We performed a comparison between Cisco Asa Firewall vs Palo Alto Network Wildfire 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, with all other factors being more or less equal, Cisco Asa Firewall comes in a bit ahead of Palo Alto simply because of their stronger support.
"The content filtering is good."
"We have not had to deal with stability issues."
"The most important features are the intrusion prevention engine and the application visibility and control. The Snort feature in Firepower is also valuable."
"The main thing that I love the most is its policy and objects. Whenever I try to give access to a user, I can create an object via group creation in the object fields. This way, I am not able to enter a user in the policy repeatedly."
"We get the Security Intelligence Feeds refreshed every hour from Talos, which from my understanding is that they're the largest intelligence Security Intelligence Group outside of the government."
"I like the firewall features, Snort, and the Intrusion Prevention System (IPS)."
"I have integrated it for incidence response. If there is a security event, the Cisco firewall will automatically block the traffic, which is valuable."
"IPS and Snort are very important because they also differentiate Cisco from other vendors and competitors."
"VPN and firewall are good features."
"The most valuable feature would be the IP blocking. It gets rid of things that you don't need in your environment."
"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 configuration capabilities and the integration with other tools are the most valuable features. I really like this product. Cisco is one of my favorite brands, and I always think Cisco solutions are very reliable, easy to configure, and very secure."
"The high-availability and remote VPN features are most valuable."
"The best features are stability and scalability."
"This product is pretty stable."
"Technical support services are excellent."
"The technical support is good."
"The scalability is acceptable."
"WildFire's application encryption is useful."
"The solution is completely integrated with all the other Palo Alto products. I think that it is the best part for endpoint protection. The firewall features include URL and DNS filtering, threat protection, and antivirus."
"The graphic user interface of Palo Alto is good and it's easy to configure."
"Intuitive threat prevention and analysis solution, with a machine learning feature. Scalable, stable, and protects against zero-day threats."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is how it keeps up-to-date with viruses."
"Scalable ATP solution that's quick to set up. It demonstrates good performance and stability."
"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."
"My team tells me that other solutions such as Fortinet and Palo Alto are easier to implement."
"The ability to better integrate with other tools would be an improvement."
"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."
"It would be great if some of the load times were faster."
"One issue with Firepower Management Center is deployment time. It takes seven to 10 minutes and that's a long time for deployment. In that amount of time, management or someone else can ask me to change something or to provide permissions, but during that time, doing so is not possible. It's a drawback with Cisco. Other vendors, like Palo Alto or Fortinet do not have this deployment time issue."
"Implementations require the use of a console. It would help if the console was embedded."
"The initial setup can be a bit complex for those unfamiliar with the solution."
"The configuration is an area that needs improvement."
"This is an older product and has reached end-of-life."
"In NGFW, Cisco should be aligned with the new technology and inspection intelligence because Cisco is far behind in this pipeline."
"In terms of what could be improved, I would say the UTM part should be more integrated for one price, because if you buy ASA from Cisco, you need to buy another contract service from Cisco as a filter for the dictionary of attacks. In Fortinet, you buy a firewall and you have it all."
"I would say that in inexperienced hands, the interface can be kind of overwhelming. There are just a lot of options. Too much, if you don't know what you are looking for or trying to do."
"The price can be better."
"Cisco is not cheap, however, it is worth investing in these technologies."
"I have worked with the new FTD models and they have more features than the ASA line."
"The only complaint that we receive from our customers is in regards to the price."
"The threat intelligence that we receiving in the reporting was not as expected. We were expecting more. Additionally, we should be able to whitelist a specific file based on a variety of attributes."
"In the future, I would like to see more automation in the reporting."
"I don't think it needs to improve anything, except maybe the speed to deploy the changes."
"The price of WildFire should be reduced in order to make it more affordable for our customers."
"The support is good but they could be faster."
"The configuration should be made a little bit easier. I understand why it is as it is, but there should be a way to make it easier from the user side."
"The automation and responsiveness need improvement."
More Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall Pricing and Cost Advice →
Cisco ASA Firewall is ranked 6th in Firewalls with 65 reviews while Palo Alto Networks WildFire is ranked 1st in Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) with 22 reviews. Cisco ASA Firewall is rated 8.0, while Palo Alto Networks WildFire is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Cisco ASA Firewall writes "Packet inspection with ASDM works well, but upgrading requires notable planning and effort". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Palo Alto Networks WildFire writes "Intuitive, stable, and scalable zero-day threat prevention solution with a machine learning feature". Cisco ASA Firewall is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate, Meraki MX, pfSense, Juniper SRX and Sophos XG, whereas Palo Alto Networks WildFire is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate, Proofpoint Email Protection, Juniper SRX, Zscaler Internet Access and Cloudflare.
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