Cisco NGIPS vs Cisco Sourcefire SNORT comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Cisco NGIPS and Cisco Sourcefire SNORT based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
To learn more, read our detailed Cisco NGIPS vs. Cisco Sourcefire SNORT Report (Updated: March 2024).
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"The features that I find most valuable are the DDoS protection, IPS/IDS, and Firepower for web application filtering.""The top features of Cisco NGIPS, which have been working very well, include stateful inspection and the access list-based security configuration. But from my perspective, the best part of Cisco NGIPS is the licensing process, which is very easy and straightforward. It's essentially copy-paste licensing.""Good IPS and VirtualBox features.""It has good intelligence. It does a great job at stopping threats.""The most valuable features of Cisco NGIPS are protection and reporting.""The integration with the Cisco portfolio is very helpful.""You can do zero-day prevention and detection. It's quite useful.""Technical support is quite good. With firewalls, the last cases I had with Cisco were professionally handled quite quickly and it was great."

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"The solution is rather easy to use.""The most valuable features of Cisco Sourcefire SNORT are the dashboard for monitoring events.""I like most of Cisco's features, like malware detection and URL filtering.""Cisco Sourcefire SNORT is easy to configure and the reporting is great. It's also very user-friendly.""The most valuable feature is the visibility that we have across the virtual environment.""The whole solution is very good, and stable.""The most valuable feature is the ability to automatically learn the traffic in our environment, and change the merit recommendations based on that.""The URL filtering is very good and you can create a group for customized URLs."

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Cons
"I would like to see Cisco NGIPS to include home office support in one single product.""Should include additional security features.""The product's high price is an area of concern where improvements are required.""My opinion is that this solution should improve the pricing.""The attack patterns and payloads go undetected in Cisco. We would like to see a new solution with more effective detection of attack patterns. There should be more data analyzing patterns as well which provides useful information.""More flexibility with the dashboards is needed because some of them are not fully developed.""The integration can be more secure.""Better integration with other products, such as a SIEM tool, would provide better peer visibility about your security posture."

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"There are problems setting up VPNs for some regions.""We are unhappy with technical support for this solution, and it is not as professional as what we typically expect from Cisco.""The implementation could be a bit easier.""The main dashboard of Cisco Sourcefire SNORT could improve.""To be frank, the product is not really stable, although they're working on that. Whenever I go to the technical community with an issue, they will usually say that it is not there yet, but the technical team are working on it. The issues are not insolvable. I think they should just keep working on the product to make sure that the product can become very stable. The technical support is great. I appreciate that. We have a lot of communities supporting Firepower now, so you can find help for whatever issue you have.""I did not experience any pain points that required improvement. Maybe a couple of false-positives, but that's about it.""While the alerts they offer are good, it could improve it in the sense that they should be more detailed to make the alerts more useful to us in general. Sometimes the solution will offer up false positives. Due to the fact that the alerts aren't detailed, we have to go dig around to see why is it being blocked. The solution would be infinitely better if there was just a bit more detail in the alert information and logging we receive.""With the next release, I would like to see some PBR, so that you can do the configuration with the features."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "We buy the licensing on a yearly basis, when we renew our contract. It is around $14,000."
  • "The price for additional throughput is the highest in the industry."
  • "Licensing fees for this solution are $3,500 USD, and there are no additional costs."
  • "Cisco products are always expensive, but if you can afford the price then it's a great solution."
  • "Pricing depends on negotiation with the vendor, although I can say that it is moderate."
  • "The cost of the license depends on the level of support that you have with Cisco."
  • "This is an expensive product, with the biggest cost being the license that keeps the service going."
  • "There are licensing fees depending on the features that you are using."
  • More Cisco NGIPS Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "We have a three-year license for this solution."
  • "Licensing for this solution is paid on a yearly basis."
  • "I don't know the exact amount, but most of the time when I go to a company with a proposition, they will say, "This thing that you are selling is good, but it's expensive. Why don't you propose something like FortiGate, Check Point, or Palo Alto?" Cisco device are expensive compared to other devices."
  • "The cost is per port and can be expensive but it does include training and support for three years."
  • More Cisco Sourcefire SNORT Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:The product's initial setup phase was easy.
    Top Answer:My company does not use the URL filtering capabilities offered by Cisco NGIPS. My company prefers to use the URL filtering feature offered by a brand other than Cisco since other tools provide an… more »
    Top Answer:The most valuable features of Cisco Sourcefire SNORT are the dashboard for monitoring events.
    Top Answer:The cost is per port and can be expensive but it does include training and support for three years.
    Top Answer:The main dashboard of Cisco Sourcefire SNORT could improve.
    Ranking
    Views
    3,001
    Comparisons
    1,836
    Reviews
    25
    Average Words per Review
    329
    Rating
    8.2
    Views
    2,226
    Comparisons
    1,664
    Reviews
    4
    Average Words per Review
    343
    Rating
    8.3
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Sourcefire NGIPS, Firepower NGIPS
    Sourcefire SNORT
    Learn More
    Overview

    Cisco NGIPS (Next-Generation IPS) is a highly effective intrusion detection and prevention solution. It is designed to secure a user’s system from end to end and ensure that users are equipped to handle even the most sophisticated threats by offering them a high level of network visibility, threat intelligence, and security automation. Organizations across a wide variety of industries trust IPS to help them prevent unwanted intrusions from harming their networks.

