Network Firewall Pricing - Everything You Need to Know

Network firewalls monitor and control traffic passing between trusted and untrusted networks, such as internal business systems and the public internet. They offer vital protection for organizations of all sizes, safeguarding sensitive data and maintaining network integrity by blocking unauthorized access, malware, and other cyberattacks.

Identifying the right firewall is an important aspect of network security, and pricing is a crucial consideration for any business. Network firewall pricing varies significantly depending on features, performance, deployment models, and other factors. Understanding these factors helps you make informed decisions, align your cybersecurity investments with business needs, and avoid overspending on solutions that may not provide the best value or protection.

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Why Understanding Network Firewall Pricing is Important

Even with cloud adoption and the erosion of the traditional network perimeter, having an effective network firewall remains an essential part of enterprise cybersecurity. Network firewalls allow you to filter malicious traffic before it reaches sensitive business assets, enforcing consistent security policies and maintaining compliance.

Today, there are many firewall products on the market, ranging from basic tools to more advanced Next-Generation Firewalls (NGFWs) and hybrid mesh firewalls. These different firewall solutions vary significantly in capabilities, performance, and cost. Understanding network firewall pricing and the key factors influencing it is critical to ensuring your business gets the right level of protection without unnecessary overspending.

Network firewall pricing can significantly impact your overall IT budget, affecting both immediate spending and long-term cybersecurity planning. For example, you may choose an inexpensive option to reduce your initial outlay. However, low-cost solutions can end up costing more in the long term, as they struggle to scale with your operations, leave security gaps that increase the risk of cyberattacks, or reduce productivity due to bandwidth constraints.

Alternatively, choosing the most secure solution on the market can leave you with unnecessary and unused security features and a wasted budget, limiting spending on other critical cybersecurity investments.

To find the balance between these two outcomes and identify the right network firewall and pricing for your business, you need to learn how different factors affect costs.

Key Factors Influencing Network Firewall Pricing

Network firewall pricing can vary significantly depending on the type of solution, its performance capabilities, and the services bundled with it. Understanding these factors is essential for accurately comparing options and ensuring you choose a firewall that aligns with your security needs and budget. Below are the key factors that influence what you will pay for a network firewall.

Type of Firewall

Firewall type and deployment model are among the biggest drivers of network firewall pricing. Each type comes with different cost structures and operational considerations. A network firewall can be delivered as a hardware device, a software application, or a solution that combines both.

Hardware Firewalls: These are physical appliances installed on-premises. They tend to have higher upfront costs due to the need for dedicated hardware. Still, they offer strong performance and are well-suited for organizations with high-volume traffic to sensitive, on-prem infrastructure.
Software Firewalls: Installed on existing servers or devices, software firewalls often have lower initial costs. However, they may require additional resources, influencing long-term expenses.

Another type of firewall that is becoming increasingly popular is cloud-delivered solutions or Firewall-as-a-Service (FWaaS). Operating similar to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings, cloud-based firewalls provide flexibility, automatic updates, and easier scalability, but costs can rise based on usage, bandwidth, or advanced services. They are particularly beneficial for businesses with distributed computing environments and workforces.

Security Features and Capabilities

Modern firewalls offer a wide range of built-in and add-on security features that influence their total cost. Almost all firewalls will provide basic features, including packet filtering and simple access controls. However, more advanced solutions typically offer additional security capabilities such as:

VPN support
Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) technology
Deep Packet Inspection (DPI)
TLS/SSL Inspection
Threat intelligence integration
Sandboxing

Another increasingly important feature of modern firewalls is their ability to secure AI traffic and systems. With the rapid adoption of AI tools, organizations need AI-specific security controls to safely integrate this technology while maintaining network integrity. Examples include Data Loss Prevention (DLP) measures that prevent users from exposing sensitive information when interacting with AI systems, and maintaining visibility and control over Model Context Protocol (MCP) server traffic when connecting AI models with external tools and datasets.

These enhanced capabilities improve protection but require more computing power, specialized software, or additional licensing, which can significantly increase network firewall pricing. The exact security features to focus on will depend on organizational needs. Remember, costs can quickly spiral with security upgrades that may go beyond what is necessary for your use case. Additionally, implementing more advanced protections can impact network performance.

Throughput and Performance

Firewalls will always have some impact on network performance and throughput. The act of inspecting traffic and enforcing security policies intrinsically slows down traffic. Vendors use various techniques to deliver network protection without significantly reducing performance. This comes at a cost, as the capacity and speed at which a firewall processes network traffic directly affect its price.

Firewalls with higher throughput can support larger, more complex environments and therefore generally come at a higher price point. You must evaluate your network size, user count, and expected traffic to ensure you select an appropriate solution that doesn’t degrade performance or force an early upgrade.

Scalability

Similarly, scalable firewall options often provide better return on investment over time by delaying or reducing the need for costly replacements or major upgrades. A scalable firewall can adapt as your network grows, impacting both initial costs and long-term value. Firewalls with greater capacity, modular hardware, or flexible licensing options may require a higher upfront investment. But for growing businesses or dynamic environments, scalability can be as important as immediate performance.

Another aspect of scalability that affects long-term costs is whether a vendor designs its solution for use in an intelligent firewall cluster. Environments that require high resilience and performance are increasingly using intelligent firewall clusters, containing 2 or more firewalls working together as a single system. This approach offers multiple benefits, including:

High availability with added redundancy and multiple points of failure, rather than just one.
Intelligent load balancing to allocate firewall resources to your most critical applications during unexpected traffic peaks.
Distributing network traffic across multiple firewalls to increase the total capacity of the network for greater scalability.

