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Cisco Meraki vMX vs Cisco Secure Firewall comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Cisco Meraki vMX
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
4.6
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) Solutions (16th), Enterprise Infrastructure VPN (21st)
Cisco Secure Firewall
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
459
Ranking in other categories
Firewalls (5th), Cisco Security Portfolio (3rd)
 

Featured Reviews

Mansukh Bhesania - PeerSpot reviewer
MD and CEO at Aster Networks
Have worked confidently across large deployments and ensured long-term reliability for critical sectors
I have used Cisco Meraki vMX dashboard's orchestration feature with this product. The Meraki dashboard helps manage our network effectively because it is quite easy; we manage ourselves very well. Performance-wise, there is no problem with Cisco Meraki vMX's integrated analytics for network performance, as my 70 to 80 customers use Cisco only. We do business with semi-enterprise customers, and there is no competition against Cisco except for the wireless solutions from Aruba. We find it easy to promote Cisco Meraki vMX because the centralized dashboard is there for management, and the customers accept it without any problem. From a sales point of view, it is easy to integrate, and nowadays, the 93 is also part of the Meraki desktop.
Phil Shiflett - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager, Network Engineering at TTi Power Equipment
Unified policies streamline network management but complex licensing requires attention
Cisco Secure Firewall has some growth opportunities in terms of visibility and control capabilities regarding managing encrypted traffic. It has the ability to analyze encrypted traffic, and there is potential for more integration with APIs and AI to enhance these capabilities. Cisco Secure Firewall needs improvement in deployment time and the capability to access the CLI during support calls. I often encounter issues when technical support uses a CLI that is not familiar to me while troubleshooting through the GUI. My ongoing complaint for the last six years has been the lack of CLI functionality, which hinders my ability to work on the firewall, alongside concerns regarding deployment time. For the next release, they should look at the features offered by competitors such as Fortinet, including the ability to perform packet capture directly from the interface. If they enhanced their troubleshooting efficiency related to packet capture for each specific rule, it would simplify the process significantly.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Cisco Meraki vMX offers sufficient features for most customers; it is very easy to handle and proves very efficient, with the main advantages being the visibility it provides and the ease of administration."
"The most valuable features in Cisco Meraki vMX are easy deployment, an easy-to-read dashboard for information, and automatic load balancing for two circuits in the MX, which are the most important key features for our small business customers."
"The Meraki dashboard helps manage our network effectively because it is quite easy; we manage ourselves very well."
"The feature I find most valuable is the Cisco VPN Interconnection."
"The important features are IPS intrusion prevention, anti-malware, and anti-spam."
"Cisco Secure Firewall is one of the best and most stable solutions I have encountered, with no crashes and a powerful, stable system that shows no degradation in performance."
"The VPN is our most widely used feature for Cisco Secure Firewall. Since we were forced into a hybrid working situation by COVID a few years back, VPN is the widely used feature because everybody is working remotely for our agency. So it came in very handy."
"The return on investment is not going to be restricted to just the box, because nowadays, if you look at the integrated security that Cisco has been heavily investing into, it's not just about ASA doing the firewalling functions."
"Largely, it's quite stable."
"Cisco ASA is a very robust solution; it does its job, has all the top features, and overall it does everything they say it does."
"Very good as a stateful inspection firewall, but weak in all other areas."
 