    Cisco NGIPS Benefits

    Some of the ways that organizations can benefit by choosing to deploy Cisco NGIPS include:

    • Increased visibility. Cisco NGIPS enables users to gain a real-time view of all of the events that are taking place in their network. It gathers data from all corners of the network and uses it to provide organizations with context that can aid them in both proactively keeping themselves safe from harm and reactively addressing potential issues.
    • Increased threat protection. NGIPS’ backbone is the core open Snort technology. This is the most widely used intrusion prevention software on the planet. It leverages this software to search for and detect vulnerabilities and anomalies that might otherwise go unnoticed. IPS is 99.7% effective at stopping threats.
    • Flexibility. NGIPS can be customized so as to fit an organization’s specific security needs. Users can set the system so that it recognizes and seeks out threats that the organization defines as being of the highest level of concern.

    Cisco NGIPS Features

    • Security automation. NGIPS offers users a variety of powerful automation tools that can be leveraged to maximize a network’s protection. Analytics tools automatically examine intrusions and correlate them with known vulnerabilities in a user’s network.
    • Integration suite. NGIPS enables users to integrate their security with many different cloud and application security services. Organizations can seamlessly combine the features that NGIPS offers with other platforms to bolster their effectiveness. This gives users the option to plug any feature hole that they might perceive.
    • URL filter. NGIPS comes with a built-in filter that allows businesses to specify sources that the system should flag and block. This prevents known threats from causing significant harm to an organization’s network.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Cisco NGIPS is a highly effective solution that stands out when compared to many of its competitors. Two major advantages are its easy-to-use GUI interface and the highly effective technical support that it offers users.

    Aankit G., a consultant at Pi DATACENTERS, said, “The FTD has a GUI interface, which is very easy to work around with all the configurations. It is a client-based software based on Java. Now we have the GUI web interface, and it's very interactive and easy to navigate.”

    Gebremichael T., a networking and security engineer at IE Network Solutions PLC, says, “The other aspect that I like is the technical support, who are highly capable. They were very good to us during the times that we used them and they tend to reply immediately to queries, even though you might not get the right engineer to help you right away. Tickets are usually assigned to junior staff at first but they do have escalation procedures, so if the support member can't solve the issue then they will immediately escalate it to higher management.”

    Snort is an open-source, rule-based, intrusion detection and prevention system. It combines the benefits of signature-, protocol-, and anomaly-based inspection methods to deliver flexible protection from malware attacks. Snort gained notoriety for being able to accurately detect threats at high speeds.

    Sample Customers
    American Electric Power, Huntington Bank, Keycorp, Nationwide, Transunion, Marriott, Inova Health, Ford, Thomson Reuters, Dow Chemical, Equifax, Chevron, Walmart, Coca Cola
    CareCore, City of Biel, Dimension Data, LightEdge, Lone Star College System, National Rugby League, Port Aventura, Smart City Networks, Telecom Italia, The Department of Education in Western Australia
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm19%
    Computer Software Company14%
    Government11%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company19%
    University10%
    Government9%
    Financial Services Firm9%
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company27%
    Financial Services Firm18%
    Comms Service Provider18%
    Government9%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company18%
    Government9%
    Financial Services Firm8%
    Comms Service Provider7%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business38%
    Midsize Enterprise27%
    Large Enterprise35%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business20%
    Midsize Enterprise17%
    Large Enterprise64%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business22%
    Midsize Enterprise39%
    Large Enterprise39%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business25%
    Midsize Enterprise12%
    Large Enterprise64%
    Buyer's Guide
    Cisco NGIPS vs. Cisco Sourcefire SNORT
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco NGIPS vs. Cisco Sourcefire SNORT and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Cisco NGIPS is ranked 5th in Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) with 62 reviews while Cisco Sourcefire SNORT is ranked 15th in Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) with 17 reviews. Cisco NGIPS is rated 8.2, while Cisco Sourcefire SNORT is rated 7.6. The top reviewer of Cisco NGIPS writes "Very effective for malware and signature-based anomalies but stability needs improvement". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Cisco Sourcefire SNORT writes "The solution provides visibility across virtual environments, protects internal networks, and is scalable to meet organizational needs". Cisco NGIPS is most compared with Check Point IPS, Fortinet FortiGate IPS, Trend Micro TippingPoint Threat Protection System, Palo Alto Networks Advanced Threat Prevention and Trellix Intrusion Prevention System, whereas Cisco Sourcefire SNORT is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate IPS, Check Point IPS, Palo Alto Networks Advanced Threat Prevention, Darktrace and Trend Micro TippingPoint Threat Protection System. See our Cisco NGIPS vs. Cisco Sourcefire SNORT report.

    See our list of best Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) vendors.

    We monitor all Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) 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.