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Cisco Sourcefire SNORT vs Fortinet FortiWeb comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

Cisco Sourcefire SNORT
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
20
Ranking in other categories
Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) (12th)
Fortinet FortiWeb
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
122
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

Cisco Sourcefire SNORT and Fortinet FortiWeb aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Cisco Sourcefire SNORT is designed for Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) and holds a mindshare of 2.9%, up 2.7% compared to last year.
Fortinet FortiWeb, on the other hand, focuses on Web Application Firewall (WAF), holds 3.9% mindshare, down 7.4% since last year.
Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cisco Sourcefire SNORT2.9%
Darktrace10.0%
Fortinet FortiGate7.1%
Other80.0%
Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS)
Web Application Firewall (WAF) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Fortinet FortiWeb3.9%
Imperva Application Security Platform7.2%
Cloudflare5.0%
Other83.9%
Web Application Firewall (WAF)
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2772102 - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud Architect at a consultancy with 1-10 employees
Logging and customizable rules have helped improve threat monitoring and detection
The logging is mainly what I consider one of the best features with Cisco Sourcefire SNORT. Being able to log and store it in a file allows you to push it to a centralized repository. The logging and reporting help improve incident response. You should always be logging threats, any sort of misconfiguration, and anything that could be an issue. It's important to at least log and monitor it. The basic rules provide a good baseline in assessing Cisco Sourcefire SNORT's ability in providing real-time analytics for threat detection, but as a professional, you should look to constantly modify that baseline. They provide extensive customizability so you can define your own rules. The customizability allows it to be adaptable in protecting against diverse network threats to the constant change.
HameedAhmed - PeerSpot reviewer
Joint Director at PAA
Security threats have been reduced through seamless deployment and strong integration with other tools
I have used Fortinet FortiWeb's integration features. We have easily integrated all of the applications with the product. Most of the applications we are using are in-house built. My technical team is looking after the best features. I have not used it extensively for maybe two and a half years. I have been involved in the installation, but I am not actually using the product. I work with it from time to time but not extensively. I would assess Fortinet FortiWeb's adaptive machine learning and artificial intelligence as having new patches installed regarding artificial intelligence, but when we bought it, I think the learning feature was there. Now they have installed artificial intelligence features through patches. We have a complete portfolio of Fortinet in our organization, including FortiMail, Fortinet FortiWeb, and FortiGate, along with multi-factor authentication. All of the products are from Fortinet. Fortinet tools integrate with each other and work in conjunction. I think Fortinet FortiWeb has helped us meet regulatory compliance because we are not a regulatory organization, but our sister organization is regulatory. We have regulatory compliance with the International Civil Aviation Authority, whose audit teams have checked our data center and these security products, and they are satisfied with us. The question about leveraging Fortinet FortiWeb's automated policy management does not pertain to my domain because I am not so technical, but I am in a management role now. My engineer is more technical than me. I would rate this product an eight point five out of ten.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"With Cisco Sourcefire SNORT, we've been able to prevent and detect intrusion in our network and actually decrease our SLA (Service Level Agreement)."
"We primarily use this solution as an intrusion prevention system for external firewalls and deploy the solution on-premises."
"The most valuable feature is the visibility that we have across the virtual environment."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to automatically learn the traffic in our environment, and change the merit recommendations based on that."
"It is quite an intelligent product."
"I like most of Cisco's features, like malware detection and URL filtering."
"The solution can be integrated with some network electors like Cisco Stealthwatch, Cisco ISE, and Active Directory to provide the client with authentication certificates."
"Cisco Sourcefire SNORT is easy to configure and the reporting is great. It's also very user-friendly."
"FortiWeb's position as part of the Fortinet platform makes it particularly beneficial for Fortinet customers, offering seamless integration and operational cost savings."
"We use Fortinet FortiWeb to protect our exchange terminal for mail security."
"The most valuable feature of Fortinet FortiWeb is the reports and the AI-based features."
"Other than the additional security with exploit protection, we have simpler certificate handling, as we can keep internal servers using internal certificates continuously distributed and updated by Active Directory Group Policy, while the public certificates become updated only in a single place, FortiWeb itself."
"It can scale well."
"When we had Cisco we had around thirty thousand entries on our firewalls, now we are down to three thousand because Fortinet has a mechanism to detect all of your entries which are not used, and it can clean it up."
"I like FortiWeb's usability and ease of configuration. It's simple to configure rules and exceptions inside the attack log. We block everything by default. If something isn't working, we ask the system admin to adjust the template and add exceptions."
"It is easy to install and to maintain."
 

