Cisco Secure Firewall vs Cisco Secure Workload comparison

Cisco Secure Firewall and Cisco Secure Workload are both solutions in the Cisco Security Portfolio category. Cisco Secure Firewall is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.1, while Cisco Secure Workload is ranked #8 with an average rating of 9.5. Cisco Secure Firewall holds a 6.9% mindshare in CSS, compared to Cisco Secure Workload’s 7.8% mindshare. Additionally, 83% of Cisco Secure Firewall users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Cisco Secure Workload users who would recommend it.

Cisco Secure Firewall

Read 429 Cisco Secure Firewall reviews

21,052 Views
211 Comparison Views

83% willing to recommend

Cisco Secure Workload

Read 15 Cisco Secure Workload reviews

4,428 Views
354 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Cisco Secure Firewall

Cisco Secure Workload

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Firewall and Cisco Secure Workload based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Cisco Security Portfolio solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Cisco Secure Firewall vs. Cisco Secure Workload Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Secure Firewall vs. Cisco Secure Workload

September 2025

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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 Secure Firewall

Ranking in Cisco Security Portfolio

3rd

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

429

Ranking in other categories

Firewalls (7th)

Cisco Secure Workload

Ranking in Cisco Security Portfolio

8th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Cloud and Data Center Security (9th), Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (14th), Microsegmentation Software (4th)

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Cisco Security Portfolio category, the mindshare of Cisco Secure Firewall is 6.9%, up from 6.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco Secure Workload is 7.8%, up from 6.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cisco Security Portfolio Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Cisco Secure Firewall	6.9%
Cisco Secure Workload	7.8%
Other	85.3%

Cisco Security Portfolio

Featured Reviews

Phil Shiflett

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.

Read full review

Raj Metkar

Director, Head of Networks at MUFG, EMEA

Discover internal application dependencies and create a dependency map

We actively seek improvements in integrating the Infoblox DDI platform with Cisco Secure Workload. This integration allows Cisco Secure Workload to learn about our networks and network tags, providing valuable insights into vulnerabilities related to the operating system and various applications installed on our servers. Recently, Cisco announced a new product called HyperShield, an AI-based autonomous micro-segmentation solution. While Cisco has not stated that HyperShield will replace Cisco Secure Workload, it represents a natural evolution for the company. HyperShield features dynamic policy discovery and enforcement; however, once policies are enforced, they do not change until a discovery occurs, requiring a re-enforcement process. This new platform operates autonomously, minimizing the need for user or security engineer intervention. I would have expected Cisco to incorporate more automatic discovery and enforcement features within the existing Cisco Secure Workload product. Instead of enhancing the current product, they have introduced a new solution. Cisco plans to honor existing Tetration licenses, allowing users to transition to HyperShield without additional costs, reflecting the investment enterprises have already made. From Cisco’s perspective, this represents a natural progression in their product line. While the product name changes, it seems more of a rebranding effort. The enhancements are greater autonomy, improved discovery, and automatic enforcement, which are now being introduced in HyperShield. Cisco Secure Workload offers automatic policy enforcement but cannot adjust policies dynamically as the application needs to change. Having used the platform for the past five years, the recent announcement has been reassuring. Cisco has confirmed that our investment in the platform will not go to waste. They will honor our existing licenses, providing a natural migration path to the new solution without any disruption

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Cisco Secure Firewall has improved our customers' security posture because it offers Next-Gen features, granularity, and reporting on the back of it. You can see the amount of users accessing Office 365, for example, and whether they're having a good or bad experience. You can see the threats that are coming into your network. You can see anyone who is compromised from within your network."

"The setup was straightforward. I was happy with the configuration and deployment of the solution, as it was quick."

"We can shift traffic, block certain content, or redirect policies."

"It's a flexible solution and is well-known in the community."

"I like the way Firepower presents the data. It gives you two classifications for the evidence, something based on the priority of the evidence and another classification based on the impact of the evidence in your environment. This makes it very easy to spot the evidence that is most impactful to my environment. Instead of having to go through all the evidence based on that priority, I can focus on the evidence that has the most impact on my environment."

"With the pandemic, people began working from home. That was a pretty big move, having all our users working from a home. More capacity needed to be added to our remote VPN. ASA did this very well."

"Cisco Firewall has very good features, like trusted applications and restricted access for users based on keywords."

"An eight because it's a good security solution. It's more mature than its competitors."

More Cisco Secure Firewall pros

"Scalability is its most valuable feature."

"The only use case I can see that makes sense is micro-segmentation. I think there are other use cases for it. The main purpose of the product is to do micro-segmentation by collecting IP. That could be done by installing an agent, and then you have all the communication coming in and out. You could also use some flow sensors installed in the network that receive a copy of the traffic and then report that back to the system."

"The product provides multiple-device integration."

"It's stable."

"Secure Workload's best feature is that it's an end-to-end offering from Cisco."

