We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Firewall and ShieldX based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Netgate, Fortinet, OPNsense and others in Firewalls."It's quite comfortable to handle the FortiGate firewall."
"It blocks the vulnerabilities that can negatively impact us."
"Security solution with a straightforward and quick setup. It's a stable and scalable product."
"Its performance in fulfilling our requirements has been satisfactory."
"Whenever I need something, Fortinet improves and updates the software for me."
"We use the FortiGate Sandbox to detect zero-day vulnerabilities, such as anomalies or malware, that are unknown and have not yet been discovered."
"LinkGreat firewall capabilities"
"The technical support is great."
"It's very stable and mature."
"The technical support is excellent. I would rate it as 10 out of 10. When there has been an issue, we have had a good response from them."
"This solution made our organization more secure and gave us better control."
"The most valuable feature is the access control list (ACL)."
"Valuable features include DMZ segmentation, and IDS and IPS."
"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."
"Cisco ASA Firewall is a well known product. They're always updating it, and you know what they're doing and that it works."
"The ASA 55-x range is a solid and reliable firewall. It secures the traffic for normal purposes."
"...It takes the exact same policies that you would apply to your on-premise environment and enables you to simply apply them to the cloud. It becomes one policy for both on-prem and for the cloud."
"The UI was also one of the huge selling points. My web development manager was blown away with the detail and the granularity that you can get out of the UI. It is a very strong and informative UI, with the amount of data it provides."
"The most valuable feature is the automatic scaling. With its microservices, it scales both up and down, depending on traffic and throughput."
"The Adaptive Intention Engine is fantastic. It allows us to develop security policies using the language of our internal customers. It's machine-learning applied to security workflows. That allows us to much more easily construct the policies that will protect those workflows."
"ShieldX has been designed from the very beginning to work well in cloud environments. It understands autoscaling, automation, and auto-configuration. These are the things which are important in today's operating environment."
"We were able to see what devices are talking to each other, giving us more visibility."
"It has helped us tighten our security posture. Now, staff can only access things that they should be accessing."
"Its reporting capabilities can be improved. It should have some out-of-the-box reporting capabilities and some degree of customization. The basic reporting that it currently has is not sufficient to create more usable reports. It needs some sort of out-of-the-box reporting. They try to make customers purchase FortiAnalyzer for this kind of reporting, which is an additional cost. Other firewall vendors, such as SonicWall and Sophos, provide this sort of reporting without any additional cost."
"While FortiGate is cheaper than most other solutions, we're seeing increased license renewal costs. Most of our clients are asking for more significant discounts because the price is going up."
"If they had better integration with security products, such as Cisco ISE or Rapid Threat Containment, then it would be an improvement."
"The ease of use could be improved."
"Pricing for it is a bit high. It could be cheaper."
"There are some problems that support cannot give you a logical reason as to why it happened. For example, I had a case where I was dealing with a WhatsApp application that was giving issues. Technical support gave more than one reason it could be giving issues, but none of them solved the problem. Eventually I solved the problem, but it was far from the solutions that support had given."
"Security is a continuous process. In every product, there is a requirement for improvement. Its pricing should also be improved according to Indian market requirements. They must also improve on the reporting part. Its reporting can be more precise. If we can get a real-time report in a specific format, it will be helpful for customers to know about the current status of their security."
"I would like to see improvements in the product's application rules."
"Cisco should work on ASDM. One of the biggest drawbacks of Cisco ASA is ASDM GUI. Cisco should improve the ASDM GUI. The configuration through ASDM is really difficult as compared to CLI. Sometimes when you are doing the configuration in ASDM, it suddenly crashes. It also crashes while pushing a policy. Cisco should really work on this."
"In general, they can make it easier to manage the solutions. They can make it easier in terms of administration and provide a single tool for different firewalling solutions. They have different tools to manage different firewalls, such as Firepower or ASA. Sometimes, both are on the same thing. You have ASA with Firepower modules, so you manage some of the things via HTML, and then you manage some of the things via another management tool. It's not seamless."
"One of my main concerns, an area that could use improvement is in adjusting the need to buy a license to enable features."
"The user interface for the Firepower management console is a little bit different from traditional Cisco management tools. If you look at products we already use, like Cisco Prime or other products that are cloud-based, they have a more modern user interface for managing the products. For Firepower, the user interface is not very user-friendly. It's a little bit confusing sometimes."
"It would be good if Cisco made sure that the solution supports all routing protocols. Sometimes it doesn't."
"The price can be better."
"It doesn't have a proper GUI to do troubleshooting, so most people have to rely on the command line."
"There's a little bit of a disconnect between Firepower’s management and the rest of the products, like DNA and Prime. The solution should have fewer admin portals for network, security, and firewalls."
"With any kind of tool like ShieldX, where you're in the cloud instead of a traditional firewall, you're using CPU resources in those environments to provide the protection. So there's a cost associated with CPU resources. I'm pressing upon them to make the product much more efficient and use less CPUs to do the same thing."
"I would like better reports and in-depth reporting."
"There should be a bit more customer care, with regular review meetings on it or regular reports. It would be nice to have a quarterly or biannual review of what ShieldX has blocked."
"We are having some issues with their LDAP and integrating it with the Active Directory. We can't seem to set it up."
"They need to be consistent in performance and capabilities over time, given the fact that this is new and I want to see where this goes in the next year or so. As the vendor continues to evolve and add future functionality, we want to make sure that we are still keeping up with the integrations, etc. Time will be the key factor here. The proper support for some of the latest technologies, Docker containers, etc. They need to keep up with threat landscape, so we will see how the security get layered. This is what we are going to be keeping an eye on."
Earn 20 points
Cisco Secure Firewall is ranked 4th in Firewalls with 404 reviews while ShieldX is ranked 47th in Firewalls. Cisco Secure Firewall is rated 8.2, while ShieldX is rated 9.2. 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 ShieldX writes "Proactively monitors, blocks, and reports what it has blocked; and self-updates meaning there is zero maintenance". Cisco Secure Firewall is most compared with Palo Alto Networks WildFire, Netgate pfSense, Meraki MX, Sophos XG and Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, whereas ShieldX is most compared with .
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