Competitive Comparison

Palo Alto Networks vs. Fortinet vs. CrowdStrike

All three cybersecurity platform-consolidation bets I actually hold, benchmarked head to head — the same theme, three different growth and valuation profiles.

Metric	Palo Alto Networks (PANW)	Fortinet (FTNT)	CrowdStrike (CRWD)
PEG ratio	6.12	3.03	6.97
EV/EBITDA	135.75x	39.83x	n/m (negative earnings)
Capex	n/a	n/a	$302.1M (FY26)

PEG ratio, compared

CRWD

6.97

PANW

6.12

FTNT

3.03

Same PEG ratio figures as the table above, plotted for a direct read. Bold = held in this book.

Market cap, P/E, PEG, EV/EBITDA, and capex sourced via public filings and financial-data aggregators (GuruFocus, StockAnalysis, company earnings releases), as of August 2026. PEG ratio sourced primarily from GuruFocus where available; different providers use different growth-rate assumptions, so figures elsewhere for the same stock can vary by several multiples. Gold-highlighted column(s) indicate the name(s) actually held in this book.

Why I hold all three, not just one

This is the one comparison in the book where I don't pick a single winner — I hold all three because they're consolidating the same fragmented security-spend market from different starting points. Fortinet is the cheapest on EV/EBITDA, reflecting its ongoing hardware-to-subscription transition; CrowdStrike is the most expensive and the fastest-growing, the purest cloud-native bet of the three; Palo Alto sits in between, the largest and most established. If security-budget consolidation onto fewer platforms is real, which vendor captures the most share is genuinely uncertain, and spreading the bet across all three is a deliberate hedge against picking the wrong single winner in a real structural trend.