Cisco Secure Firewall vs ShieldX comparison

The compared Cisco and Fortinet solutions aren't in the same category. Cisco is ranked #5 in Firewalls , with an average rating of 8.2, and holds a 7.5% mindshare in the category. Fortinet is ranked #11 in MS , and holds a 1.2% mindshare. Additionally, 83% of Cisco users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Fortinet users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 16, 2024

Cisco Secure Firewall and ShieldX are both highly-regarded in the cybersecurity market. Cisco seems to have the upper hand due to its comprehensive support and versatile security features.

Features: Users highlight Cisco Secure Firewall's robust threat detection, extensive integration capabilities, and comprehensive security features. ShieldX stands out for its unique microsegmentation, simplified management, and innovative features.

Room for Improvement: Cisco Secure Firewall users note the need for more intuitive configurations, faster updates, and improved user experience. ShieldX users seek better scalability, enhanced user documentation, and expanded feature set.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Cisco Secure Firewall is commended for its detailed deployment guides and responsive customer service. ShieldX users find its deployment process more straightforward but desire quicker customer support response times.

Pricing and ROI: Cisco Secure Firewall's pricing is justified given its extensive support and functionalities, though it is on the higher end. ShieldX offers competitive pricing with a strong ROI due to its advanced features, making it preferable for cost-conscious buyers seeking significant returns.

To learn more, read our detailed Cisco Secure Firewall vs. ShieldX Report (Updated: December 2024).

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Secure Firewall vs. ShieldX

December 2024

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Fortinet FortiGate

Mindshare comparison

Firewalls Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Cisco Secure Firewall	7.5%
Fortinet FortiGate	18.3%
OPNsense	10.3%
Other	63.9%

Firewalls

Microsegmentation Software Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
ShieldX	1.2%
Illumio	26.5%
Akamai Guardicore Segmentation	22.7%
Other	49.6%

Microsegmentation Software

Featured Reviews

Vasu Gala

Manager, Information Technology Operation/Presales at TechMonarch

A stable solution with an intuitive interface and quick customer service

I have been working with Fortinet FortiGate, WatchGuard, Sophos, and SonicWall. I'm not as comfortable with SonicWall because of their UI and limitations. I prefer Fortinet above all other options. When it comes to configuration, I am confident in my ability to handle various tasks, including creating policies such as firewall rules, web policies, and application policies. Additionally, I can configure VPNs and implement load balancing, among other tasks. Overall, I feel much more comfortable working with Fortinet. Fortinet has made significant improvements by integrating AI with firewalls for threat analysis and prevention. In the past 2-3 years, they have launched FortiSASE and SIEM, and they also provide SOC services. Both Palo Alto and Fortinet FortiGate are excellent. While Fortinet FortiGate comes at higher prices, the functionality and support justify the cost. They promptly resolve firmware issues and inform all support providers about configuration changes.

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Phil Shiflett

Senior Manager, Network Engineering at TTi Power Equipment

Unified policies streamline network management but complex licensing requires attention

Cisco Secure Firewall has some growth opportunities in terms of visibility and control capabilities regarding managing encrypted traffic. It has the ability to analyze encrypted traffic, and there is potential for more integration with APIs and AI to enhance these capabilities. Cisco Secure Firewall needs improvement in deployment time and the capability to access the CLI during support calls. I often encounter issues when technical support uses a CLI that is not familiar to me while troubleshooting through the GUI. My ongoing complaint for the last six years has been the lack of CLI functionality, which hinders my ability to work on the firewall, alongside concerns regarding deployment time. For the next release, they should look at the features offered by competitors such as Fortinet, including the ability to perform packet capture directly from the interface. If they enhanced their troubleshooting efficiency related to packet capture for each specific rule, it would simplify the process significantly.

