"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."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is stability."
"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."
"Being able to determine our active users vs inactive users has led us to increased productivity through visibility. Also, if an issue was happening with our throughput, then we wouldn't know without research. Now, notifications are more proactively happening."
"There are no issues that we are aware of. It does its job silently in the background."
"It's got the capabilities of amassing a lot of throughput with remote access and VPNs."
"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 feature that I have found the most useful is that it meets all our requirements technically."
"It has excellent scalability."
"The most valuable feature is that you can control your traffic flowing out and coming it, allowing you to apply malware and threat protection, as well as vulnerability checks."
"The most valuable features are the User ID, URL filtering, and application filtering."
"In Palo Alto the most important feature is the App-ID."
"The Palo Alto VM-Series is nice because I can move the firewalls easily."
"With the improved visibility we now have, the traffic is being properly monitored, which means that we are better able to manage it. These are improvements that we saw very quickly."
"What I like about the VM-Series is that you can launch them in a very short time."
"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."
"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."
"This product is managed using the Firepower Management Center (FMC), but it would be better if it also supported the command-line interface (CLI)."
"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."
"On the VPN side, Firepower could be better. It needs more monitoring on VPNs. Right now, it's not that good. You can set up a VPN in Firepower, but you can't monitor it."
"The performance should be improved."
"Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall can be more secure."
"The Firepower FTD code is missing some old ASA firewalls codes. It's a small thing. But Firepower software isn't missing things that are essential, anymore."
"The solution needs to have more easily searchable details or documentation about it online, so it's easier to Google if you have queries."
"The implementation should be simplified."
"It would be helpful if we had a direct number for the support manager or the supporting engineer. That would be better than having to email every time because there would be less wait."
"The disadvantage with Palo Alto is that they don't have a cloud-based solution that includes a secure web gateway."
"The one issue that I didn't like is that the SNMP integration with interfaces didn't record the interface counters."
"Its web interface is a bit outdated, and it needs to be updated. They can also improve the NAT functionality. We have had issues with the NAT setup."
"The command-line interface is something that some people struggle with and I think that they should have an option to go straight to the GUI."
"The product needs improvement in their Secure Access Service Edge."
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Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall is ranked 4th in Firewalls with 41 reviews while Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is ranked 10th in Firewalls with 16 reviews. Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall is rated 8.4, while Palo Alto Networks VM-Series 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 VM-Series writes "An excellent solution for the right situations and businesses". Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate, Cisco ASA Firewall, Palo Alto Networks WildFire and Meraki MX, whereas Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is most compared with Azure Firewall, Fortinet FortiGate, Cisco ASA Firewall, Juniper SRX and Check Point NGFW. See our Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall vs. Palo Alto Networks VM-Series report.
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I can't say for Palo Alto as I haven't tried them myself, but I'd advise against FTDs and Firepower Management Center.
* Firepower systems take about 4 minutes on average to make config changes (it's referred to as "Deployment", can take 1-6 minutes depending type of change you're making). which makes troubleshooting a nightmare.
* it is overall very buggy, we had to open at least 2-3 tickets per year with Cisco to fix issues with our system that has only 2 firewalls working in HA. some that required upgrading software. some cases required involvement from R&D to diagnose and fix, and took more than a week. I don't want to imagine the administration overhead of having several bugs in several different sites (I'd think "10K+ employees" operate in more than one site) and having to troubleshoot each with the Cisco TAC (Cisco TAC is good compared to other vendors, but it's not their fault the software is buggy).
* I'm not sure this is the case for FTDv, but I don't think that would be different.
I suggest you implement test sites using both solutions through a POC if possible before migrating such a large environment.
Neither.
I'd pick Fortinet's products for a variety of reasons, but the #1 reason being they are easier to use and maintain. And they are better for TSCM work which is something we specialize in (Technical Surveillance Countermeasures - and within networks).