"By using Tetration insight, we are able to get the latency on our level accounts and we can determine whatever the issue is with the application latency itself."

"Generally speaking, Cisco support is considered one of the best in the networking products and stack."

"The solution offers 100% telemetry coverage. The telemetry you collect is not sampled, it's not intermittent. It's complete. You see everything in it, including full visibility of all activities on your endpoints and in your network."

More Cisco Secure Workload pros

Cons

"In my experience, a number of engineers get tunnel vision with devices. This is exacerbated by vendors fostering a silo mentality in disciplines."

"Managing various product integrations, such as Umbrella, is challenging."

"Its user interface is good, but it could be better. Currently, you have to know what to do before you can manage a device. If you don't know what to do, you can mess things up. There are some devices that are easier, such as FortiGate. The user interface of FortiGate is more intuitive. It is very easy to log in and configure things."

"<p>If there is old hardware, or appliances, it does not necessarily work with the new Cisco generation firewalls."

"The virtual firewalls don't work very well with Cisco AnyConnect."

"It could also use a reporting dashboard."

"I would like to see the inclusion of a protocol that can be used to protect databases."

"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."

More Cisco Secure Firewall cons

"There is some overlap between Cisco Tetration and AppDynamics and I need to have a single pane of glass, rather than have to jump between different tools."

"It is not so easy to use and configure. It needs a bunch of further resources to work, which is mainly the biggest downside of it. The deployment is huge."

"There was a controversy when Cisco reduced the amount of data they kept, and the solution became quite cost-intensive, which made its adoption challenging….Although they have modified it now, I preferred the previous version, and I wish all the functionality were back under the same product."

"It is highly scalable, but there is a limitation that it is only available on Cisco devices."

"The multi-tenancy, redundancy, backup and restore functionalities, as well as the monitoring aspects of the solution, need improvement. The solution offers virtually no enterprise-grade possibility for monitoring."

"I'd like to see better documentation for advanced features. The documentation is fairly basic. I would also like to see better integration with other applications."

"The interface is really helpful for technical people, but it is not user-friendly."

"The product must be integrated with the cloud."

More Cisco Secure Workload cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Pricing for Cisco is expensive. There are additional costs for the licensing part, support, and even the hardware part. The device cost is very high. I would be very happy with an improvement on the price."

"This is an expensive product, although when you buy this solution, you can do many things so it provides good value for the investment."

"Its price is moderate. It is not too expensive."

"The price is comparable."

"Licensing is expensive compared to other solutions."

"We pay a lot of money for it."

"We are happy with its price. Licensing is on a yearly basis for technical support. There is one license for technical support. There is another license for IP Version 2 VPN and IPS."

"Cisco is considered to be an expensive solution."

More Cisco Secure Firewall pricing and cost advice

"The price is outrageous. If you have money to throw at the product, then do it."

"The cost for the hardware is around 300k."

"Pricing depends on the scope of the application and the features. Larger installations save more."

"The price is based on how many computers you're going to install it on."

"Regarding price, Cisco Secure Workload can be expensive if you don't have a budget. If you're not doing micro-segmentation, every extra security measure or enforcement you're putting on top of your existing environment will be an extra cost. It's not a cheap solution at all. But from my point of view, if you need to do micro-segmentation, this is one of the best tools I've seen for it. I can't compare that to Microsoft's solution because I haven't looked into it. I've looked into VMware and Cisco. Those are the only two that I know of. I didn't know that Microsoft could do micro-segmentation at all. Maybe they can, but I haven't heard anything about it."

"The pricing is a bit higher than we anticipated."

"It is not cheap and pricing may limit scalability."

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Comparison Review

it_user206346

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…

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

20%

University

Manufacturing Company

Educational Organization

Computer Software Company

21%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	180
Midsize Enterprise	126
Large Enterprise	212

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Midsize Enterprise	3
Large Enterprise	8

Questions from the Community

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...

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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...

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

What do you like most about Cisco Secure Workload?

The product provides multiple-device integration.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco Secure Workload?

CloudStrike offers antivirus capabilities and firewall features for servers and VDI but lacks automatic policy discovery. This raises questions about the resources required to discover and write po...

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What needs improvement with Cisco Secure Workload?

See all answers

Comparisons

Fortinet FortiGate vs Cisco Secure Firewall

Compared 37% of the time

Palo Alto Networks WildFire vs Cisco Secure Firewall

Compared 8% of the time

Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls vs Cisco Secure Firewall

Compared 8% of the time

Netgate pfSense vs Cisco Secure Firewall

Compared 4% of the time

OPNsense vs Cisco Secure Firewall

Compared 4% of the time

More Cisco Secure Firewall Competitors

Cisco Hypershield vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 22% of the time

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 16% of the time

Illumio vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 15% of the time

Cisco ACI vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 10% of the time

VMware NSX vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 10% of the time

More Cisco Secure Workload Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Secure Firewall

September 2025

Download Cisco Secure Firewall product report

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Secure Workload

September 2025

Download Cisco Secure Workload product report

Also Known As

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

Cisco Tetration

Overview

Cisco Secure Firewall provides comprehensive network security with advanced features such as application visibility, URL filtering, and malware protection. It combines a user-friendly interface with robust VPN capabilities, making it a reliable choice for varying network environments and industry applications.