Cons

"In comparison with Aruba, I find Aruba to be far better in terms of deployment, ClearPass, and everything, which is all very easy."
"Cisco Meraki vMX needs to improve its ability to configure complex policy-based routing."
"It is not the strongest security solution, so if you want to have next-generation firewall features, you always need an additional component."
"One of my main concerns and an area that could use some major improvement is the need to pay for licensing in order to enable necessary additional features."
"When you make any changes, irrespective of whether they are big or small, Firepower takes too much time. It is very time-consuming. Even for small changes, you have to wait for 60 seconds or maybe more, which is not good. Similarly, when you have many IPS rules and policies, it slows down, and there is an impact on its performance."
"I have a lot of difficulties with the solution's Firewall Management Center (FMC) and the GUI. Neither is responsive enough and should be improved."
"You need to have a little bit of knowledge to be able to configure it. Otherwise, it would be very difficult to configure because there is no GUI. The latest software available in the market has a GUI and probably zero-touch provisioning and auto-configuration. All these things are not available in our version. You need to manually go and configure everything in the switch. In terms of new features, we would definitely want to have URL-based filtering, traffic steering, and probably a little bit steering in the bandwidth based on the per-user level and per-user group. We will definitely need some of these features in the near future."
"It lacks management. For me, it still doesn't have a proper management tool or GUI for configuration, logging, and visualization. Its management is not that easy. It is also not very flexible and easy to configure. They used to have a product called CSM, but it is no longer being developed. FortiGate is better than this solution in terms of GUI, flexibility, and user-friendliness."
"The ease of use needs improvement. It is complex to operate the solution. The user interface is not friendly."
"Critical bugs need to be addressed before releasing the version."
"The upgrade is a bit of a pain in the neck."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"You get what you pay for. It's always priced based on what you get and what it can handle. It's acceptable."
"It's affordable."
"I bought a license for three years and it was really affordable."
"I know that licensing for some of the advanced solutions, like Intrusion Prevention and Secure Malware Analytics, are nominal costs."
"Cost-wise, it's in the same range as its competitors. It's likely cheaper than Palo Alto. Cisco is affordable for a large organization of 500 to 1,000 users and above. You need a Cisco sales partner or engineer to explain to you the licensing aspects."
"With the bundling mode with Duo licensing, it's now better. It's better to have one simplified global licensing mode, and this is what Cisco has done with bundling. The next-generation firewalls include a set of features such as filtering, emails, and IPS. This combination offers the best way for customers to manage their operating expenses."
"The licensing is not good, it's confusing. I'm an engineer so I don't care about the actual price that much but the licensing part is confusing."
"We pay about €2,000 ($2,400 USD) per year for licensing."
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Comparison Review

it_user206346 - PeerSpot reviewer
Security Consultant at Webernetz.net - Network Security Consulting
Mar 11, 2015
Cisco ASA vs. Palo Alto Networks
Cisco ASA vs. Palo Alto: Management Goodies You often have comparisons of both firewalls concerning security components. Of course, a firewall must block attacks, scan for viruses, build VPNs, etc. However, in this post I am discussing the advantages and disadvantages from both vendors concerning…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
26%
Outsourcing Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business191
Midsize Enterprise129
Large Enterprise232
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Cisco Meraki vMX?
Cisco Meraki vMX needs to improve its ability to configure complex policy-based routing. The product can only be set up via the GUI interface and cannot perform complex tasks like a Cisco router wh...
What is your primary use case for Cisco Meraki vMX?
I am an architect planning for our customers to plan their enterprise connectivity via Cisco Meraki vMX and SASE. This is for internet access for mobile users, and I am a reseller, not using the pr...
What advice do you have for others considering Cisco Meraki vMX?
I have no idea about additional features that I would like to see in the next release to make it better. My customers will buy it from the AWS Marketplace and Azure. In my opinion, Cisco Meraki vMX...
Which is the better NGFW: Fortinet Fortigate or Cisco Firepower?
When you compare these firewalls you can identify them with different features, advantages, practices and usage at large. In my opinion, Fortinet would be the best option and l use Fortinet too...
Which is better - Fortinet FortiGate or Cisco ASA Firewall?
One of our favorite things about Fortinet Fortigate is that you can deploy on the cloud or on premises. Fortinet Fortigate is very stable, reliable, and consistent. We like that we can manage the e...
How does Cisco's ASA firewall compare with the Firepower NGFW?
It is easy to integrate Cisco ASA with other Cisco products and also other NAC solutions. When you understand the Cisco ecosystem, it is very simple to handle. This solution has traffic inspection ...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Firewall, Cisco ASA NGFW, Adaptive Security Appliance, Cisco Sourcefire Firewalls, Cisco ASAv, Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall, Cisco Secure Firewall ASA Virtual - BYOL
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
There are more than one million Adaptive Security Appliances deployed globally. Top customers include First American Financial Corp., Genzyme, Frankfurt Airport, Hansgrohe SE, Rio Olympics, The French Laundry, Rackspace, and City of Tomorrow.
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