"We have not had to deal with stability issues."
"The most valuable features of this solution are the integrations and IPS throughput."
"The Firepower+ISE+AMP for endpoint integration is something that really stands it out with other vendor solutions. They have something called pxGrid and i think it is already endorsed by IETF. This allows all devices on the network to communicate."
"I have integrated it for incidence response. If there is a security event, the Cisco firewall will automatically block the traffic, which is valuable."
"I have experience with URL filtering, and it is very good for URL filtering. You can filter URLs based on the categories, and it does a good job. It can also do deep packet inspection."
"If you compare the ASA and the FirePOWER, the best feature with FirePOWER is easy to use GUI. It has most of the same functionality in the Next-Generation FirePOWER, such as IPS, IPS policies, security intelligence, and integration and identification of all the devices or hardware you have in your network. Additionally, this solution is user-friendly."
"The most important feature is the intensive way you can troubleshoot Cisco Firepower Firewalls. You can go to the bit level to see why traffic is not handled in the correct way, and the majority of the time it's a networking issue and not a firewall issue. You can solve any problem without Cisco TAC help, because you can go very deeply under the hood to find out how traffic is flowing and whether it is not flowing as expected. That is something I have never seen with other brands."
"The Adversity Malware Protection (AMP) feature is the most valuable. It is also very easy to use. Every technical user can operate this solution without any difficulty. The dashboard of Cisco Firepower has every tool that a security operator needs. You can find every resource that you need to operate through this dashboard."
"Check Point has a centralized console that makes it possible to manage all the deployed equipment. It also has a built-in VPN service that lets users connect through VPN to our organization, which facilitates teleworking while cutting off unauthorized access to the organization's internal network."
"The packet inspection capabilities are great."
"It has various features, like Threat Prevention and Antivirus. It is easier to use and have knowledge of a single device rather than multiple devices/technologies when doing an installation. It is also easy to use because of having Antivirus and Threat Prevention features within the same firewall."
"As a system administrator my favourite part of Check Point is the smart view tracker. This alone is a must-have tool for tracking all traffic traversing the Check Point appliance."
"The initial setup is very straightforward."
"The rules are very easy to deploy and can be optimized pretty quickly."
"By deploying Check Point, it has made it easier to manage everything from a single interface. The management dashboard and policies are on its single pane of glass."
"The most valuable features for us are identity awareness, IDS and IPS, and application control."
"The solution is scalable."
"The simplicity of the product is great. It's very easy to use, which is a compliment we get all the time in terms of feedback."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the analytics."
"There are great templates, so you don't have to customize them if you don't want to. You do have the option to custom create some folders and some reports, however, with what is there, you don't really need to go through extra effort, as they already give you a lot of predefined views of reports and so forth."
"The most valuable features are that it is very simple to configure and to manage."
"I think that the UTM features are the most value, as it truly protects my infrastructure."
"Its user interface is good, and it is always working fine."
"The main reason why I purchased the particular unit was that it had good reviews and what other people were saying as far as its completeness and its leading capabilities in terms of endpoint security was very good."
"On the VPN side, Firepower could be better. It needs more monitoring on VPNs. Right now, it's not that good. You can set up a VPN in Firepower, but you can't monitor it."
"FirePOWER does a good job when it comes to providing us with visibility into threats, but I would like to see a more proactive stance to it."
"When you make any changes, irrespective of whether they are big or small, Firepower takes too much time. It is very time-consuming. Even for small changes, you have to wait for 60 seconds or maybe more, which is not good. Similarly, when you have many IPS rules and policies, it slows down, and there is an impact on its performance."
"We cannot have virtual domains, which we can create with FortiGate. This is something they should add in the future. Additionally, there is a connection limit and the FMC could improve."
"There is limited data storage on the appliance itself. So, you need to ship it out elsewhere in order for you to store it. The only point of consideration is around that area, basically limited storage on the machine and appliance. Consider logging it elsewhere or pushing it out to a SIEM to get better controls and manipulation over the data to generate additional metrics and visibility."
"I believe that the current feature set of the device is very good and the only thing that Cisco should work on is improving the user experience with the device."
"We're getting support but there's a big delay until we get a response from their technical team. They're in the USA and we're in Africa, so that's the difficulty. When they're in the office, they respond."
"Implementations require the use of a console. It would help if the console was embedded."
"The product or services can be improved from the cost and the pricing perspective."
"While not being cheap, their pricing models are competitive. In the pricing structure, however, they need improvement."
"Several of the security modules including IPS, URL Filtering, and Anti-Virus, are based on HTTPS inspection, losing relevant security capabilities if you don't implement it in your network."
"The predefined reports are few and it would be nice to increase them since the logs are excellent."
"There should be better integration with our current NAC solution to increase the granularity of policies that we implement."
"The upgrading process takes too much time."
"Potential improvements could be made around simplifying VPN functionality and configuration."
"Identity Awareness has been a massive source of problems for our deployment and the ability to debug it has been lacking."
"The logs need to be better. They need to be more visible and easier to access."
"The pricing could be reduced or include the first year warranty."
"The product does need better support in the cloud environment. It's not exactly cloud-native right now."
"They sometimes hide some features and if you want to enable them, you have to go in the CLI, enable the feature and configure it through the CLI. Customers, typically, like everything to be done by the GUI."
"There are a lot of bugs I have found in the solution and it is difficult to upgrade. These areas need improvement."
"If they had better integration with security products, such as Cisco ISE or Rapid Threat Containment, then it would be an improvement."
"The performance and speed are aspects of the solution that could always be improved upon."
"Some of the features in the graphical user interface do not work, which requires that we used the command-line-interface."
More Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall Pricing and Cost Advice →
Check Point NGFW is ranked 2nd in Firewalls with 161 reviews while Fortinet FortiGate is ranked 1st in Firewalls with 97 reviews. Check Point NGFW is rated 8.8, while Fortinet FortiGate is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Check Point NGFW writes "Central architecture means we can see an end-to-end picture of attacks". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Fortinet FortiGate writes "Stable, easy to set up, and offers good ROI". Check Point NGFW is most compared with Azure Firewall, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Meraki MX, Cisco ASA Firewall and Juniper SRX, whereas Fortinet FortiGate is most compared with Cisco ASA Firewall, pfSense, Meraki MX, Sophos XG and SonicWall TZ. See our Check Point NGFW vs. Fortinet FortiGate report.
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I have experience on both from Disti and channel experience. Please find below my comments (nothing new as such).
-Check Point GUI is a bit complicated,
-Application and Web filtering are better than Fortigate.
-IPS and AV are more effective than Fortigate. Overall more stable than any other firewall
Support: not up to the level like Fortigate and lack of trained resources (in the gulf).
Check Point is expensive.
Fortinet has many models and is more affordable than Check Point. It also provides outstanding support. GUI is more user-friendly.
We had this same discussion recently with my organization. It came down to the security of the platform.
Fortinet has had a number of breaches over the last 2 years and this was a key factor in our decision.
The challenge with Check Point will be the transition from our existing firewall and taking advantage of the various features across our organization.