We performed a comparison between Cisco ASA Firewall and Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Based on the parameters we compared, Cisco ASA Firewall and Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall are similarly well-thought of. Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall seems to be slightly more popular than Cisco ASA Firewall. The major differentiation between the two is that Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall seems to have a smoother deployment process.
"This solution made our organization more secure and gave us better control."
"The initial setup is easy."
"The best features are stability and scalability."
"The technical support is excellent. I would rate it as 10 out of 10. When there has been an issue, we have had a good response from them."
"I love the ASDM (Adaptive Security Device Manager) which is the management suite. It's a GUI and you're able to see everything at a glance without using the command line. There are those who love the CLI, but with ASDM it is easier to see where everything is going and where the problems are."
"ASA integrates with FirePOWER, IPS functionality, malware filtering, etc. This functionality wasn't there in the past. With its cloud architecture, Cisco can filter traffic at the engine layer. Evasive encryptions can be entered into the application, like BitTorrent or Skype. This wasn't possible to control through a traditional firewall."
"Cisco ASA Firewall is a well known product. They're always updating it, and you know what they're doing and that it works."
"The most valuable feature is that it's secure."
"We have not had to deal with stability issues."
"Another benefit has been user integration. We try to integrate our policies so that we can create policies based on active users. We can create policies based on who is accessing a resource instead of just IP addresses and ports."
"The customer service/technical support is very good with this solution."
"The solution offers very easy configurations."
"The most important features are the intrusion prevention engine and the application visibility and control. The Snort feature in Firepower is also valuable."
"This solution helped us to identify the key areas where we need to focus to block traffic that is malicious to our organization."
"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."
"It is one of the fastest solutions, if not the fastest, in the security technology space. This gives us peace of mind knowing that as soon as a new attack comes online that we will be protected in short order. From that perspective, no one really comes close now to Firepower, which is hugely valuable to us from an upcoming new attack prevention perspective."
"You shouldn't have to use the ASDM to help manage the client."
"The user interface is a little clunky and difficult to work with. Some things aren't as easy as they should be."
"The solution needs to have better logging features."
"Its user interface is good, but it could be better. Currently, you have to know what to do before you can manage a device. If you don't know what to do, you can mess things up. There are some devices that are easier, such as FortiGate. The user interface of FortiGate is more intuitive. It is very easy to log in and configure things."
"Some individuals find the setup and configuration challenging."
"On firewall features, Fortinet is better. Cisco needs to become more competitive and add more features or meet Fortinet's offering."
"The price can be better."
"Comparing Cisco solution to others, it is expensive, it would be better for it to be cheaper."
"Cisco Firepower is not completely integrated with Active Directory. We are trying to use Active Directory to restrict users by using some security groups that are not integrated within the Cisco Firepower module. This is the main issue that we are facing."
"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."
"In a future release, it would be ideal if they could offer an open interface to other security products so that we could easily connect to our own open industry standard."
"One of the few things that are brought up is that for the overall management, it would be great to have a cloud instance of that. And not only just a cloud instance, but one of the areas that we've looked at is using an HA type of cloud. To have the ability to have a device file within a cloud. If we had an issue with one, the other one would pick up automatically."
"The ability to better integrate with other tools would be an improvement."
"Licensing is complex, and I'd like it to be simplified. This is an area for improvement."
"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."
"Implementations require the use of a console. It would help if the console was embedded."
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Cisco ASA Firewall is ranked 4th in Firewalls with 91 reviews while Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall is ranked 5th in Firewalls with 53 reviews. Cisco ASA Firewall is rated 8.4, while Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Cisco ASA Firewall writes "Includes multiple tools that help manage and troubleshoot, but needs SD-WAN for load balancing". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall writes "The ability to implement dynamic policies for dynamic environments is important, given the fluidity in the world of security". Cisco ASA Firewall is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate, Palo Alto Networks WildFire, Meraki MX, pfSense and Juniper SRX, whereas Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate, Meraki MX, Palo Alto Networks WildFire, Check Point NGFW and pfSense. See our Cisco ASA Firewall vs. Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall report.
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