We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Firewall and Fortinet Fortigate based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Based on the parameters we compared, Fortinet Fortigate comes out on top. Its ease of deployment combined with its solid set of features and excellent service and support ratings make it a more desirable solution than Cisco Secure Firewall.
"One of the nice things about Firepower is that you can set it to discover the environment. If that is happening, then Firepower is learning about every device, software operating system, and application running inside or across your environment. Then, you can leverage the discovery intelligence to get Firepower to select the most appropriate intrusion prevention rules to use for your environment rather than picking one of the base policies that might have 50,000 IPS rules in it, which can put a lot of overhead on your firewall. If you choose the recommendations, as long as you update them regularly, you might be able to get your rule set down to only 1,000 or 1,500, which is a significant reduction in a base rule set. This means that the firewall will give you better performance because there are less rules being checked unnecessarily. That is really useful."
"The most important features are the intrusion prevention engine and the application visibility and control. The Snort feature in Firepower is also valuable."
"I have not contacted technical support. There is a lot of information on the internet for troubleshooting. All you need to do is use a search engine and you will find the information you are looking for easily."
"One of the most valuable features is the GUI front end, which is very easy to use. But I'm also a command-line guy, and being able to access the device via command-line for advanced troubleshooting is quite important."
"The most valuable Cisco Secure Firewall features are options, features, and ease of deployment because it's an appliance."
"It's very scalable. You can go to different models of the ASAs and they scale up to as big as you want to go."
"Cisco Secure Firewall improved our organization. We have it in every one of our French offices."
"So far, it has been very stable."
"I like that you are able to manage FortiGate from the FortiManager to create a more centralized environment."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiGate are the APIs. They are the most widely known."
"I have found Fortinet FortiGate to be scalable."
"Fortinet FortiGate is a scalable solution."
"The network security and cloud security are most valuable."
"The interface is very good."
"Security solution with a straightforward and quick setup. It's a stable and scalable product."
"Offers good security and filtering."
"Cisco wasn't first-to-market with NGFWs... they should look at what other vendors are doing and try not only to be on the same wavelength but a little bit better."
"Cisco should work on ASDM. One of the biggest drawbacks of Cisco ASA is ASDM GUI. Cisco should improve the ASDM GUI. The configuration through ASDM is really difficult as compared to CLI. Sometimes when you are doing the configuration in ASDM, it suddenly crashes. It also crashes while pushing a policy. Cisco should really work on this."
"Setting firewall network rules should be more straightforward with a clearer graphical representation. The rule-setting method seems old-fashioned. The firewall and network rules are separate from the Firepower and web access rules."
"A feature that would allow me to load balance among multiple ISPs, especially since we have deployed it as a perimeter firewall, would be a great addition."
"Most of the features don't work well, and some features are missing as well."
"Firepower's user experience should be a little bit better."
"One of my colleagues is using the firewall as an IPS, but he is worried about Firepower's performance... With the 10 Gb devices, when it gets to 5 Gbps, the CPU usage goes up a lot and he cannot manage the IPS."
"The main problem we have is that things work okay until we upgrade the firmware, at which point, everything changes, and the net stops working."
"It would be good if they had fewer updates."
"I don't really have anything negative to say as far as Fortinet firewalls are concerned. If anything, they can support a user a little bit better. They can stop being so time-sensitive about how much time the support call has taken, and they can help you do it yourself."
"If they could extend their fabric towards other vendor environments for integration, that would be great."
"A sandbox would be good in order to be able to inspect the emails containing spam and be able to validate the emails that contain malware, prior to delivering to the customer."
"Its price could be better."
"There are a lot of bugs I have found in the solution and it is difficult to upgrade. These areas need improvement."
"Pricing for it is a bit high. It could be cheaper."
"When we cluster the two Fortinet FortiGate boxes together we have some issues."
Cisco Secure Firewall is ranked 2nd in Firewalls with 111 reviews while Fortinet FortiGate is ranked 1st in Firewalls with 84 reviews. Cisco Secure Firewall is rated 8.2, while Fortinet FortiGate is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Cisco Secure Firewall writes "The ability to implement dynamic policies for dynamic environments is important, given the fluidity in the world of security". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Fortinet FortiGate writes "SSL proxy makes URL filtering easier because the encryption is done before the packet ever leaves ". Cisco Secure Firewall is most compared with Meraki MX, Palo Alto Networks WildFire, pfSense, Juniper SRX Series Firewall and Check Point NGFW, whereas Fortinet FortiGate is most compared with pfSense, Sophos XG, Meraki MX, WatchGuard Firebox and Check Point NGFW. See our Cisco Secure Firewall vs. Fortinet FortiGate report.
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