Solutions designed for use as part of an intelligent firewall cluster offer long-term savings. Organizations can simply integrate their current network firewall into the cluster without overhauling their entire firewall infrastructure.

Vendor Support and Maintenance

While these factors focus on the technical capabilities of a network firewall solution, it is important to remember that your team must implement these solutions. Ongoing vendor support is a major but sometimes overlooked component of network firewall pricing. Costs can include technical support, firmware updates, and security patching, all of which are critical for maintaining protection. Many vendors bundle these services into subscription packages, while others charge them separately.

Maintenance costs can quickly spiral if you choose to stick with inferior firewall solutions. This includes the costs associated with an increased number of security incidents and the ongoing updates required to address Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEVs). The US Government Agency Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) tracks these vulnerabilities to minimize their impact on firewalls and other solutions.

However, a single unpatched KEV can compromise your network and lead to major security breaches. You can compare firewall vendors based on the number of KEV incidents they have experienced over the years to identify those with the best track record and therefore lower long-term maintenance costs.

Common Network Firewall Pricing Models

Network firewall pricing can be structured in various ways. Understanding these models is key to finding a solution that aligns with both your security needs and financial strategy. Each pricing model can provide different pros and cons depending on whether your organization prioritizes flexibility, predictable budgeting, or long-term value.

Below are the most common models used across the industry:

Upfront Purchase: In this model, you pay a one-time cost for the firewall hardware or software license. Therefore, it is predictable but requires a large initial investment and can limit flexibility. Plus, it may still require additional charges for ongoing support or feature upgrades.

Subscription-Based: Firewalls delivered as a subscription involve recurring monthly or annual fees, often bundled with updates and support. This leads to relatively predictable operating expenses, simplified updates, and a reduced maintenance burden. However, over time, ongoing subscription costs may exceed the price of an upfront purchase.

Consumption-Based: Network firewall pricing based on actual usage, such as bandwidth consumption, traffic volume, or number of active users. This pricing model is beneficial for organizations with fluctuating traffic patterns that don’t want to overpay for unneeded firewall usage. To make this approach more viable and prevent unexpected bills, you need to track usage internally and estimate upcoming bills.

Bundled Packages: Network firewalls are an important component in your larger security posture. Vendors often bundle network firewalls with other security tools such as endpoint security, analytics, or centralized management platforms. This can be more cost-effective, assuming you need and value each of the security components offered.

Outsourced Firewall Services: Some organizations choose to outsource firewall deployment, monitoring, and maintenance to a managed security service provider (MSSP). This pricing model typically includes monthly service fees that cover the technology, expertise, and ongoing management. While it may increase costs, outsourcing firewall services can be an effective solution for organizations that lack the internal resources or time to manage complex security infrastructure.

Determining the Right Firewall and Pricing for Your Business

To effectively evaluate network firewall options, you need a clear understanding of your existing business operations and network architecture, as well as the budget and resources you have available. This includes finances, but it also includes internal expertise and the size of your security team.

The kind of questions you need to answer during this process include:

What sensitive business data and systems will the network firewall protect?
What data privacy regulations do you need to comply with?
Beyond basic inspection and policy enforcement, what security features do you require?
How many users access your network, and where are they located?
How much network traffic do you expect to pass through the firewall?
How do you expect the number of users and traffic volume to change in the next year or 3 years?
Where will the firewall be positioned within your existing network architecture?
Who oversees and manages firewall operations?

By taking a considered, structured approach, you ensure that firewall investments are more likely to deliver long-term value.

A vital aspect of identifying the right network firewall at the right price is estimating Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), your overall outlay over the firewall’s full lifecycle. This requires an extensive analysis of potential firewall costs, such as:

Initial Purchase Costs: Hardware or software license costs and installation fees.
Licensing and Subscription Costs: Annual or monthly security subscriptions, service fees for cloud-based firewalls, and additional security features that accompany the firewall (e.g., IPS, DPI, threat intelligence, VPN, sandboxing).
Support and Maintenance Costs: Vendor support contracts, firmware updates, and replacement parts or hardware refresh cycles.
Emergency Patch Costs: Urgent security patches to eliminate KEVs and prevent significant security incidents, as well as their associated disruption and costs.
Administrative Costs: Staff time for monitoring and managing the firewall, training costs for in-house IT teams, and the potential costs of outsourced firewall management.
Performance-Related Costs: Scaling costs as traffic or user counts increase, network upgrades required to support higher throughput, and any additional equipment needed for redundancy or high availability.

Protect Your Network with Quantum Network Security

Understanding network firewall pricing is essential to maximizing the protection you can provide within the security budget and resources you have available. By evaluating the factors that impact firewall pricing, common pricing models used in the industry, and how to calculate TCO, you can make informed decisions on how best to protect your network without overspending.

Whatever the scale or needs of your organization, Check Point has a network firewall solution for you with its Quantum Network Security platform. Recently named number 1 for firewall threat prevention, including industry-leading malware and phishing block rates, Quantum delivers the best possible protection while maintaining network performance. This includes a significantly lower number of KEVs compared to other leading firewall vendors.

With a suite of potential security features to fit your needs, Quantum is easy to install and manage from a single smart console. This simplifies the management of complex corporate networks, dramatically reducing operational and administrative costs.

See Quantum in action for yourself by scheduling a demo and start protecting your network with next-generation threat prevention and performance.