We performed a comparison between Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall and Meraki MX based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Meraki MX has a slight edge in this comparison. According to its reviewers, it scales more easily than Cisco Firepower.
"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."
"When it comes to the integration among Cisco tools, we find it easy. It's a very practical integration with other components as well."
"Firepower has reduced our firewall operational costs by about 25 percent."
"The most valuable feature that Cisco Firepower NGFW provides for us is the Intrusion policy."
"It is one of the fastest solutions, if not the fastest, in the security technology space. This gives us peace of mind knowing that as soon as a new attack comes online that we will be protected in short order. From that perspective, no one really comes close now to Firepower, which is hugely valuable to us from an upcoming new attack prevention perspective."
"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."
"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."
"Another benefit has been user integration. We try to integrate our policies so that we can create policies based on active users. We can create policies based on who is accessing a resource instead of just IP addresses and ports."
"We've had no issues with the scalability or the stability of this solution"
"Its ease of configuration and management is very useful for us and for other companies that don't have an onsite IT person. It is easy to configure and easy to manage. It is easy to configure the VPN with the Auto VPN feature."
"I think cloud management is key. The cloud management and support are the two things that make the product great."
"Dual WAN connections are greatly simplified and point-to-point VPNs automatically connect regardless of what WAN connection is active."
"Both the scalability and the scalability are great with Meraki MX."
"It has the most advanced security features, for example, layer 3 and layer 7 firewall capabilities and the end team and IPS protection. It also has IPS, and it has very good functioning of cloning services. You don't actually have to touch the device. If you have multiple companies in different countries, you don't really require this device to be touched. You can get it delivered directly to any office of a country, and then you can simply put your configuration over the cloud. It's very simplified and easy to manage. It gives a very good granular visibility about your network. Earlier, a lot of things were lacking in the network. We were unable to identify where the problem was, but after implementing Meraki MX, we are able to dig down and identify where is the problem. We can easily and quickly identify the sources and the root causes of the issues."
"In general, Meraki MX is easy to work with."
"It has very good features; it's easy to use, configure, set up, and deploy."
"The configuration in Firepower Management Center is very slow. Deployment takes two to three minutes. You spend a lot of time on modifications. Whereas, in FortiGate, you press a button, and it takes one second."
"Cisco makes horrible UIs, so the interface is something that should be improved."
"I believe that the current feature set of the device is very good and the only thing that Cisco should work on is improving the user experience with the device."
"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."
"Licensing is complex, and I'd like it to be simplified. This is an area for improvement."
"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."
"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."
"I think they need to review their whole UI because it feels like it was created by a whole bunch of different teams of developers who didn't fully talk to each other. The net policy screen is just a mess. It should look like the firewall policy screen, and they should both act the same, but they don't. I feel like it's two different buildings or programming, who don't talk to each other, and that really annoys me."
"The whole Cisco Meraki range requires easier access for cameras. For a security center, it would be helpful to have easier access to cameras through the portal. Its licensing cost could also be better."
"They need to improve the link between Meraki and Active Directory."
"As far as what needs to be improved — nothing really comes to mind. It does what we need it to do."
"You can only have one tunnel in the whole infrastructure — one tunnel with one device."
"In the next release, because the security is pretty basic, I think they could include additional security features."
"We have been having a problem with the VPN. When the energy goes down and is back again, the VPN link doesn't get established. We have to manually turn off the modems and other pieces of equipment and manually establish the VPN. It has been around one month since we have been having this problem, and we don't have enough support from Meraki to solve the problem."
"It would be nice if the different services, including the SIEM SOC and endpoint detection and response (EDR) were integrated into one, so that I don't have to go to different vendors for different services."
"In general, the SD-WAN feature needs to be improved. The load sharing and load balancing of the traffic should be improved. I have had some problems with these features in the past."
More Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall Pricing and Cost Advice →
Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall is ranked 5th in Firewalls with 53 reviews while Meraki MX is ranked 2nd in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 15 reviews. Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall is rated 8.2, while Meraki MX is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall writes "The ability to implement dynamic policies for dynamic environments is important, given the fluidity in the world of security". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Meraki MX writes "Makes it easy to stay on top of everything for security". Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate, Cisco ASA Firewall, Palo Alto Networks WildFire, Check Point NGFW and pfSense, whereas Meraki MX is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate, Cisco ASA Firewall, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Sophos XG and SonicWall NSa. See our Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall vs. Meraki MX report.
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