We performed a comparison between Cisco IOS Security and Plixer Scrutinizer based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Netgate, Fortinet, OPNsense and others in Firewalls."The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiGate are remote access, web filtering, and IPS."
"You can purchase switches and you don't need to do anything with them. You just put in the firewall and the switches get all the policies and rules that you already have in the firewall. With Fortinet, you just connect the FortiSwitch to the Fortinet and that's it."
"The CLI is robust and powerful, enabling rapid, consistent changes via SSH."
"LinkGreat firewall capabilities"
"We can detect any attack of viruses or malware at the first point of contact."
"It is quite easy to handle."
"Good performance, stability, and virtual domain ability."
"The pricing is excellent. It's much less expensive than Cisco."
"The technical support is good."
"The most valuable features are DNS service and shell self-service within a network."
"We are able to filter a lot of traffic especially when a lot of the traffic is in layer 7."
"Cisco has always been a premium product. There's a lot of other entry-level solutions. This is more robust."
"The VPN connection portal scan works flawlessly, which was a big plus for us."
"The stability of this solution is excellent."
"There is a positive impact on security, particularly the intrusion feature, which helps keep the solution concealed and secure."
"The hardware is pretty stable. It's also a very good product performance-wise. Initially, it wasn't mature like a firewall and there were other leaders, but now they have included almost all the features of next-generation security. Basically, it's a good product to work with."
"The most valuable features of Plixer Scrutinizer are its ease of use, accessibility, and UI."
"There are other tools out there that will do what Scrutinizer does. But what I have found with Scrutinizer is that it does it very quickly. I've taken 25 million individual data fragments from the different sensors, and it has graphed that and mapped it and presented a picture within 30 seconds. It has a very efficient database algorithm that I am really impressed with."
"Visualization of the network traffic is the most valuable feature. It allows you to drill into information quite quickly."
"As a network engineer, the ability to identify what traffic on the link is consuming all the bandwidth at any given time, and provide immediate feedback to the business, is the most valuable feature."
"It shows us the saturation of the network of devices. It gives us a clear view of the flows in the network to understand, for instance, planning upgrades in the network to get an idea of what's going on the network on traffic flows. It gives us insight, for instance, on what's going on on our VPN Client. There are a lot of things where it provides very helpful information. It also gives us our security reports with quite detailed information on what's going on in the network, and whether there are data exfiltrations and so on."
"Plixer Scrutinizer is an affordable product. Plixer Scrutinizer is a tool that allows for customization, especially in scenarios where customers need new product features."
"The most valuable features of the solution are the ability to track what a device is doing and to go back historically. It is also able to go down to, and identify, very low levels of traffic."
"The reporting and generating troubleshooting reports would be the best feature; our host-to-host conversation reporting."
"The solution lacks sufficient filtering."
"It would be ideal if they had some sort of GUI interface for troubleshooting and diagnostics."
"Currently, FortiGate is providing SSL VPN. But they're missing some features that are available in Palo Alto's SSL VPN."
"There are some tiny bugs that sometimes affect the operations. In the past revision of it, there was a bug. Because of the bug, we had to downgrade the version. It happened only with the last revision."
"I would like to see a more intuitive dashboard."
"We had some issues in the beginning while setting it up, but after doing the firmware update, it is working fine."
"Scalability is one of the disadvantages. When it comes to scalability, you have to actually change the box. If you want to upgrade it, you need to actually change the existing box and probably you take the system off to other sites."
"The user interface could be improved to make it less confusing and easier to set up."
"The configuration and reporting interfaces need a lot of improvement. It needs to be more accessible forsolide without a strong technical background. If you had a simplified dashboard, the lower-level techs could manage the solution and provide services. Cisco IOS Security requires someone who is highly trained to operate it."
"Cisco IOS Security could improve its security features. There are competitors that have some additional security features, such as Fortinet FortiGate. Additionally, there should be better synchronization with Cisco IOS Security and other vendors, and improved AI features would be beneficial."
"I would love it if it has a link-by-link feature, integration with Unified Threat Management (UTM), and load balancers. They haven't got any link-by-link feature right now, which can be a very attractive option. This link-by-link feature can also be made available for Cisco's UTM firewalls. The link-by-link feature is available in some of the other firewalls. Currently, integration with UTM is missing. Cisco IOS Security also doesn't have the load balancers and a few things that need to be done to get a good UTM firewall. Normally, other firewalls have UTM. As a next-generation firewall, it's good, but as a UTM, it has to do some work."
"It takes too much time to deploy a policy to FMC. It takes around eight minutes. You can't afford any downtime when you're changing policies."
"Cisco IOS Security's monitoring is rather rudimentary and could be improved."
"Cisco is a scalable product, but it is expensive compared to other vendors."
"Cisco very slowly introduces and implements the products, unlike other brands."
"I would like upgrading iOS to be a bit easier."
"They're working on the security areas, so it can provide more insight. What they have is still pretty much IP-concentric. If they were to make it IP and URL, they'd be a little bit ahead on that."
"It would be useful if there was a way to back up the configuration information. E.g., if you wanted to deploy a new instance or disaster recovery, you could quite easily deploy and restore the config, as opposed to having to restore all the NetFlow data. If there was just a button that said "backup config information", that would be good."
"We couldn't get it set up properly."
"From what I understand it is that the solution is not very scalable in a high volume traffic environment with a large number of flows."
"In Plixer Scrutinizer, scalability is an area with minor concerns where improvements are required."
"Data retention needs improvement. Data retention is a thing where we are looking for a better way to collect flow data for a longer time to do forensic research on security incidents. By default, data retention is quite low. We need detailed data in safe storage for a longer time, e.g., for a couple of months. An improvement would be a way to export data into a secure long-term storage."
"The solution creates a visual map of a particular location and how the network flows. You need to spend time to generate all those maps. If they could figure out a way to reduce the time needed to generate the maps, that would be great."
"Knowing that they're coming out with a new user interface, that is an area where there is room for improvement. There are so many variables. They should limit the variables in the user interface and create some classes, like "simple," "novice," and "expert" to narrow down the variables within it."
Cisco IOS Security is ranked 22nd in Firewalls with 47 reviews while Plixer Scrutinizer is ranked 9th in Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) with 15 reviews. Cisco IOS Security is rated 8.0, while Plixer Scrutinizer is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Cisco IOS Security writes "User-friendly and excels in documentation, making it easier to resolve issues". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Plixer Scrutinizer writes "Advanced reporting runs analytics on NetFlow and provides signature-based recognition of problems in the network environment". Cisco IOS Security is most compared with Cisco Secure Firewall, Meraki MX, Fortinet FortiOS, Netgate pfSense and OPNsense, whereas Plixer Scrutinizer is most compared with SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer, Flowmon , Cisco Secure Network Analytics, ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer and LiveAction LiveNX.
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