We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Firewall and Palo Alto Networks VM-Series 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."The license management is very valuable. You can get a new license each year, or you can enroll every two to four years. You can get the logs, and you will get the information on the risk in your network and the entire organization. With this information, you can take action on your actives, computers, or devices. You can bring your own device as an SSE."
"Fortinet FortiGate's ease of management is the most valuable feature."
"Fortigate's most valuable feature is that it doesn't need a push policy when writing rules."
"Fortinet FortiGate is a stable solution."
"Security management tool that's easy to integrate and easy to work with. No issues found with its stability and scalability."
"Fortinet FortiGate is easy to use. Anyone can easily maintain it."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiGate are the different types of profiling. It has been the most effective for me. The WAF and the antivirus profile are the most effective in network protection."
"The most valuable feature of Fortinet FortiGate is URL filtering."
"Previously, our customers had to always utilize hand-to-hand delivery. Now, they are able to move completely to a secure digital method. They use a strictly dark fiber optics connection from a central location to the endpoint."
"For our very specific use case, for remote access for VPN, ASAs are very good."
"The IP filter configuration for specific political and Static NAT has been most valuable."
"I like that Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall is reliable. Support is also good."
"The high-availability features, the VPN and the IPSec, are our top three features."
"Cisco ASA Firewall is a well known product. They're always updating it, and you know what they're doing and that it works."
"The solution is pretty easy to deploy."
"The grouping of the solutions helps save time. If you have a problem and you have a high-level overview of the system, you can easily dig deeper into the problem. For example, I can check to see why ASA isn't working but the reason for the outage is actually because of Duo. I can spend a lot of time working in the wrong direction because I didn't have an overview."
"It is an easy-to-scale product."
"Palo Alto’s Panorama centralized management system simplifies our security posture based on our requirements. Instead of manually pulling logs, then generating them into readable formats, it gives us the console in a readable format to view."
"Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is easy to maintain...From a security point of view, I find Palo Alto Networks VM-Series to be a better product compared to the other solutions in the market."
"Palo Alto Networks VM-Series has everything centralized. You have the VPN solution, firewall, routing, UDR, flexibility, updates, and full visibility of your traffic."
"Palo Alto Networks VM-Series's most valuable feature is the visibility of the environment."
"The main advantage of Palo Alto Networks VM-Series stems from the fact that you can access it with the help of cloud services."
"The VM-Series reports how much bandwidth a particular IP is using. You don't need to regularly log into a website, like a Cisco command, to see what kind of ACL it's getting. There isn't an ACL use portal event. You can go there and see how much my ACL has been getting me."
"The most valuable feature is the CLI."
"There are mainly two areas of improvement in Fortinet FortiGate— the licensing cost and the timing of upgrading licenses for boxes."
"Their software support needs improvement. I would prefer to have better support for bug fixes. Sometimes, we open a ticket, and it is very difficult to get a solution. Specifically, we are not at all happy with their support for load balancing."
"I would like to see better pricing in the next release, as well as a simplification of the installation."
"It can be a little bit more user-friendly in terms of policy definition and implementation. It seems a little bit complicated, and it could be simplified."
"Lacks training for new features."
"Usually, we sell the bundle with the UTM or threat management piece with IPS, IDS. Other providers, such as Palo Alto, are ahead in terms of safe functionality. So, for me, delivering truly safe service is probably something that still needs to be improved."
"FortiGate should have a better way of detecting and managing the system memory because otherwise if the memory is too low, a system restart is required."
"They have to just improve its performance when we enable all UTM features. When you enable all the features, the performance of FortiGate, as well as of Sophos and SonicWall, goes down."
"Third-party integrations could be improved."
"It would be better if we could manage all of our firewalls as a set rather than individually. I would like to see a single pane of glass type of option. We also use another vendor's firewalls and they have a centralized management infrastructure that we have implemented. This infrastructure is a bit easier to manage."
"We use the FTD management platform for the boxes. The GUI that manages multiple Firepower boxes could be improved so that the user experience is better."
"This solution could be more granular and user-friendly."
"I would like to see them add more next-generation features so that you don't need a lot of appliances to do just one task. It should be a single solution."
"I'm not very familiar with the largest Firepower models, but competitors like Palo Alto seem to have a more capable engine to do, for instance, TLS/SSL decryption. As I understand, Firepower doesn't let you export the decrypted traffic so that, for instance, the security department can look at the traffic or inspect traffic. It's all in the box. I've heard rumors that this is something Cisco is working on, but it isn't yet available."
"There is room for improvement in the stability or software quality of the product. There were a few things in the past where we had a little bit of a problem with the product, so there is room for improvement."
"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 utilization monitoring and GUI have room for improvement."
"Recently, they introduced their Prisma Cloud solution. Compared to the previous technologies, like Panorama, which is used for centralized firewall management, or even the individual firewalls, it's a bit challenging to integrate the traditional firewall policies into Prisma Cloud."
"With Palo Alto Networks VM-Series, it is hard for me to manage its network configuration part."
"The web interface is very slow, and it needs to be faster."
"The product could be better in terms of performance than one of its competitors."
"We feel that the setup was complex. So, we asked the tech team about the setup process. They explained how to deploy it in the right way, which made it very simple."
"There are some delays that I have observed when my company communicates with Palo Alto's support engineers."
"There could be dynamic DNS features similar to Fortinet in the product."
Cisco Secure Firewall is ranked 4th in Firewalls with 111 reviews while Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is ranked 9th in Firewalls with 13 reviews. Cisco Secure Firewall is rated 8.4, while Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Cisco Secure Firewall writes "Includes multiple tools that help manage and troubleshoot, but needs SD-WAN for load balancing". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Palo Alto Networks VM-Series writes "Many features are optimized for troubleshooting real-time scenarios, saving a lot of time". Cisco Secure Firewall is most compared with Meraki MX, Palo Alto Networks WildFire, Netgate pfSense and Sophos XG, whereas Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is most compared with Azure Firewall, Fortinet FortiGate-VM, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Juniper SRX Series Firewall and CloudGuard Network Security. See our Cisco Secure Firewall vs. Palo Alto Networks VM-Series report.
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I can't say for Palo Alto as I haven't tried them myself, but I'd advise against FTDs and Firepower Management Center.
* Firepower systems take about 4 minutes on average to make config changes (it's referred to as "Deployment", can take 1-6 minutes depending type of change you're making). which makes troubleshooting a nightmare.
* it is overall very buggy, we had to open at least 2-3 tickets per year with Cisco to fix issues with our system that has only 2 firewalls working in HA. some that required upgrading software. some cases required involvement from R&D to diagnose and fix, and took more than a week. I don't want to imagine the administration overhead of having several bugs in several different sites (I'd think "10K+ employees" operate in more than one site) and having to troubleshoot each with the Cisco TAC (Cisco TAC is good compared to other vendors, but it's not their fault the software is buggy).
* I'm not sure this is the case for FTDv, but I don't think that would be different.
I suggest you implement test sites using both solutions through a POC if possible before migrating such a large environment.
Neither.
I'd pick Fortinet's products for a variety of reasons, but the #1 reason being they are easier to use and maintain. And they are better for TSCM work which is something we specialize in (Technical Surveillance Countermeasures - and within networks).