We performed a comparison between Cisco ASA Firewall and OPNsense based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Firewalls solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
"Since the product is stable, we do not have to spend additional money to buy other firewalls. Once deployed, we can use the product for a long time. Thus, it is cost effective."
"The most important features are the intrusion prevention engine and the application visibility and control. The Snort feature in Firepower is also valuable."
"The most valuable feature that Cisco Firepower NGFW provides for us is the Intrusion policy."
"I have access to the web version of Cisco Talos to see the reputation of IP addresses. I find this very helpful. It provides important information for my company to obtain the reputation of IP addresses. The information in Talos is quite complete."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is stability."
"One of the nice things about Firepower is that you can set it to discover the environment. If that is happening, then Firepower is learning about every device, software operating system, and application running inside or across your environment. Then, you can leverage the discovery intelligence to get Firepower to select the most appropriate intrusion prevention rules to use for your environment rather than picking one of the base policies that might have 50,000 IPS rules in it, which can put a lot of overhead on your firewall. If you choose the recommendations, as long as you update them regularly, you might be able to get your rule set down to only 1,000 or 1,500, which is a significant reduction in a base rule set. This means that the firewall will give you better performance because there are less rules being checked unnecessarily. That is really useful."
"Firepower has reduced our firewall operational costs by about 25 percent."
"VPN and firewall are good features."
"For our very specific use case, for remote access for VPN, ASAs are very good."
"It is a very stable product. I've not had any issues with it. It is a super product, and I won't need to change it anytime soon."
"The interface is user-friendly."
"The configuration support is very good. You can find a lot of configuration samples and troubleshooting tips on the internet, which is very good."
"It's very stable and mature."
"The configuration was kind of straightforward from the command line and also from the ASDM. It was very easy to manage by using their software in Java."
"The most valuable feature we have found to be the VPN because we use it often."
"It has an open license. It works very well, and there is an update every month."
"The VPN server feature is the most valuable. It is integrated with Radius and AAA for doing accounting and authentication. Insight view is also an important feature for me at this time. It allows me to assess our network traffic. I also like the firewall feature. The BSD kernel has a packet filter. It is one of the most solid frameworks for firewalls. Its user interface is one of the best interfaces I have used."
"The IDS and IPS features are valuable. From the usability perspective, there is a lot of good documentation. As IT professionals, we found it very easy to configure the firewall. It was easy to configure and use."
"OPNsense is highly stable."
"The most valuable features are reporting, the Sensei plugin, and firewall capabilities."
"OPNsense is easy to scale when running on the hardware."
"The initial implementation process is simple."
"OPNsense could improve by making the configuration more web-based rather than shell or command-line-based."
"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."
"I would like to see improvement when you create policies on Snort 3 IPS on Cisco Firepower. On Snort 2, it was more like a UI page where you had some multiple choices where you could tweak your config. On Snort 3, the idea is more to build some rules on the text file or JSON file, then push it. So, I would like to see a lot of improvements here."
"The maturity needs to be better."
"The Firepower FTD code is missing some old ASA firewalls codes. It's a small thing. But Firepower software isn't missing things that are essential, anymore."
"Web filtering needs improvement because sometimes the URL is miscategorized."
"They need a VTI. I know it's going to be available in the next software version, which is the 6.7 version. However, the problem with that is that the 6.7 is going to deprecate all the older IKEv1 deployment tunnels. Therefore, the problem is that we have a lot of customers which are using older encryptions. If I do that, update it, it's not going to work for me."
"Most of the features don't work well, and some features are missing as well."
"It would be great if some of the load times were faster."
"They need to do an overhaul of the management console."
"The access layer of this solution could be improved in terms of the way the devices interconnect with our network. We need to be able to analyze the traffic between the different interconnection in these areas."
"A feature that would allow me to load balance among multiple ISPs, especially since we have deployed it as a perimeter firewall, would be a great addition."
"Sometimes, it is not easy to troubleshoot. You need to know where to go. It took me quite awhile. It's like, "Okay, if it doesn't go smoothly here, then go find the documentation." Once you do it, it is not so bad. However, it is sometimes a steep learning curve on the troubleshooting part of it."
"An area for improvement is the graphical user interface. That is something that is coming up now. They could make the product more user-friendly. A better GUI is something that would make life much easier."
"Cisco ASA is not a next-generation firewall product."
"The solution is overcomplicated in some senses. Simplifying it would be an improvement."
"I don't have to see all the object groups that have been created on that firewall. That's just something that I would really appreciate on the CLA, even though it already exists on the GUI."
"The solution could be more secure."
"Its interface should be a little bit better."
"I would like to see better SD-WAN performance."
"The logging could improve in OPNsense."
"The only thing that I would like to see improved is the Insight or the NetFlow analysis part. It would be good to have the possibility to dig down on the Insight platform. Right now, we can easily do only a few analyses. If this page becomes more powerful, it surely will be a well-adopted platform."
"OPNsense could improve by making the configuration more web-based rather than shell or command-line-based."
"The interface needs to be simplified. It is not user-friendly."
"The support for OPNsense is good because we have documents available on the internet. The support could improve a little."
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Cisco ASA Firewall is ranked 4th in Firewalls with 87 reviews while OPNsense is ranked 8th in Firewalls with 11 reviews. Cisco ASA Firewall is rated 8.4, while OPNsense 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 OPNsense writes "Unbeatable pricing and easy to configure and use, but it can be configured only through the GUI, and the integration with Azure cloud is difficult". Cisco ASA Firewall is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate, Palo Alto Networks WildFire, Meraki MX, pfSense and Azure Firewall, whereas OPNsense is most compared with pfSense, Untangle NG Firewall, Sophos XG, Fortinet FortiGate and WatchGuard Firebox. See our Cisco ASA Firewall vs. OPNsense report.
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