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MichaelProcyshyn

IT Director at park holidays uk

Proactively monitors, blocks, and reports what it has blocked; and self-updates meaning there is zero maintenance

The most valuable feature is the automatic scaling. With its microservices, it scales both up and down, depending on traffic and throughput. The traffic through our website depends on holiday bookings. It's very quiet in November through January, and then our traffic picks up quite rapidly and, at our peak, we will take in excess of a million pounds of business a day through our website. The UI was also one of the huge selling points. My web development manager was blown away with the detail and the granularity that you can get out of the UI. It is a very strong and informative UI, with the amount of data it provides. Uptime on the system has been 648 days and we do very little to it because it self-updates and alerts. It does everything that we need it to do, so the administration side of it is zero. One of the beauties about ShieldX is that it's such a good "fire-and-forget" product.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"From personal experience, I find that I am able to save hours of planning and implementation time because Fortinet's documentation is so helpful."

"The product is user-friendly and easy to manage."

"FortiGate improved our security. It's one of the best hardware firewalls."

"Since the implementation of Fortinet FortiGate, I have seen noticeable improvement across multiple areas, with security incidents dropping by around 60-70% and downtime reduced by nearly 50% due to SD-WAN failover."

"This product is definitely scalable."

"We have been able to offer several services to customers in a single box."

"We have a redundant setup for failover, however, it has not had to fail over ever and we have not had a capacity issue."

"FortiGate Next Generation Firewall is a good solution because it has a range of options and a clear ecosystem."

More Fortinet FortiGate pros

"With Cisco, there are a lot of features such as the network map. Cisco builds the whole network map of the machines you have behind your firewall and gives you insight into the vulnerabilities and attributes that the host has. Checkpoint and Fortinet don't have that functionality directly on the firewall."

"This solution has good security and it's a good product."

"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."

"The stability of the solution is very good, and we can see that it gets even better with every release."

"One of the best features is the ease of use. It's also easy to teach new engineers to use the ASA CLI."

"I like them mostly because they don't break and they have great diagnostics."

"Our company operates in Saudi Arabia, primarily working with government sectors. If any hardware malfunctions, the defective device is removed, and we receive a replacement from the reseller. We have not encountered any issues related to delays in receiving replacements for malfunctioning devices which has been beneficial."

"The VPN feature is the most valuable to us because it accomplishes the task well. We're able to do everything we need to do."

More Cisco Secure Firewall pros

"ShieldX has been designed from the very beginning to work well in cloud environments. It understands autoscaling, automation, and auto-configuration. These are the things which are important in today's operating environment."

"Very often, when new challengers come in, what they do is they end up coming in at a lower cost with more functionality."

"The Adaptive Intention Engine is fantastic. It allows us to develop security policies using the language of our internal customers. It's machine-learning applied to security workflows. That allows us to much more easily construct the policies that will protect those workflows."

"ShieldX makes it a lot easier and a lot simpler to define your policies and define your rules, and that greatly reduces the opportunity for user error."

"The UI was also one of the huge selling points. My web development manager was blown away with the detail and the granularity that you can get out of the UI. It is a very strong and informative UI, with the amount of data it provides."

"Once you install it you can virtually forget about it; it's very low-maintenance and high-protection."

"It has helped us tighten our security posture. Now, staff can only access things that they should be accessing."

"The most valuable feature is the automatic scaling. With its microservices, it scales both up and down, depending on traffic and throughput."

More ShieldX pros

Cons

"If they could extend their fabric towards other vendor environments for integration, that would be great."

"Like any hardware, it has finite scalability restrictions."

"It's my understanding that more of the current generation features could be brought in. There could be more integration with EDRs, for example."

"Need to Improvement in Reporting"

"One area for improvement for Fortinet FortiGate could be the price, as my clients here are small companies, and they might not have the resources or money to always buy a Fortinet FortiGate solution or FortiGate products."

"In some cases, its initial setup could be hard for customers."

"FortiGate can improve its token system, as it requires a purchase before use."

"The integration with third-party tools may be something that they should work on."

More Fortinet FortiGate cons

"Cisco support tends to take longer, and I mean really long given the fact that subject matter is sometimes also more complicated, so it really depends."

"The solution is overcomplicated in some senses. Simplifying it would be an improvement."

"The cost of this product should be reconsidered."

