We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Firewall, Fortinet FortiGate, and SonicWall NSa based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Netgate, Fortinet, OPNsense and others in Firewalls.
"Cisco has the best documentation. You can easily find multiple documents by searching the web. Even a child can go online and find the required information."
"The most valuable features of this solution are advanced malware protection, IPS, and IDS."
"All the features except IPS are valuable. IPS is not a part of my job."
"Feature-wise, we mostly use IPS because it is a security requirement to protect against attacks from outside and inside. This is where IPS helps us out a bunch."
"Cisco ASA works out-of-the-box. With the setup wizard, it was easy to get it deployed quickly, even by novice IT users."
"The GUI is among the most valuable features,"
"Beats sophisticated cyber attacks with a superior security appliance."
"I like the Cisco ASDM (Adaptive Security Device Manager), which is the configuration interface for the Cisco firewall."
"The solution is very, very easy to use."
"FortiGate firewalls are user-friendly, and I like the security profiling features."
"It is user friendly, and has all the features you need."
"One of the nice things about FortiGate is that it can be deployed on the cloud or on-premises. You can actually do both. That's the biggest reason why I stick with this solution as opposed to something like Cisco Meraki. Another nice thing is that I can log directly into a FortiGate or get to it through their FortiCloud access products. They're pretty reliable and consistent. One of the reasons why I started using the product was their single pane of management. I can deploy their line of firewalls in conjunction with their switching and access points, and I can manage the entire network from one interface. I don't have to log into one interface for the firewall, another one for the access points, and another one for the switches. These firewalls have access point controller functionality built right into the system, so I don't even have to purchase additional devices to manage them."
"The most valuable feature of Fortinet FortiGate is URL filtering."
"It is quite easy to handle."
"The stability and scalability of this solution are satisfactory. Its SD-WAN, VPN, and URL filtering features are very useful."
"I only deal with it from a security analyst's point of view. I don't really get into the features of the actual FortiGate. From the security point of view, it works, and it does its job."
"The functionality is the same whether it is on hardware or a virtual appliance. The interface is the same. It's nice that it's standardized."
"I really like the performance; there are no delays and no latency, which is a unique quality in firewalls nowadays."
"It has excellent stability."
"The most valuable features are flexibility, ease of setup, and it's a good product cost-wise."
"SonicWall's technical support is very good."
"The product is working okay. The product is working feature-wise."
"Sometimes I have some queries, and the SonicWall support team resolves my queries."
"With the deployment of the SonicWall NSA solution, we never suffered a problem due to invasion or contamination of any kind."
"Cisco provides us with application visibility and control, although it's not a complete solution compared to other vendors. Cisco needs to work on the application behavior side of things, in particular when it comes to the behavior of SSL traffic."
"I think they need to review their whole UI because it feels like it was created by a whole bunch of different teams of developers who didn't fully talk to each other. The net policy screen is just a mess. It should look like the firewall policy screen, and they should both act the same, but they don't. I feel like it's two different buildings or programming, who don't talk to each other, and that really annoys me."
"Other products are becoming easier to access and configure. They are providing UI interfaces to configure, take backup, synchronize redundant machines, and so on. It is very easy to take backup and upgrade the images in those products. Cisco ASA should have such features. If one redundant machine is getting upgraded, the technology and support should be there to upgrade other redundant machines. In a single window, we should be able to do more in terms of backups, restores, and upgrades."
"Cisco missed the mark with all the configuration steps. They are a pain and, when doing them, it looks as if we're using a very old technology — yet the technology itself is not old, it's very good. But the front-end configuration is very tough."
"HTTPs inspection and higher throughput/spec would be good."
"ASDM can be improved."
"It is slowly not supported and other vendors are a few years ahead of Cisco in development."
"If the implementation was easier, it would be a lot better for us."
"Monitoring and reporting could be better."
"Its reporting and pricing need improvement."
"The solution can have more features in a single box that can be multi-applied to integrate everything."
"The inability to scale the FortiAnalyzer to match our growth necessitates the purchase of new hardware."
"It does not have key authentication for admin access."
"Fortinet FortiGate needs to improve to be on par with its competitors, such as Palo Alto and Sophos. They are the market leaders. Fortinet FortiGate needs to improve its capabilities. However, we are happy with Fortinet FortiGate."
"It claims it does DLP, but the degree and level of controls are very basic."
"There are some complex administration tasks in their administration portal. That needs to be improved."
"The logging, reporting, and storage capacity size could improve in a future release."
"I feel that the SSL VPN client software needs a lot of improvement."
"There are a few areas that need improvement including the VPN, user management, and reporting."
"It is not scalable. If your enterprise is growing hard then you have to buy another, bigger product. Maybe if you use it virtually it is more scalable."
"The solution can be a bit expensive."
"We have used other solutions such as pfSense and Linux native firewalls. I prefer SonicWall NSa but if you are going to use something for an enterprise you need another solution."
"Customer support is severely lacking with very slow response times."
"I would like U.S.-based technical support."
