"Its Snort 3 IPS has better flexibility as far as being able to write rules. This gives me better granularity."
"The dashboard is the most important thing. It provides good visibility and makes management easy. Firepower also provides us with good application visibility and control."
"The content filtering is good."
"Firepower has been used for quite a few enterprise clients. Most of our clients are Fortune 500 and Firepower is used to improve their end to end firewall functionality."
"The implementation is pretty straightforward."
"It's got the capabilities of amassing a lot of throughput with remote access and VPNs."
"When it comes to the integration among Cisco tools, we find it easy. It's a very practical integration with other components as well."
"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."
"The initial setup is easy."
"The best features are stability and scalability."
"AnyConnect has been very helpful, along with the ability to use LDAP for authentication."
"The most valuable feature is the anti-malware protection. It protects the endpoints on my network."
"It's very stable and mature."
"Everything is all documented in the file or in the command line script that gets uploaded to the device. It gives us great visibility."
"The Packet Tracer is a really good tool. If someone calls because they're having problems, you can easily create fake traffic without having to do an extended packet capture. You can see, straight away, if there's a firewall rule allowing that traffic in the direction you're trying to troubleshoot."
"The initial setup was not complex."
"The solution has many useful features, such as content management, user management, user filtering, and domain controller connectivity mapping."
"It has excellent stability."
"SonicWall NS has a lot of valuable features. One of the best SonicWall NSa features is the ability to collect mini routers and get only one user connection."
"The technical support is very good."
"The most valuable features of this solution are the GUI pre-filtering and the ATP (advanced threat protection)."
"They offer good antivirus solutions."
"The functionality is the same whether it is on hardware or a virtual appliance. The interface is the same. It's nice that it's standardized."
"It's very simple to use and the support is great."
"A major area of improvement would be to have more functionality in public clouds, especially in terms of simplifying it. The high availability doesn't work right now because of the limitations in the cloud."
"The intelligence has room for improvement. There are some hackers that we haven't seen before and its ability to detect those types of attacks needs to be improved."
"Report generation is an area that should be improved."
"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."
"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 main problem we have is that things work okay until we upgrade the firmware, at which point, everything changes, and the net stops working."
"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."
"The application detection feature of this solution could be improved as well as its integration with other solutions."
"The solution is overcomplicated in some senses. Simplifying it would be an improvement."
"If the implementation was easier, it would be a lot better for us."
"In the next release, I would like to see the VPN and UTM features included."
"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."
"This is an older product and has reached end-of-life."
"The price can be better."
"You need to have a little bit of knowledge to be able to configure it. Otherwise, it would be very difficult to configure because there is no GUI. The latest software available in the market has a GUI and probably zero-touch provisioning and auto-configuration. All these things are not available in our version. You need to manually go and configure everything in the switch. In terms of new features, we would definitely want to have URL-based filtering, traffic steering, and probably a little bit steering in the bandwidth based on the per-user level and per-user group. We will definitely need some of these features in the near future."
"You can do zero-trust networking with them, but it's not easy."
"We're not particularly fond of the way it generally performs. We are finding ourselves rebooting often. There are freeze-ups and that kind of thing. The stability needs to improve exponentially."
"The ongoing service fees are high."
"We still get phishing emails that manage to come through from time to time."
"Overall, Im satisfied with SonicWall NSa, but it would be better if they could add a small terminal to each device. This would help me deal with certain issues by running a small bot onto any PC."
"The detection of malware can improve in SonicWall NSa."
"There are a few areas that need improvement including the VPN, user management, and reporting."
"They should consider upgrading the capabilities within the GUI."
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Cisco ASA Firewall is ranked 4th in Firewalls with 90 reviews while SonicWall NSa is ranked 15th in Firewalls with 40 reviews. Cisco ASA Firewall is rated 8.4, while SonicWall NSa is rated 8.0. 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 SonicWall NSa writes "Easy to scale advanced threat protection solution with knowledgeable technical support, but has occasional bugs". Cisco ASA Firewall is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate, Palo Alto Networks WildFire, Meraki MX, pfSense and Sophos UTM, whereas SonicWall NSa is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate, Meraki MX, SonicWall TZ, Sophos XG and Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls. See our Cisco ASA Firewall vs. SonicWall NSa report.
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