We performed a comparison between Cisco IOS Security and ShieldX based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Netgate, Fortinet, OPNsense and others in Firewalls."FortiGate is very simple to manage and easy to use."
"The web filtering feature and the intrusion protection system are the most valuable. It is a resilient appliance. I never had an issue with it in terms of any security breaches."
"The solution is very, very easy to use."
"The user interface is relatively easy. The devices are easy to deploy and figure out when you have experience with other security appliances."
"The features that I have found most valuable are the SD-WAN and their IP4 policy."
"FortiGate improved our security. It's one of the best hardware firewalls."
"The main benefit is the grouping of our security monitoring."
"The most valuable feature is the SSL VPN, as it allows us to connect and it separates this product from other firewalls."
"The Intrusion Firewall is a valuable feature."
"It covers everything we need it to without looking to secondary solutions."
"There is a positive impact on security, particularly the intrusion feature, which helps keep the solution concealed and secure."
"The solution is very user-friendly and easy to deal with."
"We use Cisco IOS Security mostly for routers to route off the firewall. It's a next-generation device."
"One of the main features is that the hardware is extremely reliable."
"Cisco products are very secure and integrate easily with other devices."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"It has helped us tighten our security posture. Now, staff can only access things that they should be accessing."
"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."
"We were able to see what devices are talking to each other, giving us more visibility."
"The most valuable feature is the automatic scaling. With its microservices, it scales both up and down, depending on traffic and throughput."
"...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."
"I would like to have logs, monitoring, and reporting for a month without extra fees."
"If I had any criticism that I would give FortiGate, it would be that they need to stop changing their logging format. Every time we do a firmware upgrade, it is a massive issue on the SIM. Parsers have to be rebuilt. Even the FortiGate guys came in and said that they don't play well in the sandbox."
"Tunnel flapping was one of the major things I had seen wherein your internet link remains but your VPN tunnel is down. However, since I got a fix from the TAC team, I have not noticed it, but the customer complained a few times that they couldn't access the internet because of this problem."
"Fortinet FortiGate could improve by having more storage in the hardware for log data."
"Bandwidth usage in reporting could be improved for Fortinet FortiGate."
"Cisco Meraki products are rising very quickly in the cloud and the connected era. Meraki products offer much better ROI, upgradability, and manageability."
"There is room for improvement related to the logging and reporting aspect."
"One area for improvement is the performance on bandwidth demands for smaller devices, as well as better web filtering."
"I think setup could be one area for improvement, because sometimes we don't have people inside so we have to move to the place."
"It would be ideal if the solution had more capacity."
"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."
"We faced significant challenges related to licensing issues, particularly when licenses expire."
"Most of their features are meant for Cisco. You cannot integrate them with any other vendor."
"I would like to see much more embedded security that works and that isn't a bolt-on."
"In the security portfolio from Cisco, the issue is marketing. Cisco is still seen primarily as an enterprise network player rather than being acknowledged as a security vendor."
"The configuration should be easier in the solution."
"We are having some issues with their LDAP and integrating it with the Active Directory. We can't seem to set it up."
"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."
"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."
"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."
Earn 20 points
Cisco IOS Security is ranked 22nd in Firewalls with 47 reviews while ShieldX is ranked 46th in Firewalls. Cisco IOS Security is rated 8.0, while ShieldX is rated 9.2. 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 ShieldX writes "Proactively monitors, blocks, and reports what it has blocked; and self-updates meaning there is zero maintenance". Cisco IOS Security is most compared with Cisco Secure Firewall, Meraki MX, Fortinet FortiOS, Netgate pfSense and OPNsense, whereas ShieldX is most compared with .
See our list of best Firewalls vendors.
We monitor all Firewalls reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