Cisco Secure Firewall offers exceptional protection with its integration into Cisco's broader ecosystem, ensuring enhanced threat detection and policy unification. Despite its complexity in command-line interfaces and management, Cisco Secure Firewall remains a potent tool for safeguarding data. It is widely adopted for edge security, VPN services, perimeter defense, and traffic segmentation, especially in hybrid settings. Essential sectors like banking and telecom benefit from its stable connectivity and centralized security management. Though there are challenges with costs and support for third-party APIs, the firewall's scalability and high availability provide comprehensive support for protecting network assets.

What are the key features of Cisco Secure Firewall?

Application Visibility: Offers in-depth visibility of application traffic to monitor and protect against threats.
Advanced Malware Protection: Protects against known and emerging malware threats with powerful detection capabilities.
URL Filtering: Manages and restricts access to websites, enhancing organizational data security.
VPN Capabilities: Ensures secure remote access and encrypted communication through strong VPN features.
Integration with Cisco Ecosystem: Enhances security measures with seamless integration with Cisco's suite of security tools.

What benefits and ROI should be expected from Cisco Secure Firewall?

Comprehensive Protection: Offers multi-layered security for diverse network environments, increasing overall data protection.
Performance Efficiency: High availability and scalability lead to improved network performance and resource management.
Management Simplification: Centralized security management streamlines policy deployment across networks.
Enhanced Threat Detection: Integration capabilities improve threat detection and mitigation for better security posture.

Cisco Secure Firewall is widely implemented across sectors like banking, education, ISPs, and telecoms. It fortifies data centers and network edge security, delivering strong protection for client access, hybrid environments, and intrusion prevention. In these industries, firewall solutions ensure secure connectivity and manage RTU traffic effectively, leveraging centralized management and integration with Cisco's security tools.

Cisco

Cisco Secure Workload is a cloud and data security solution that offers a zero-trust policy of keeping an organization’s application workloads safe and secure throughout the entire on-premise and cloud data center ecosystems.

Cisco Secure Workload will consistently provide protection by discovering workload process anomalies, stopping threats immediately, minimizing the risk threat surface, and aborting any lateral movement.

Today’s ecosystems are very elastic, and in the application-focused dynamic of today’s aggressive marketplace, Cisco Secure Workload delivers a robust security solution that works effectively with today’s most popular applications. The solution uniquely surrounds each and every workload to ensure organizations are able to keep their data, network, and applications safe and secure at all times. Cisco Secure Workload ensures that enterprise organizations can maintain secure applications by consistently building firewalls around every workload level throughout the entire ecosystem. The solution can manage applications that are deployed on containers, virtual machines, or bare-metal servers.

Cisco Secure workload is able to meet an organization's busy needs and offers flexible options such as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and on-premises options. Using the Secure Workload SaaS options, users receive all the benefits of Cisco Secure Workload protection without the hassle of having to deploy and maintain the platform on premises. Users are responsible for acquiring the necessary software licensing and deploying software agents. Using SaaS, Secure Workload runs in the cloud and is operated and maintained by Cisco. This option offers the ability to scale easily and is a popular choice for SaaS-first and SaaS-only clients. Many organizations find they get the best TCO and achieve the best productivity and profitability using the SaaS options.

When choosing on-premises options, organizations choose between hardware-based appliance models (large or small form factors). Platform selection is dependent on scalability goals, the desired fidelity level of flow telemetry, and the actual number of workloads. When a user chooses to configure Cisco Secure Workload for a conversation-only flow telemetry for all workloads, each platform has the capability to scale up vertically twice the default platform scale. Additionally, with Secure Workload, it is possible for the platform to be scaled horizontally in order to satisfy the demands of extra large widely distributed enterprise environments using federation capabilities.

Cisco Secure Workload also provides a robust disaster recovery (DR) tool, which helps to make it a complete, comprehensive solution. The DR allows for continuous restore and backup capabilities that enable users to quickly remediate operations and data to a standby cluster in the event of a drastic failure or disaster.

Reviews from Real Users

“The solution offers 100% telemetry coverage. The telemetry you collect is not sampled, it's not intermittent. It's complete. You see everything in it, including full visibility of all activities on your endpoints and in your network. Other valuable features include vast support for annotations, flexible user applications, machine learning, automatic classification, and hierarchical policies.” - CTO at a tech vendor

Cisco

Sample Customers

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.

ADP, University of North Carolina Charlotte (UNCC)

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Secure Firewall vs. Cisco Secure Workload

September 2025

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