making it less desirable for cloud firewall use cases. The absence of public cloud CSPM capabilities, limited generative AI assistant functions, lack of IoT detection or tagging, no Kubernetes-specific policy support and no container firewall support are a few examples of such gaps.


• Sophos - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Product: Sophos offers integration of NDR with Sophos Central. The lightweight version of NDR directly integrates with Sophos XGS Firewalls and analyzes TLS metadata and DNS queries using AI. It also offers risk-based scoring detection.
  • Product strategy: Sophos enables unified policy management across on-premises, virtual and cloud environments via its cloud-native Sophos Central platform, allowing centralized visibility and control of all firewall deployments.
  • Sales strategy: Sophos maintains a strong global presence with multilingual technical support and an extensive channel partner network spanning North America, EMEA and Asia/Pacific.
  • Sales execution: Sophos is one of the top-cited competitors in SMB because of its bundled pricing. The vendor focuses on a simplified and intuitive user interface, providing ease in deployment and management for organizations with limited resources.

  Cons:

  • Marketing strategy: Sophos lacks dedicated HMF-based positioning, with a primary focus on cloud firewall use cases. Sophos traditionally emphasized Synchronized Security, highlighting the integration between Firewall and EDR. Sophos now focuses on Active Threat Response, emphasizing the integration between Firewall and XDR or MDR services.
  • Marketing execution: While Sophos offers a single firewall series, there are some overlapping capabilities between Sophos Firewall and Endpoint products. These overlapping offerings can leave clients uncertain about which product best fits their needs and can be a factor in clients considering alternative vendors with more streamlined portfolios.
  • Product offering: Sophos Central provides unified cloud-based management; however, some advanced configuration, policy tuning and troubleshooting tasks require direct access to individual firewall appliances or on-premises interfaces. While this depth of management is not always needed, this limits the seamlessness of centralized management and may create operational inefficiencies for clients seeking fully cloud-native unified administration
  • Market responsiveness: Sophos lacks FWaaS and lags market leaders in core and advanced features for ZTNA, IoT device detection and network segmentation.


• WatchGuard - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Offering: The unified cloud-based manager supports all hardware and software models, enabling scalable policy management with shared policies, templates, tags and device groups. WatchGuard offers integration of XDR with NDR, providing agentless telemetry, full network visibility and device monitoring.
  • Sales strategy: The vendor offers large regional channels and scores high in global presence. Technical support ranks high, with support in multiple languages.
  • Sales execution: WatchGuard offers a flexible licensing model, including FlexPay for MSP partners with options for monthly subscriptions and choices between one-year or multiyear terms. There is also a points system option for product allocation to tenants. It provides multiple security service packages from which to choose, with tools and quick reference guides available for partners to estimate pricing.
  • Customer experience: Surveyed clients have scored WatchGuard high in ease of use and deployment. They have also highlighted that the licensing bundles are easy to consume and cost-effective.

  Cons:

  • Product: WatchGuard's offering lacks features, such as containerized firewalls, user-based dynamic risk scoring and comprehensive IoT tagging. Additionally, TLS decryption causes significant performance drops, even when used on high-performance appliances.
  • Product execution: Connectivity for SSL VPN users can be slow, impacting user experience. There are feature gaps between on-premises and cloud managers, which may impact the adoption of cloud management.
  • Market execution: WatchGuard's GTM is through resellers/MSPs/MSSPs. It prioritizes SMB requirements and is not often cited by Gartner clients for the cloud firewall use case.
  • Product execution: Client feedback suggests that documentation for initial configurations could be improved because it lacks the necessary detail for inexperienced users.

Reference

• Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Hybrid Mesh Firewall, 25 August 2025, ID G00824307

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