We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Firewall and Fortinet FortiOS 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."The most valuable feature of Fortinet FortiGate is URL filtering."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiGate are the ease of use and the UI. It has always provided me with what I needed. I have no need for additional costs that other solutions have, such as Sophos."
"With FortiClient, you can easily connect when you are home, check out what you want to do, and connect to your network when you are not at work. You can switch on servers and you can check what is wrong."
"The most useful functionality of Fortinet FortiGate is the user interface, multiple engines, and their cloud with the latest integrations. Additionally, the Security Fabric tool is very good."
"I think that the UTM features are the most value, as it truly protects my infrastructure."
"The initial installation is very straightforward."
"Reliability is the best feature. We faced some issues when we were setting it up, but the service, portal, and administration are good."
"The web tutor and automatic rules by schedule are good features."
"Being able to use it as a policy-based VPN is valuable. It's very easy to understand. It's very easy to troubleshoot."
"So far, it has been very stable."
"Network segmentation is the most valuable feature."
"With Cisco, there are a lot of features such as the network map. Cisco builds the whole network map of the machines you have behind your firewall and gives you insight into the vulnerabilities and attributes that the host has. Checkpoint and Fortinet don't have that functionality directly on the firewall."
"Cisco Secure Firewall is a good solution. In some ways, it is a reactive solution and we have it sitting in a whitelist mode rather than a blacklist mode. It seems to work fairly well for us."
"Cisco ASA has an okay CLI with a nice GUI."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is AMP (Advanced Malware Protection), as this is really needed to protect against cyber threats."
"Logging is great. It will show when it reaches its capacity before it is too late, unless you have bursts of traffic."
"I personally think the site-to-site VPN is the most useful feature. A lot of firewalls have that, but to me, that's one of the features that's essential."
"It's simple to use in terms of inbound and outbound traffic management."
"Performance-wise, I think FortiOS is much better than its Juniper counterpart. Based on our actual experience and performance metrics, FortiOS-based products are much better than Juniper."
"The interface is good."
"The solution provides good firewall and antivirus protection."
"The stability of Fortinet FortiOS is great."
"FortiOS' most valuable features are management, security, and easy updates with no downtime."
"It has a lot of scalability abilities which makes it easy to scale."
"Fortinet already improved FortiGate, but in the current market, many brands of security devices have improved together. Fortinet still needs to catch up with market standards. Fortinet is lacking in features in comparison to competitors."
"Scalability is one of the disadvantages. When it comes to scalability, you have to actually change the box. If you want to upgrade it, you need to actually change the existing box and probably you take the system off to other sites."
"It would be nice if FortiGate incorporated some built-in endpoint protection features. I would also like a built-in SOC dashboard for managing multiple Fortinet firewalls."
"The UTM filtering needs improvement."
"Its filtering is sometimes too precise or strict. We sometimes have to bypass and authorize some of the sites, but they get blocked. We know that they are trusted sites, but they are blocked, and we don't know why."
"To some degree, it's almost a question as to why some of this stuff isn't simpler. For example, for an AP deployment, while it's integrated, the number of steps that you have to go through in order to get the AP up, seems like a lot."
"Reporting is limited to providing an external appliance for improving the reporting capabilities of the FortiAnalyzer. It does not offer a central management and is also sold separably as an appliance."
"The solution is very expensive."
"I would like the ability to pick and choose different features of it to run in a packaged infrastructure or modules, therefore I would like to have more customizability over it."
"As it’s a GenX firewall, expertise for both implementation and troubleshooting the pain points can be a challenge. This could be a concern when companies are thinking about buying this product."
"If I want to activate IPS features on it, I have to buy another license. If I want Cisco AnyConnect, I have to buy another license. That's where we have challenges."
"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."
"There used to be information displayed about the packets in a module called Packet Flow, but it is no longer there."
"The license system is also good but it's not very impressive. It's a very regular licensing system. They call it a smart license which means that your device will connect to the internet. This is a little bit of a headache for some customers. It doesn't make the customer happy because most of the customers prefer not to connect their firewall or system to the internet."
"The initial setup could be simplified, as it can be complex for new users."
"The product crashes. We have a cluster of firewalls and we regularly get failovers."
"The pricing model makes this product far more expensive than similar solutions."
"I would like to see more statistics in the monitoring part."
"Fortinet FortiOS can improve the monitoring function, it could be more accurate, easy to use, and understandable."
"The additional features I would like to see included in the next release is better troubleshooting and reporting."
"The implementation could be simplified."
"In terms of what needs improvements, the troubleshooting could use improvement. When we work with other products like Cisco ASA, Palo Alto, and Check Point, we see a big difference in the troubleshooting. It's not easy to find a report."
"It should also manage the local DSCP network."
"Fortinet needs to make this solution even more robust. Sometimes when we get a DDoS attack, the cannot withstand it. We can run out of sessions very easily. That said, I suppose if you want more a robust system, then you could purchase higher-end solutions, which are more expensive. Still, I would like to see more protection from even in the low-end version."
Cisco Secure Firewall is ranked 4th in Firewalls with 404 reviews while Fortinet FortiOS is ranked 15th in Firewalls with 73 reviews. Cisco Secure Firewall is rated 8.2, while Fortinet FortiOS is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Cisco Secure Firewall writes "Highlights and helps us catch Zero-day vulnerabilities traveling across our network". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Fortinet FortiOS writes "Provides effective filtering features, good stability but initial setup is moderately challenging". Cisco Secure Firewall is most compared with Palo Alto Networks WildFire, Netgate pfSense, Meraki MX, Sophos XG and Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, whereas Fortinet FortiOS is most compared with Fortinet FortiManager, Fortinet FortiWeb, Fortinet FortiGate-VM, Infoblox Advanced DNS Protection and Zyxel Unified Security Gateway. See our Cisco Secure Firewall vs. Fortinet FortiOS report.
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