Cons

"Cisco Sourcefire SNORT can scale, but if you have too much, you could fill up your log files, which I consider when discussing scalability."
"I would like to have analytics included in the suite."
"To be frank, the product is not really stable, although they're working on that. Whenever I go to the technical community with an issue, they will usually say that it is not there yet, but the technical team are working on it. The issues are not insolvable. I think they should just keep working on the product to make sure that the product can become very stable. The technical support is great. I appreciate that. We have a lot of communities supporting Firepower now, so you can find help for whatever issue you have."
"The price of this solution could be improved."
"Performance needs improvement."
"The initial setup is a little difficult compared to other products in the market. It depends on the environment. If we are doing any migration, it might take months in a brown-field environment."
"I don't think this solution is a time-based control system, because one cannot filter traffic based on time."
"I want to see a better dashboard for the product. The dashboard can be a bit modified or enhanced."
"Fine-tuning is a room for improvement in Fortinet FortiWeb."
"The product can be costly."
"If some of my customers want to migrate from F5 to Fortinet Firewall, or the Fortinet WAF solution, there are some migration issues since I cannot migrate all the elements quickly using Fortinet Firewall."
"In the initial setup of Fortinet FortiWeb, we wanted to deploy it with WCCP mode, but we cannot do it because of the limitation with our Cisco ASA firewalls."
"Fortinet FortiWeb needs to improve the way it's configured. Common services like publishing exchange should be done in one click only."
"Fortinet's technical support is pretty slow."
"The product lacks features offered by enterprise-level firewall tools."
"The tool's WAF or web application firewall area has certain aspects that can be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I don't know the exact amount, but most of the time when I go to a company with a proposition, they will say, "This thing that you are selling is good, but it's expensive. Why don't you propose something like FortiGate, Check Point, or Palo Alto?" Cisco device are expensive compared to other devices."
"We have a three-year license for this solution."
"If one is an extremely expensive product, and ten is cheap, I rate the tool's price as a five."
"Licensing for this solution is paid on a yearly basis."
"The cost is per port and can be expensive but it does include training and support for three years."
"When I use any other firewall, I have to take a license. It could be a perpetual license or subscription-based. In both cases, we have to pay some amount in advance, whereas in the case of FortiWeb, when using it as a service, I am paying half a dollar only for the domain name, and then I am paying based on the traffic or the number of requests."
"I rate the product price a four on a scale of one to ten, where one is a high price, and ten is a low price."
"The price of Fortinet FortiWeb is expensive in our Ethiopian currency."
"FortiWeb Web Application Firewall is not expensive."
"The pricing is average; the product is neither particularly expensive nor affordable."
"FortiWeb is more expensive than some competing products."
"The price of Fortinet FortiWeb is reasonable. This is one of the key factors of why we use this solution."
"Keep a loose margin between your actual bandwidth and the product sizing when using hardware appliances. Only virtual machines are upgradable to larger sizes."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
13%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise9
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business61
Midsize Enterprise27
Large Enterprise37
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Cisco Sourcefire SNORT?
I have not had much experience with the community-driven rule set while utilizing Cisco Sourcefire SNORT. I don't have experience with recognizing zero-day vulnerabilities, but based on my knowledg...
What is your primary use case for Cisco Sourcefire SNORT?
Endpoint protection is the main use case. The main aspect involves specifying different rules, and when network traffic hits these rules, it will try to block the traffic or at least log the traffi...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fortinet FortiWeb?
The pricing for Fortinet FortiWeb varies with different models having different prices. It depends on the requirement. For VM machines, the price increases based on CPU configurations of 2, 4, or 8...
What needs improvement with Fortinet FortiWeb?
There is room for improvement in Fortinet FortiWeb. The team was only from FortiGate itself. They are making new firmware versions and releasing them before checking, which leads to many bugs in th...
What is your primary use case for Fortinet FortiWeb?
Fortinet FortiWeb is very good as a web application solution. I have been working with Fortinet FortiWeb since 2020.
 

Also Known As

Sourcefire SNORT
FortiWeb Web Application Firewall (WAF)
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

CareCore, City of Biel, Dimension Data, LightEdge, Lone Star College System, National Rugby League, Port Aventura, Smart City Networks, Telecom Italia, The Department of Education in Western Australia
Lush, Barnabas Health, Options, Riverside Healthcare, Hillsbourough County Schools, Columbia Public Schools, Schiller AG
Find out what your peers are saying about Darktrace, Fortinet, Check Point Software Technologies and others in Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS). Updated: October 2026.
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