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Cisco Sourcefire SNORT vs Fortinet FortiWeb comparison

 

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
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) (16th)
Fortinet FortiWeb
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
96
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 3.5%, up 3.3% compared to last year.
Fortinet FortiWeb, on the other hand, focuses on Web Application Firewall (WAF), holds 7.3% mindshare, up 6.9% since last year.
Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Cisco Sourcefire SNORT3.5%
Darktrace18.0%
Vectra AI10.6%
Other67.9%
Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS)
Web Application Firewall (WAF) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Fortinet FortiWeb7.3%
F5 Advanced WAF9.2%
Microsoft Azure Application Gateway7.8%
Other75.7%
Web Application Firewall (WAF)
 

Featured Reviews

Jack Poon - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers ease of setup and good documentation
When it comes to the product's deployment phase, we have a lot of vendor support. We have a lot of skills here in Hong Kong. Our company doesn't find any problem deploying Cisco solutions. The solution is deployed on an on-premises version. Speaking about the time required to deploy the solution, I would say that we have quite a lot of previous experience with deploying Cisco products. We have our company's standard design document, which we need to follow. We have a standard testing procedure for all those features. We just take out some appropriate parts and then compile them into one document for an individual project. It is actually quite easy for us to do the documentation, so it just takes one or two hours, and we can do the implementation because all the materials and testing procedures are already in our company standard documents, so it is not that difficult for us.
OcheEluma - PeerSpot reviewer
Enhanced security with comprehensive traffic inspection and some downtime automation needs
One area that needs improvement is the handling of SaaS downtime. When there is downtime at their data center, it becomes a transit point issue for us, causing downtime in our environment as well. Although measures like built-in redundancy and manual switching between data centers exist, there is room for improvement in making these transitions automatic without impacting the customer. Automating the migration without manual intervention would significantly enhance user experience during downtime. Additionally, being able to read non-flagged traffic for operational purposes could also be an area to improve.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Solid intrusion detection and prevention that scales easily in very large environments."
"The URL filtering is very good and you can create a group for customized URLs."
"The most valuable features of Cisco Sourcefire SNORT are the dashboard for monitoring events."
"Cisco technical support is unbeatable. It offers a premium service every time."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to automatically learn the traffic in our environment, and change the merit recommendations based on that."
"It simplifies the configuration process by offering pre-defined base configurations, including security and connectivity settings."
"The most valuable feature is the visibility that we have across the virtual environment."
"The product is inexpensive compared to leading brands such as Palo Alto or Fortinet."
"The most valuable feature is ease of use."
"The ability to configure multiple policies for different requirements is a strong feature of Fortinet FortiWeb."
"It's easy to use and allows us to integrate solutions together."
"Deployment can be straightforward"
"It can scale well."
"High-performance and detection engines, provide a high rate of exposure of web attacks."
"The most valuable feature in this solution is the ability to disseminate between the user entering some wrong value to the field, and a suspicious actor trying to exploit some known vulnerability."
"The policies and the filtering are the most valuable features, especially traffic, URL, and application filtering. The solution is excellent at detecting vulnerabilities."
 

Cons

"If the price is brought down then everybody will be happy."
"I would like to have analytics included in the suite."
"I did not experience any pain points that required improvement. Maybe a couple of false-positives, but that's about it."
"I don't think this solution is a time-based control system, because one cannot filter traffic based on time."
"Integration with other components — even Cisco's own products — can be enhanced to improve administrative experience."
"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."
"While the alerts they offer are good, it could improve it in the sense that they should be more detailed to make the alerts more useful to us in general. Sometimes the solution will offer up false positives. Due to the fact that the alerts aren't detailed, we have to go dig around to see why is it being blocked. The solution would be infinitely better if there was just a bit more detail in the alert information and logging we receive."
"The cloud can be improved."
"I see no room for improvement at the moment."
"The product’s stability could be improved."
"In my experience, Fortinet FortiWeb could improve the intelligent features to acknowledge whether any threat or incident that's running happened. Then give us the ability to escalate it to layer 2 or layer 3 in the network operations."
"Fortinet FortiWeb is not scalable. You'll need more budget to change the hardware."
"The support side of things can be improved."
"New releases and old releases have some bugs, some features do not work as good as we want but every new release the Fortinet team fixes up problems."
"For advanced users, it would be really useful to have access and the ability to manipulate packets. If we can access and manipulate the contents of packets, even encrypted packets... that would be powerful. Since we're looking at packets arriving at our network, we would have the private key to access those packets and their information."
"They can introduce a scaled-down version for the SMB market. It would be very competitive in the environment."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"If one is an extremely expensive product, and ten is cheap, I rate the tool's price as a five."
"The cost is per port and can be expensive but it does include training and support for three years."
"Licensing for this solution is paid on a yearly basis."
"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."
"Previously, for each project, the cost was $800 to $1,000 per application. Now, it's $100 to $120. For some of the applications, there is a 90% reduction, and for some of the applications, there is a 50% reduction. We're paying only $500 to $600."
"Keep a loose margin between your actual bandwidth and the product sizing when using hardware appliances. Only virtual machines are upgradable to larger sizes."
"​The pricing is reasonable."
"The solution is very inexpensive when compared to F5 Advanced WAF and Avi Networks but offers the same benefits."
"The solution is cheaper compared with other solutions. It has a yearly license."
"It's an expensive solution, although there are no additional costs."
"If one is very cheap and ten is very expensive, I rate the product price as three or four."
"The license to use Fortinet FortiWeb is approximately $14,000."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
10%
University
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Government
7%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business47
Midsize Enterprise20
Large Enterprise30
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Cisco Sourcefire SNORT?
The product is inexpensive compared to leading brands such as Palo Alto or Fortinet.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco Sourcefire SNORT?
If one is an extremely expensive product, and ten is cheap, I rate the tool's price as a five. There are some other tools in the market that are more expensive than Cisco. There are no additional c...
What needs improvement with Cisco Sourcefire SNORT?
Cisco offers the Cisco DNA Center, which is a source that provides crucial information for us to monitor performance, and see whether there is any trouble. We are using Cisco DNA center, but again,...
What do you like most about Fortinet FortiWeb?
The WAF profiles has been effective at mitigating web-based threats.
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...
 

Also Known As

Sourcefire SNORT
No data available
 

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, Check Point Software Technologies, Fortinet and others in Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS). Updated: August 2025.
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