"The most valuable features of this solution are advanced malware protection, IPS, and IDS."
"We have not had to deal with stability issues."
"Provides good integrations and reporting."
"Firepower has been used for quite a few enterprise clients. Most of our clients are Fortune 500 and Firepower is used to improve their end to end firewall functionality."
"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."
"When it comes to the integration among Cisco tools, we find it easy. It's a very practical integration with other components as well."
"The most important feature is the intensive way you can troubleshoot Cisco Firepower Firewalls. You can go to the bit level to see why traffic is not handled in the correct way, and the majority of the time it's a networking issue and not a firewall issue. You can solve any problem without Cisco TAC help, because you can go very deeply under the hood to find out how traffic is flowing and whether it is not flowing as expected. That is something I have never seen with other brands."
"If you compare the ASA and the FirePOWER, the best feature with FirePOWER is easy to use GUI. It has most of the same functionality in the Next-Generation FirePOWER, such as IPS, IPS policies, security intelligence, and integration and identification of all the devices or hardware you have in your network. Additionally, this solution is user-friendly."
"The solution has increased productivity with our outside salespeople being able to connect into their computers and use those remotely."
"The features that I have found most valuable are the FireWall features. The management side of WatchGuard is quite easy because it supports two ways to manage it - by the web and the other one they call WatchGuard systems manager. I used to be familiar with WSM only, but they improved their GUI in the web browser and now it is much easier to do it within the web browser."
"There are many fantastic features."
"It provides us with Layer 2 and Layer 3 security."
"The ease of use is most valuable. You can quickly train someone who hasn't seen a firewall in life. You can get people up to speed, and in a few months, they are able to manage this product very easily. It is a very user-friendly, scalable, and stable product. Its price is also spot-on."
"It saves us time in the respect that we now have the template built for it so we can get in and get it done. We've had much less problem supporting Voice over IP technologies from different companies. Because our client base has grown over the years, we're probably saving 20 to 30 man-hours a month now that we've got this on a good stable level."
"The solution simplifies my business. Normally, for administration, we are using NetApp System Manager on Window since it's easy to create new policies. In a short amount of time, you can create new policies based on new requirements. For example, in the last few months, many requirements changed due to the coronavirus, adding the use of new services, like Office 365, and eLearning tools, like Zoom."
"The main features of the solution are the control of the site-to-site network access and the overall features."
"The initial setup can be a bit complex for those unfamiliar with the solution."
"My team tells me that other solutions such as Fortinet and Palo Alto are easier to implement."
"The product line does not address the SMB market as it is supposed to do. Cisco already has an on-premises sandbox solution."
"Report generation is an area that should be improved."
"The performance should be improved."
"We're getting support but there's a big delay until we get a response from their technical team. They're in the USA and we're in Africa, so that's the difficulty. When they're in the office, they respond."
"The initial setup was a bit complex. It wasn't a major challenge, but due to our requirements and network, it was not very straightforward but still easy enough."
"Implementations require the use of a console. It would help if the console was embedded."
"Its documentation could be improved. Sometimes, you need to search a bit longer to find what you are looking for."
"There's always room for improvement, especially if the threats are getting more sophisticated and the IT department cannot sufficiently meet this kind of sophistication with their own knowledge and experience. Knowing that this solution can get up to the level of addressing a lot of these threats is something that everybody wishes for. If we look at the dark web and the lawful web, they are two opposites, and if these two good and bad collide in the world of the internet, you want the best possible product—especially if you cannot get to that point of knowledge. I am just an individual and end user, with limited knowledge of usage. That's why I say there's always room for improvement, from their side and also from mine, because by knowing exactly what they can achieve and the knowledge that they can get on an everyday basis, and the portion that is understandable to me, it's an improvement for them as well."
"I would like to see the devices made more flexible by adding modules to increase the ports that we can use."
"The only downside is that it is missing an API, that you can use to easily collect information from it."
"The pricing could be improved. It is definitely one of the more expensive products."
"The data loss protection works well, but it could be easier to configure. The complexity of data loss protection makes it a more difficult feature to fully leverage. Better integration with third-party, two-factor authentication would be advantageous."
"If they could make the traffic monitoring easier that would be great. I don't use it that frequently, but I would like to see some improvements in the ease of use of that component, so it makes more sense. I know it's a technical component so there's going to be some difficulty trying to make that easier."
"Sometimes I would like to copy a rule set from one box to another box in a direct way. This is a feature that is not present at the moment in WatchGuard."
More Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall Pricing and Cost Advice →
Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall is ranked 4th in Firewalls with 41 reviews while WatchGuard Firebox is ranked 3rd in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 27 reviews. Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall is rated 8.4, while WatchGuard Firebox 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 WatchGuard Firebox writes "Competent, basic front-end; the ports that I have assigned appear to be unattainable to outsiders". Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate, Cisco ASA Firewall, Palo Alto Networks WildFire, Meraki MX and Palo Alto Networks VM-Series, whereas WatchGuard Firebox is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate, Sophos XG, pfSense, Cisco ASA Firewall and Azure Firewall. See our Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall vs. WatchGuard Firebox report.
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