"One issue with Firepower Management Center is deployment time. It takes seven to 10 minutes and that's a long time for deployment. In that amount of time, management or someone else can ask me to change something or to provide permissions, but during that time, doing so is not possible. It's a drawback with Cisco. Other vendors, like Palo Alto or Fortinet do not have this deployment time issue."

"I would like to see the inclusion of a protocol that can be used to protect databases."

"We tried to look into Z3 models before, but our cybersecurity team found some issues where it was lacking. They found some bugs or loopholes, so we wanted Cisco to address these before we fully roll out the solution. We're trying again, and hopefully, with Cisco's updates, it will be acceptable to us in the near future."

"The next generations part of these products need a better approach."

"The implementation is not so straightforward. It's rather complex and we have a lot of trouble with it."

More Cisco Secure Firewall cons

"I would like better reports and in-depth reporting."

"The one criticism I might have is there should be a bit more customer care, with regular review meetings on it or regular reports."

"They need to be consistent in performance and capabilities over time, given the fact that this is new and I want to see where this goes in the next year or so. As the vendor continues to evolve and add future functionality, we want to make sure that we are still keeping up with the integrations, etc. Time will be the key factor here. The proper support for some of the latest technologies, Docker containers, etc. They need to keep up with threat landscape, so we will see how the security get layered. This is what we are going to be keeping an eye on."

"They need to be consistent in performance and capabilities over time, given the fact that this is new and I want to see where this goes in the next year or so."

"We are having some issues with their LDAP and integrating it with the Active Directory."

"With any kind of tool like ShieldX, where you're in the cloud instead of a traditional firewall, you're using CPU resources in those environments to provide the protection. So there's a cost associated with CPU resources. I'm pressing upon them to make the product much more efficient and use less CPUs to do the same thing."

"There should be a bit more customer care, with regular review meetings on it or regular reports. It would be nice to have a quarterly or biannual review of what ShieldX has blocked."

More ShieldX cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Compared to other firewall products, it's a little cheaper in terms of pricing."

"I would rate the pricing a seven out of ten"

"Its pricing is competitive with other solutions."

"FortiGate Next Generation Firewall costs our company around $12000 per year."

"Fortinet is competitive price-wise."

"The tool is a bit pricey for small businesses, but it is still bearable in terms of cost."

"I rate FortiGate's pricing a five out of ten."

"It is quite affordable for our customers. There is a separate cost for IPS, antivirus, web filtering, and other features. They have a great choice of licenses. You can go for the license that you want, which is quite useful."

More Fortinet FortiGate pricing and cost advice

"It's pretty competitive. If they could make it cheaper, it would be great. You always want cheaper, but relative to the performance capabilities of the firewall and relative to what you get, it's fair. It's not the cheapest in the world, but you get an excellent product for that price."

"We have a perpetual license for all of our firewalls. For some of the features, we purchase them on demand. The pricing is decent but it could always be cheaper, we would be happier."

"I know that licensing for some of the advanced solutions, like Intrusion Prevention and Secure Malware Analytics, are nominal costs."

"We're using the smart license for this firewall. The models that we have require licensing for remote access."

"With the bundling mode with Duo licensing, it's now better. It's better to have one simplified global licensing mode, and this is what Cisco has done with bundling. The next-generation firewalls include a set of features such as filtering, emails, and IPS. This combination offers the best way for customers to manage their operating expenses."

"We pay about €2,000 ($2,400 USD) per year for licensing."

"Some of our customers would be more likely to standardize on Cisco equipment if the cost was lower because a lot of people install cheap equipment."

"Cisco is not for a small mom-and-pop shop because of the cost, but if you're in a regulated industry where a breach could cost you a million dollars, it's a bargain."

More Cisco Secure Firewall pricing and cost advice

"ShieldX also enables us to migrate to cloud environments faster. That is an important part of it for sure because it takes the exact same policies that we would apply to our on-premise environment and enables us to simply apply them to the cloud. It becomes one policy for both on-prem and for the cloud."

"We are very happy with the pricing and licensing. It's about getting a site-wide license. One of the challenges that we've had with our previous vendor had been the cost of licensing."

"For a three-year deal we paid £55,000 plus tax... But, and this is a big "but," this was over two years ago. ShieldX had only just hit the market. We were the first company in Europe to buy ShieldX."

