We performed a comparison between Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall and Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls 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.
"You do not have to do everything through a command line which makes it a lot easier to apply rules."
"A good intrusion prevention system and filtering."
"One of the most valuable features of Firepower 7.0 is the "live log" type feature called Unified Event Viewer. That view has been really good in helping me get to data faster, decreasing the amount of time it takes to find information, and allowing me to fix problems faster. I've found that to be incredibly valuable because it's a lot easier to get to some points of data now."
"The content filtering is good."
"This solution helped us to identify the key areas where we need to focus to block traffic that is malicious to our organization."
"We have not had to deal with stability issues."
"The feature set is fine and is rarely a problem."
"Cisco's technical support is the best and that's why everybody implements their products."
"The first time I came across these firewalls, what surprised me the most was their web user interface. It is complete and gives you a lot of information. You can do 80% of the things related to your network and firewall through the web UI. In some of the other devices, the UI is not as complete. App-ID is also very valuable in customer networks. When you're seeing a lot of traffic in your network, you can see in your web UI which users have the applications that are consuming the most bandwidth. You have a broad context, which is very good."
"I like all the functions and features."
"I like the architecture because it separates the management plan process and the data plan process."
"DNS Security is a good feature because, in the real world with web threats, you can block all web threats and bad sites. DNS Security helps to prevent those threats. It's also very helpful with Zero-day attacks because DNS Security blocks all DNS requests before any antivirus would know that such requests contain a virus or a threat to your PC or your network."
"Protection from a single packet and ease of making security rules."
"The solution is user-friendly. It's secure and easy to understand your network visibility, control the network, and prevent attacks."
"The most valuable features are the power of the threat prevention and the WildFire service. Its strength comes from the huge number of sensors all over the world. The firewalls have a rich library of signatures."
"It has a solid network security with some robust tools. We can block unexpected attacks, especially zero-day attacks. Since they use the Pan-OS engine, they can collect attacks from all over the world and analyze them. They can then protect against zero-day attacks and unexpected attacks."
"We only have an issue with time sync with Cisco ASA and NTP. If the time is out of sync, it will be a disaster for the failover."
"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."
"The maturity needs to be better."
"Report generation is an area that should be improved."
"We cannot have virtual domains, which we can create with FortiGate. This is something they should add in the future. Additionally, there is a connection limit and the FMC could improve."
"I would like it to have faster deployment times. A typical deployment could take two to three minutes. Sometimes, it depends on the situation. It is better than it was in the past, but it could always use improvement."
"Cisco makes horrible UIs, so the interface is something that should be improved."
"Web filtering needs improvement because sometimes the URL is miscategorized."
"In the cloud, the HA could be a lot better. Its price could also be better. It is very expensive."
"The pricing could be improved. They need to work on the setup over the firewall, VLAN, and PPPoE."
"As things are evolving, we want to make sure that Palo Alto is able to keep up with what is going on outside. They should continue to do more intelligence-related enhancements and integrate with some of the other security tools. We want to have a more intelligent toolset down the road."
"The price of the solution is very high."
"The configuration part could be improved. It's very difficult to configure. It doesn't have a user-friendly interface. You have to know Palo Alto deeply to use it."
"I would like a collaboration system and reporting ASA policy needs to be smarter."
"Its scalability for on-prem deployments can be better. For an on-prem deployment, the hardware has to be replaced if the volume goes up to a certain level."
"They could improve their support and pricing and maybe integration. It's a little more expensive that Check Point but the quality is better. Integration with firewall endpoints could be better. Palo Alto does have very good malware or antivirus protection. I think they could improve on that front."
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Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall is ranked 7th in Firewalls with 52 reviews while Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is ranked 5th in Firewalls with 80 reviews. Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall is rated 8.2, while Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is rated 8.6. 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 Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls writes "The product stability and level of security are second to none in the industry". Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate, Cisco ASA Firewall, Meraki MX, Palo Alto Networks WildFire and Sophos UTM, whereas Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is most compared with Azure Firewall, Fortinet FortiGate, Check Point NGFW, Meraki MX and Sophos UTM. See our Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall vs. Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls report.
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There are some major differentiators that make Palo Alto more preferable. First of all Palo Alto's Hardware is FPGA based, which has no parallel. Due to this capability it supports SP3 technology which provides single pass parallel processing architecture. This means PA processes traffic through all the engines i.e. application, IPS and others simultaneously. This improves resiliency and provides exactly the same throughput which committed in PA data sheet. PA has been in the leaders magic quadrant of Gartner for the 7th consecutive time in a row, which shows its block capability is above power. Moreover, it is very user friendly and easy for configure. Palo Alto provides all routing features plus IPsec tunnels without any license - license subscriptions are only required for security bundles. Palo Alto has on-box (without any additional license or cost) reporting capability that no other firewall has at the moment.
On the contrary, Cisco Firewall and its management center is not stable and lacks user friendly operations.
Well they are two leaders, one from US, another from Israel.
Checkpoint is the first well known firm to launch firewalls.
Palo Alto is certainly now the leader, but could be expensive in strong configurations. It supports virtualization very well and is number one for reporting.
Checkpoint NGFW is strong but under competition for high volumes when compared referred to a comparable appliance (Fortinet for instance). It needs perhaps more technical knowledge to administrate, in spite of an amazing choice of blades in the NGFW offering.
The reliability depends on your partner or integrator and a good definition of needs to have a proper sizing of your equipment.
Ease of Use
- GUI familiarities and adoption level can differ from user to user.
- Personally I found CISCO ASA interface is hard to comprehend compare to Palo Alto
- Command line interface is good, only challenge is past experience and correctness of commands to get error free results!
Performance of the Appliance
- Palo Alto VS CISCO - Palo Alto is better performing appliance.
Palo Alto is the market leader and a company with a very holistic approach to security. Firewalls are its mainstream business, whereas Cisco basically known as a networking company is trying to be one of the major players in providing security solutions. Things like advantages, disadvantages, usage and practices is a very vast topic. Generally companies already having Cisco infrastructure tend to choose Cisco firewalls from the integration point of view. Palo Alto firewalls could be more expensive.
Pick a product model for both vendors: Cisco & Palo Alto (refer to technical data sheets and whitepapers --) See the key differences on your target or specific needs).
Practical evaluation by a person who has both products under the belt and can share their experiences...
Anyone inputs, please?