We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Firewall and Fortinet FortiGate-VM based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Firewalls solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."There are some hiccups here and there, but compared to the technical support from other vendors, I have had the best experience with Cisco's technical support. I would rate them at nine out of ten."
"Cisco offers a great educational series to train users on their devices."
"The most valuable feature is IPS. It's a feature that's very interesting for tackling the most current attacks."
"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."
"I like the ASDM for the firewall because it is visual. With the command line, it is harder to visualize what is going on. A picture is worth a thousand words."
"The high-availability and remote VPN features are most valuable."
"Since the product is stable, we do not have to spend additional money to buy other firewalls. Once deployed, we can use the product for a long time. Thus, it is cost effective."
"AnyConnect has been very helpful, along with the ability to use LDAP for authentication."
"It is very versatile."
"The product can scale."
"It's very easy to set up, even for more junior developers."
"The most valuable feature is the WAN optimization."
"FortiGate-VM's firewall is excellent."
"The most valuable features are network security, VLAN, network protection, and encryption are very valuable to us."
"It is highly scalable because it has a mesh architecture that allows consistent policies."
"The most valuable feature is the WAN optimization."
"When we talk about data centers, we are talking about 100 gig capacity or 400 gig capacity. When it comes to active-active solution clustering and resilience and performance, Cisco should look into these a little bit more."
"I think that the solution can be improved with the integration of application-centric infrastructure. It could be used to have better solutions in one box."
"One big pain point I have is the ASDM interface because it's Java, and sometimes, it's a bit buggy and has low performance. That's something that probably won't be improved because of backward compatibility."
"I'm not a big fan of the FDM (Firepower Device Manager) that comes with Firepower. I found out that you need to use the Firepower Management Center, the FMC, to manage the firewalls a lot better. You can get a lot more granular with the configuration in the FMC, versus the FDM that comes out-of-the-box with it. FDM is like Firepower for dummies."
"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."
"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."
"It integrates with other security products from Cisco, but sometimes, there can be glitches or errors."
"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."
"The block, the clarity, the quarantine command, is not very user-friendly. You would have to do everything through the command line and I would have preferred if it wasn't a CLI."
"We'd like to have more customization and easier customization of policies."
"It needs an Application Inspection."
"his is not a good solution for enterprises. It's better for smaller companies."
"There is always room for improvement in any solutions, including Fortinet's FortiGate-VM. Although the solution claims to have a superior throughput compared to other OEMs, upon closer examination and comparison, there is potential for significant improvement in this area. In today's rapidly evolving technology world, it is important to continuously strive for enhancement and development, and I believe Fortinet can make significant strides in this direction for the FortiGate-VM."
"FortiGate's application load balancing has to be improved. They need to improve a lot on the load balancing and RAF side. They are far behind Citrix in that regard."
"To improve FortiGate-VM, Fortinet needs to harden it more. For example, if you are using Hyper-V, then you need guidelines for hardening FortiGate-VM that are specific to the Hyper-V environment. If it's VMware, there should be at least a guideline on how to harden the firewall."
"Sizing can be challenging for customers interested in using Fortinet FortiGate-VM."
Cisco Secure Firewall is ranked 2nd in Firewalls with 116 reviews while Fortinet FortiGate-VM is ranked 9th in Firewalls with 48 reviews. Cisco Secure Firewall is rated 8.2, while Fortinet FortiGate-VM is rated 8.6. 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-VM writes "Flexible with good cloud management and a straightforward user interface". Cisco Secure Firewall is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate, Meraki MX, Palo Alto Networks WildFire, pfSense and Juniper SRX Series Firewall, whereas Fortinet FortiGate-VM is most compared with Azure Firewall, Fortinet FortiGate, pfSense, Palo Alto Networks VM-Series and OPNsense. See our Cisco Secure Firewall vs. Fortinet FortiGate-VM report.
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