"ShieldX ensures that we can have the separation needed for our environment to avoid drastically increasing the cost on the licensing side. From this perspective, it's been very positive and helpful."

"We are actually expecting our costs to drop in the coming year, but it is just a matter of the licensing expiring. That is going to happen in the next six months or so. Then, we will start to see a decrease in overall spend."

"For other security professions who are looking for something which is low in cost that does microsegmentation, they should look at ShieldX. It might not be the big name out there, but it does everything that you are looking for in microsegmentation at a very low price."

"Security policies are now applied as applications are going up. Because it's automated, we don't have the three to four week delay. The insertion of applications in the cloud for us dropped from an average of three to four weeks to a couple of days."

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Comparison Review

it_user206346

Security Consultant at Webernetz.net - Network Security Consulting

Mar 11, 2015

Cisco ASA vs. Palo Alto Networks

Cisco ASA vs. Palo Alto: Management Goodies You often have comparisons of both firewalls concerning security components. Of course, a firewall must block attacks, scan for viruses, build VPNs, etc. However, in this post I am discussing the advantages and disadvantages from both vendors concerning…

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

11%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

University

No data available

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	361
Midsize Enterprise	135
Large Enterprise	190

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	186
Midsize Enterprise	129
Large Enterprise	231

No data available

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Comparisons

Sophos Firewall vs Fortinet FortiGate

Compared 19% of the time

Netgate pfSense vs Fortinet FortiGate

Compared 4% of the time

Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls vs Fortinet FortiGate

Compared 4% of the time

OPNsense vs Fortinet FortiGate

Compared 3% of the time

Check Point Quantum Force (NGFW) vs Fortinet FortiGate

Compared 3% of the time

More Fortinet FortiGate Competitors

Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls vs Cisco Secure Firewall

Compared 10% of the time

Palo Alto Networks WildFire vs Cisco Secure Firewall

Compared 10% of the time

Check Point Quantum Force (NGFW) vs Cisco Secure Firewall

Compared 4% of the time

Netgate pfSense vs Cisco Secure Firewall

Compared 3% of the time

OPNsense vs Cisco Secure Firewall

Compared 2% of the time

More Cisco Secure Firewall Competitors

Illumio vs ShieldX

Compared 31% of the time

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs ShieldX

Compared 25% of the time

Check Point CloudGuard Network Security vs ShieldX

Compared 19% of the time

Nutanix Flow Network Security vs ShieldX

Compared 13% of the time

More ShieldX Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Fortinet FortiGate

March 2026

Download Fortinet FortiGate product report

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Secure Firewall

March 2026

Download Cisco Secure Firewall product report

Buyer's Guide

ShieldX

March 2026

Download ShieldX product report

Also Known As

Fortinet FortiGate Next-Generation Firewall

Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Firewall, Cisco ASA NGFW, Adaptive Security Appliance, Cisco Sourcefire Firewalls, Cisco ASAv, Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall, Cisco Secure Firewall ASA Virtual - BYOL

APEIRO, ShieldX APEIRO

Overview

Fortinet FortiGate is a versatile network security tool offering features like VPN, firewall, web filtering, intrusion prevention, and scalability. It is known for its performance and integration with other Fortinet products, making it a preferred choice for robust cybersecurity.

Fortinet FortiGate stands out as a comprehensive cybersecurity solution with strong performance and ease of configuration. It delivers unified threat management, integrating features such as dynamic routing, SD-WAN support, and centralized management. Despite its strengths, improvements in the web interface's stability, pricing structures, and reporting capabilities are needed. Users seek better integration with third-party tools and automation advancements to enhance the experience further. These enhancements, alongside improvements in bandwidth management and the reduction of licensing costs, are points of interest for users looking to capitalize on FortiGate's extensive capabilities.

What are Fortinet FortiGate's key features?

VPN: Ensures secure remote connections.
Firewall: Protects against unauthorized access.
Web Filtering: Blocks malicious sites and content.
Application Control: Manages and controls applications.
Intrusion Prevention: Detects and prevents vulnerabilities.
SSL Inspection: Enhances security by inspecting encrypted traffic.

