We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Firewall and WatchGuard Firebox based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: The two solutions are very comparable. WatchGuard Firebox received slightly better ratings because it is easier to deploy than Cisco Secure Firewall.
"It increases security posture and is helpful for firewall reporting, intrusion protection, web filtering, and SD-WAN implementation."
"The most valuable feature of Fortinet FortiGate is URL filtering."
"Good performance, stability, and virtual domain ability."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiGate are it is one of the most mature firewalls in the UTM bundle."
"The pipe filter application is an outstanding feature."
"It does a lot for you for intrusion protection and as an antivirus. The threat management bundle is worth the money. You don't need another company to monitor your web traffic for you. You can do everything yourself on the firewall. You restrict your own black list for people on the firewall. You don't need to pay some other company for another product to do that for you. The firewall can do that for you. So, it's an easy-to-use product for people to be independent. They don't need to rely on other vendors to do what the firewall can do. They can do everything."
"Fortinet FortiGate is a scalable solution."
"The management console is pretty simple, so anyone who understands networking can initially deploy the solution."
"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."
"Protecting our landscape in general and being able to see logging when things aren't going as set out in policies are valuable features. Our security department is keen on seeing the logging."
"Implementing Cisco Secure Firewall has saved us time because we rely on most of the out-of-the-box signatures. It has reduced the time and effort spent in configuration within the security network."
"The management aspect of the product is very straightforward."
"The technical support is excellent. I would rate it as 10 out of 10. When there has been an issue, we have had a good response from them."
"URL filtering is valuable."
"The most valuable feature is the anti-malware protection. It protects the endpoints on my network."
"The most valuable feature is the Intrusion Prevention System."
"From my experience with their customer service team, I would say that they seem quite knowledgeable and fairly quick to respond."
"It is a scalable solution."
"The most valuable features are the VPN and web blocker security."
"The features that I have found most valuable are the FireWall features. The management side of WatchGuard is quite easy because it supports two ways to manage it - by the web and the other one they call WatchGuard systems manager. I used to be familiar with WSM only, but they improved their GUI in the web browser and now it is much easier to do it within the web browser."
"Easy to change the model if you need more performance, with good cohesion in the whole lineup of devices."
"All of the features have been valuable. There's nothing on my M270 that I'm not using. If you have remote access, you can see how many users are coming from the outside world to be connected to the systems, through the virus systems that we have behind the firewall, in order to gain access to their files and do their work. We can also see how long they stay online and whether these connections are closed forcefully or for any other reasons, such as a glitch or some kind of misbehavior, to see if internet traffic is optimized and if that particular traffic is under company policies, concerning which websites were visited."
"The most valuable features of the WatchGuard Firebox are all the security and updated features. You are able to configure the solution from the cloud platform and the application and web interface are very nice."
"It has everything we need in terms of functionality."
"We'd like more management across other integrations."
"Web security solutions can be improved."
"If they could extend their fabric towards other vendor environments for integration, that would be great."
"The solution's framework needs to be frequently updated in order to have a stable solution."
"The cloud features and integration could be improved."
"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."
"Fortinet FortiGate could improve if it had a cloud-managed solution."
"Fortinet should focus on enhancing the capabilities of FortiGate by consolidating its various products, such as FortiGate Cloud, FortiManager, and FortiAnalyzer."
"Cisco Secure Firewall's integration with cloud providers has room for improvement. We could do more in terms of integration, for example, if we had a tag on an instance."
"The main problem we have is that things work okay until we upgrade the firmware, at which point, everything changes, and the net stops working."
"I would like it if there was a centralized way to manage policies, then sticking with the network functions on the actual devices. That is probably the thing that frustrates me the most. I want a way that you can manage multiple policies at several different locations, all at one site. You then don't have to worry about the connectivity piece, in case you are troubleshooting because connectivity is down."
"We're getting support but there's a big delay until we get a response from their technical team. They're in the USA and we're in Africa, so that's the difficulty. When they're in the office, they respond."
"The user interface is a little clunky and difficult to work with. Some things aren't as easy as they should be."
"It would be great to have all the data correlated to have an overview and one point of administration."
"The Cisco Firewall UI could be improved."
"One thing that we really would have loved to have was policy-based routing. We had a lot of connections, and sometimes, we would have liked to change the routing depending on the policies, but it was lacking this capability. We also wanted application filtering and DNS filtering."
"There's always room for improvement, especially if the threats are getting more sophisticated and the IT department cannot sufficiently meet this kind of sophistication with their own knowledge and experience. Knowing that this solution can get up to the level of addressing a lot of these threats is something that everybody wishes for. If we look at the dark web and the lawful web, they are two opposites, and if these two good and bad collide in the world of the internet, you want the best possible product—especially if you cannot get to that point of knowledge. I am just an individual and end user, with limited knowledge of usage. That's why I say there's always room for improvement, from their side and also from mine, because by knowing exactly what they can achieve and the knowledge that they can get on an everyday basis, and the portion that is understandable to me, it's an improvement for them as well."
"Some of the configuration options are somewhat confusing."
"The level of support from WatchGuard is not as good."
"It's sometimes not easy to understand and can require specialist assistance."
"There is room for improvement in the threat protection, data packet inspection, and performance of the solution. Generally, it's just a lower-end product. It does the job but doesn't do it very well."
"In terms of what could be improved, I would say their web blocker feature. It is still quite a confusing setup, especially when you want to filter out a particular category for granularity. For example, you do not want to filter Facebook but you do want to filter Facebook games only. It can be done, but the process to do it is very confusing."
"WatchGuard Firebox could improve the speed of updates, such as new features or improvements. However, they are frequently improving the solution in many areas, such as geo-locations, definitions, and web blocking."
"When working with WatchGuard, specifically in configuring Panda Security on the portal for the first time, it was challenging for me."
Cisco Secure Firewall is ranked 3rd in Firewalls with 115 reviews while WatchGuard Firebox is ranked 2nd in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 25 reviews. Cisco Secure Firewall is rated 8.4, while WatchGuard Firebox is rated 8.4. 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 WatchGuard Firebox writes "Easy to deploy and it provides useful data on threats ". Cisco Secure Firewall is most compared with Meraki MX, Palo Alto Networks WildFire, Netgate pfSense, Juniper SRX Series Firewall and SonicWall NSa, whereas WatchGuard Firebox is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Sophos XG, Meraki MX, OPNsense and Sophos UTM. See our Cisco Secure Firewall vs. WatchGuard Firebox report.
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