We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Firewall and Zscaler Internet Access 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."Web filtering and two-factor authentication are great features."
"FortiGate SD-WAN facilitated a smooth transition for our customers between their two internet service providers, ensuring uninterrupted connectivity without any downtime."
"We can detect any attack of viruses or malware at the first point of contact."
"It's quite comfortable to handle the FortiGate firewall."
"Fortinet FortiGate is user-friendly and affordable."
"A strong point of FortiGate is that the graphical interface is complete and easy to use, especially if we think there is a list of operations that we are able to perform inside."
"Valuable features include the Web Application Firewall, and it even has DLP (data leak prevention)."
"The pricing is excellent. It's much less expensive than Cisco."
"All the features except IPS are valuable. IPS is not a part of my job."
"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."
"The stability of the product is good."
"We get the Security Intelligence Feeds refreshed every hour from Talos, which from my understanding is that they're the largest intelligence Security Intelligence Group outside of the government."
"VPN, firewall, and IDS/IPS allow us to deliver services to meet client needs across various industry verticals."
"The technical team is always available when we have problems."
"It is pretty stable. I haven't seen many issues during the past four years."
"The Firepower IPS, based on Snort technology, has an amazing detection engine and historical analysis capability of files that eases threat investigations a lot."
"The most valuable feature is bandwidth control."
"After a proper implementation, the maintenance is very low."
"The data loss prevention feature is the most valuable. It stops our users from inadvertently leaking our customers' data to the Internet or anywhere else it shouldn't go."
"We don't have to buy equipment to use it. And when our engineers set it up on our side, we just configured a few settings and we were in."
"One feature that is valuable to me from an implementation point of view is that it's very easy to implement."
"Zscaler covers all the features needed to replace a VPN or proxy solution. They are good. They've been on the market for 15 years now, so they are mature enough."
"The solution is scalable and stable."
"We enjoy all of the proxy capabilities and the capability to integrate into the SIEM/SOC solution."
"I would like to see improvements with the antivirus and IPS as they are not working properly all the time."
"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."
"For the migration, everyone has a firewall in use and I am selling Fortinet. Typically, I am replacing another firewall. Previously, there was a tool available to convert configurations from one firewall, such as Palo Alto, to Fortinet, but this tool is no longer free. If it could be made free again, it would be very beneficial."
"Fortinet FortiGate could improve if it had a cloud-managed solution."
"Fortinet Fortigate could benefit by simplifying some of their processes."
"Sometimes you do need to know some CLI commands, so it's a bit harder for technicians or new people that don't know it."
"The Web-filter in this solution is not very good."
"Price, of course, can always be more competitive or better."
"Cisco is not cheap, however, it is worth investing in these technologies."
"When we talk about data centers, we are talking about 100 gig capacity or 400 gig capacity. When it comes to active-active solution clustering and resilience and performance, Cisco should look into these a little bit more."
"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."
"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."
"Cisco wasn't first-to-market with NGFWs... they should look at what other vendors are doing and try not only to be on the same wavelength but a little bit better."
"If you need to reschedule a call with the support team when you face a new issue with the product, then it may get a bit of a problem to get a hold of someone from the support team of Cisco."
"When we're looking at full-stack visibility, it can be difficult to get the right information out of Firepower."
"When comparing the graphical interface of this solution to other vendors it is more difficult to configure. There is a higher learning curve for administrators in this solution."
"Do not expect to pay for the service and start using it, like Gmail. Zscaler requires a proper implementation to be done to make it successful."
"Zscaler Internet Access needs to integrate more ISPs. It is good to have more than three ISPs."
"I would like to see the ability to choose a pool of IPs for my company, set up rules based on them, and know that those IPs are not used by other companies."
"I don't know whether it's Zscaler or not, however, sometimes I can't access my time management. I need to wait and try again a few hours later. Typically, if I let some time pass, I can access it again."
"Zscaler does not provide dedicated IPs to each customer. Hence, they share a pool of IPs provided by Zscaler. There is a chance of blacklisting these IPs. I also do not like the multi-management portal."
"The pricing is an issue. It is expensive if you have all of your users in the same location. It is expensive compared to other firewalls on the market."
"If they can also integrate with the multi-factor authentication to prompt users to do another, second-factor authentication, that would be ideal."
"Zscaler Internet Access can improve by adding traffic filtering based on the DNS."
Cisco Secure Firewall is ranked 4th in Firewalls with 404 reviews while Zscaler Internet Access is ranked 2nd in Secure Web Gateways (SWG) with 46 reviews. Cisco Secure Firewall is rated 8.2, while Zscaler Internet Access is rated 8.2. 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 Zscaler Internet Access writes "Provides integrated CASB and file sandboxing but could be less expensive ". Cisco Secure Firewall is most compared with Palo Alto Networks WildFire, Netgate pfSense, Meraki MX, Sophos XG and Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, whereas Zscaler Internet Access is most compared with Cisco Umbrella, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, Netskope , Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks and Appgate SDP. See our Cisco Secure Firewall vs. Zscaler Internet Access report.
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