What benefits should be considered when evaluating Fortinet FortiGate?

Affordability: Offers cost-effective security solutions.
Reliability: Known for consistent and stable performance.
Integration: Seamlessly integrates with other Fortinet products.
Comprehensive Protection: Provides broad threat protection capabilities.

Fortinet FortiGate is widely implemented across industries as a primary firewall system for securing internet gateways and safeguarding data centers. It supports businesses in achieving SD-WAN integration and enhances cybersecurity by providing essential features like antivirus, web filtering, and application control. Enterprises utilize FortiGate for securing remote connections and ensuring compliance with security standards, making it adaptable for different network sizes and industries.

Fortinet

Cisco Secure Firewall provides comprehensive network security with advanced features such as application visibility, URL filtering, and malware protection. It combines a user-friendly interface with robust VPN capabilities, making it a reliable choice for varying network environments and industry applications.

Cisco Secure Firewall offers exceptional protection with its integration into Cisco's broader ecosystem, ensuring enhanced threat detection and policy unification. Despite its complexity in command-line interfaces and management, Cisco Secure Firewall remains a potent tool for safeguarding data. It is widely adopted for edge security, VPN services, perimeter defense, and traffic segmentation, especially in hybrid settings. Essential sectors like banking and telecom benefit from its stable connectivity and centralized security management. Though there are challenges with costs and support for third-party APIs, the firewall's scalability and high availability provide comprehensive support for protecting network assets.

What are the key features of Cisco Secure Firewall?

Application Visibility: Offers in-depth visibility of application traffic to monitor and protect against threats.
Advanced Malware Protection: Protects against known and emerging malware threats with powerful detection capabilities.
URL Filtering: Manages and restricts access to websites, enhancing organizational data security.
VPN Capabilities: Ensures secure remote access and encrypted communication through strong VPN features.
Integration with Cisco Ecosystem: Enhances security measures with seamless integration with Cisco's suite of security tools.

What benefits and ROI should be expected from Cisco Secure Firewall?

Comprehensive Protection: Offers multi-layered security for diverse network environments, increasing overall data protection.
Performance Efficiency: High availability and scalability lead to improved network performance and resource management.
Management Simplification: Centralized security management streamlines policy deployment across networks.
Enhanced Threat Detection: Integration capabilities improve threat detection and mitigation for better security posture.

Cisco Secure Firewall is widely implemented across sectors like banking, education, ISPs, and telecoms. It fortifies data centers and network edge security, delivering strong protection for client access, hybrid environments, and intrusion prevention. In these industries, firewall solutions ensure secure connectivity and manage RTU traffic effectively, leveraging centralized management and integration with Cisco's security tools.

Cisco

The ShieldX Elastic Security Platform dynamically scales to deliver comprehensive and consistent controls to protect data centers, cloud infrastructure, applications and data no matter where they are or where they go to make the cloud more secure than on-premise deployments. Our frictionless approach leverages agentless technology as well as the ShieldX Adaptive Intention Engine which autonomously translates and enforces intention into a set of comprehensive controls - microsegmentation, firewall, IPS and more - making security the easiest thing you do in the cloud.

Fortinet

Sample Customers

Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, IBM, Cisco, Dell, HP, Oracle, Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, Vodafone, Orange, BT Group, Telstra, Deutsche Telekom, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, CenturyLink, NTT Communications, Tata Communications, SoftBank, China Mobile, Singtel, Telus, Rogers Communications, Bell Canada, Telkom Indonesia, Telkom South Africa, Telmex, Telia Company, Telkom Kenya

There are more than one million Adaptive Security Appliances deployed globally. Top customers include First American Financial Corp., Genzyme, Frankfurt Airport, Hansgrohe SE, Rio Olympics, The French Laundry, Rackspace, and City of Tomorrow.

Iowa State University

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Secure Firewall vs. ShieldX

December 2024

Free Report: Cisco Secure Firewall vs. ShieldX

Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco Secure Firewall vs. ShieldX and other solutions. Updated: December 2024.

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