"The most important features are the intrusion prevention engine and the application visibility and control. The Snort feature in Firepower is also valuable."
"If configured, Firepower provides us with application visibility and control."
"Its Snort 3 IPS has better flexibility as far as being able to write rules. This gives me better granularity."
"Firepower has reduced our firewall operational costs by about 25 percent."
"The most valuable feature would be ASDM. The ability to go in, visualize and see the world base in a clear and consistent manner is very powerful."
"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."
"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."
"Firepower NGFW has improved my organization in several ways. Before, we were trying to stamp out security threats and issues, it was a one-off type of way to attack it. I spent a lot of manpower trying to track down the individual issues or flare-ups that we would see. With Cisco's Firepower Management, we're able to have that push up to basically one monitor and one UI and be able to track that and stop threats immediately. It also gives us a little more granularity on what those threats might be."
"It's very stable and mature."
"Netting is one of the best features. We can modify it in different ways. Site-to-site VPN is also an awesome feature of Cisco ASA. The biggest advantage of Cisco products is technical support. They provide the best technical support."
"It's a flexible solution."
"The user interface is easy to navigate."
"It helped us a lot with our VPNs for the home office during COVID. There has been more security and flexibility for VPNs and other applications."
"The most valuable feature is that it's secure."
"The high-availability and remote VPN features are most valuable."
"The solution is excellent for enterprise-level networks."
"The GUI is easy to understand."
"The solution is fairly scalable when it comes to integrating with other applications and data sets."
"We've found the stability to be very good overall."
"pfSense helped us during COVID-19 because we used OpenVPN to connect from home."
"pfSense allows us to spread the hours of connection and do the filtering on the pfSense site."
"The built-in open VPN and the VPN Client Export are the solution's most valuable aspects."
"We like the fact that the product is open-source. It's free to use. There are no costs associated with it."
"The solution is very easy to use and has a very nice GUI."
"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."
"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 my colleagues is using the firewall as an IPS, but he is worried about Firepower's performance... With the 10 Gb devices, when it gets to 5 Gbps, the CPU usage goes up a lot and he cannot manage the IPS."
"Implementations require the use of a console. It would help if the console was embedded."
"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."
"This product is managed using the Firepower Management Center (FMC), but it would be better if it also supported the command-line interface (CLI)."
"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."
"The reporting and other features are nice, but there is an issue with applying the configuration. That part needs some improvement."
"The virtual firewalls don't work very well with Cisco AnyConnect."
"The user interface isn't as good as it could be. They should work to improve it. It would make it easier for customer management if it was easier to use."
"Some individuals find the setup and configuration challenging."
"The ease of use needs improvement. It is complex to operate the solution. The user interface is not friendly."
"Cisco ASA Firewall could improve by adding more advanced features such as web filtering, which is available in the next-generation firewalls. However, the Cisco ASA Firewall I am using could be old and these features have been updated."
"I would like the ability to drill down into certain reports because currently, that cannot be done."
"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."
"They should improve their interface."
"The usage reports can be better."
"The solution requires a lot of administration."
"The configuration of the solution is a bit difficult."
"There are some bias issues and some intrusions in our network that have to be addressed. So, we're thinking of changing this firewall to something like a professional hardware-enabled firewall."
"pfSense could improve by having a sandboxing feature that I have seen in SonicWall. However, maybe it is available I am not aware of it."
"It would be great to add more to security."
"Ultimately, we'd like something stronger, and something that can handle threats better in real-time."
"Web interface could be enhanced and more user friendly."
More Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall Pricing and Cost Advice →
Cisco ASA Firewall is ranked 6th in Firewalls with 71 reviews while pfSense is ranked 3rd in Firewalls with 61 reviews. Cisco ASA Firewall is rated 8.2, while pfSense 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 pfSense writes "Feature-rich, well documented, and there is good support available online". Cisco ASA Firewall is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate, Palo Alto Networks WildFire, Meraki MX, Juniper SRX and Sophos XG, whereas pfSense is most compared with OPNsense, Fortinet FortiGate, Sophos XG, Untangle NG Firewall and Zyxel Unified Security Gateway. See our Cisco ASA Firewall vs. pfSense report.
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