We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Firewall and Sangfor NGAF 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 network security and cloud security are most valuable."
"The tool is a nice product and easy to handle. The software's user interface is also good. You can easily implement remote access in the solution."
"Its stability is the most valuable."
"The most important feature, normally for small business customers, is link load balancing."
"It works very well. It has a lot of different functionalities. Its cost is also fine for our customers."
"The UTM feature is quite good. FortiAP is easy to deploy because both Fortigate and FortiAP are under the same brand. Otherwise, you need to do more work on the configuration."
"The technical support is great."
"FortiGate firewalls are easy to manage through a user-friendly web interface. They also have advanced features like DDoS and DLP. However, I wouldn't recommend enabling all of these features on one device because it can cause performance issues."
"The Packet Tracer is a really good tool. If someone calls because they're having problems, you can easily create fake traffic without having to do an extended packet capture. You can see, straight away, if there's a firewall rule allowing that traffic in the direction you're trying to troubleshoot."
"It's quite a capable box for UTM."
"I have experience with URL filtering, and it is very good for URL filtering. You can filter URLs based on the categories, and it does a good job. It can also do deep packet inspection."
"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."
"One thing I like about the product is the logging features, the way it logs, the way it forwards the logs in Syslog."
"I like its integration with the AnyConnect client. I also like how modular it is. For example, I can easily integrate the Umbrella add-on into it. We are planning on adding Umbrella. We haven't added it yet, but we have researched."
"Cisco ASA is very strong."
"For business purposes, it's a very detailed solution, which is it's greatest benefit, as you can get almost any piece of information you need from the solution. It allows for admins to be able to troubleshoot pretty easily."
"We can utilize our own network rather than paying for a private one."
"Sangfor NGAF works accordingly with our customers. The solution has good performance, easy to use, and integrates well with the endpoints."
"The VPN connectivity feature is really nice."
"You might try Sangfor if you are on a tight budget. The price is affordable, and Sangfor offers a lot of features. We don't have any complaints about Sangfor."
"The built-in features function as intended, providing exceptional value."
"The product is very fast and reliable."
"The most valuable feature of Sangfor NGAF is its integration."
"Technical support is very good."
"They sometimes hide some features and if you want to enable them, you have to go in the CLI, enable the feature and configure it through the CLI. Customers, typically, like everything to be done by the GUI."
"Performance and technical support are the main issues with this solution."
"One area for improvement is the performance on bandwidth demands for smaller devices, as well as better web filtering."
"There can be more security in hybrid implementations. When a customer has a hybrid environment where some parts are in the cloud, we need a consistent security solution for such scenarios."
"Fortinet FortiGate needs to improve the logging and reporting. Additionally, the next-generation application's policies should be improved. When they were released they had bugs."
"To some degree, it's almost a question as to why some of this stuff isn't simpler. For example, for an AP deployment, while it's integrated, the number of steps that you have to go through in order to get the AP up, seems like a lot."
"The solution's framework needs to be frequently updated in order to have a stable solution."
"The graphical user interface of Fortinet's FortiGate product does not function well with text-based interfaces."
"It can probably provide a holistic view of different appliances because many customers do not have only one brand, besides the traditional SNMP protocols, to cover all their devices. There are some specific requirements in terms of configurations or actions that sometimes have to be done in a very manual way because of the different versions or brands in a customer's infrastructure. It could also have some additional analytics capabilities. It has some very interesting ways to monitor the traffic and identify false positives from the architecture and the environment. It would be good if there is a way to patch with some other industry-specific solutions and synchronize some of the information, such as what other customers experience in their operations and probably share some additional information that could be leveraged or shared among the industry. Such information would be something interesting to see. It could have AI capabilities related to how the appliances could benefit from learning the current environment and different exposures."
"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 have used Fortinet, Palo Alto, and Check Point previously and I prefer the process of everything working together."
"We would like to see improvement in recovery. If there is an issue that forces us to do recovery, we have to restart or reboot. In addition, sometimes we have downtime during the maintenance windows. If Cisco could enhance this, so that upgrades would not necessarily require downtime, that would be helpful."
"A memory leakage issue which literally freeze the nodes (we have an HA environment). The issue is still not solved and the only recommendation from Cisco is to reboot the node."
"The solution’s GUI could be better."
"The most valuable features of the product are the VPN and the NextGen firewall features such as application control, URL filtering, etc."
"They really need support for deployment."
"They need to improve their research team and they need to study their data to analyze it and build the product."
"The firewall system needs gradual improvements because there are more threats and challenges every day."
"Sangfor NGAF could improve the policies and default criteria. They could be much better."
"I would be happy if Sangfor developed a firewall designed specifically for home use, as well as for small businesses such as clinics and so on. A household version of the Sangfor firewall for your personal computer or laptop would be ideal, in my opinion."
"The solution should be able to work in a hybrid setup."
"Sangfor need greater exposer in the market because the market is mainly saturated by Fortinet. The user experience of Fortinet is quite different compared to NGAF. If we want to switch our users from Fortinet to NGAF, we have to convince them that the user experience will be much easier once once they start to use it."
"There is room for improvement in dependency on certain infrastructure, like the DNS dependency on the current DNS server that the company has. It should be standalone. It should not depend on any other DNS server."
"The product must provide more IPS features."
Cisco Secure Firewall is ranked 4th in Firewalls with 404 reviews while Sangfor NGAF is ranked 21st in Firewalls with 31 reviews. Cisco Secure Firewall is rated 8.2, while Sangfor NGAF is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Cisco Secure Firewall writes "Highlights and helps us catch Zero-day vulnerabilities traveling across our network". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sangfor NGAF writes "Affordable, easy to configure firewall with fast, responsive support". Cisco Secure Firewall is most compared with Palo Alto Networks WildFire, Netgate pfSense, Meraki MX, Sophos XG and Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, whereas Sangfor NGAF is most compared with Sophos XG, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Netgate pfSense, Check Point NGFW and H3C SecPath Firewalls. See our Cisco Secure Firewall vs. Sangfor NGAF report.
See our list of best Firewalls vendors.
We monitor all Firewalls reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
