"The dashboard is the most important thing. It provides good visibility and makes management easy. Firepower also provides us with good application visibility and control."
"One of the most valuable features of Firepower 7.0 is the "live log" type feature called Unified Event Viewer. That view has been really good in helping me get to data faster, decreasing the amount of time it takes to find information, and allowing me to fix problems faster. I've found that to be incredibly valuable because it's a lot easier to get to some points of data now."
"You do not have to do everything through a command line which makes it a lot easier to apply rules."
"The content filtering is good."
"It's got the capabilities of amassing a lot of throughput with remote access and VPNs."
"Firepower has reduced our firewall operational costs by about 25 percent."
"The main thing that I love the most is its policy and objects. Whenever I try to give access to a user, I can create an object via group creation in the object fields. This way, I am not able to enter a user in the policy repeatedly."
"The deep packet inspection is useful, but the most useful feature is application awareness. You can filter on the app rather than on a static TCP port."
"Very reliable solution with good scalability and straightforward implementation."
"Five out of five ROI."
"The installation is easy, we have not had any complaints from our customers."
"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 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."
"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."
"I like that this product has very few issues."
"This product offers great protection using the default settings."
"The set up was quite straightforward and we handled it in-house. It took a few hours to deploy the product."
"Policy VPN, site-to-site VPN, traffic monitoring, anti-spam filters, and all other advanced features are valuable."
"It saves us time in the respect that we now have the template built for it so we can get in and get it done. We've had much less problem supporting Voice over IP technologies from different companies. Because our client base has grown over the years, we're probably saving 20 to 30 man-hours a month now that we've got this on a good stable level."
"An area of improvement for this solution is the console visualization."
"Web filtering needs improvement because sometimes the URL is miscategorized."
"The intelligence has room for improvement. There are some hackers that we haven't seen before and its ability to detect those types of attacks needs to be improved."
"My team tells me that other solutions such as Fortinet and Palo Alto are easier to implement."
"The configuration in Firepower Management Center is very slow. Deployment takes two to three minutes. You spend a lot of time on modifications. Whereas, in FortiGate, you press a button, and it takes one second."
"In a future release, it would be ideal if they could offer an open interface to other security products so that we could easily connect to our own open industry standard."
"There is limited data storage on the appliance itself. So, you need to ship it out elsewhere in order for you to store it. The only point of consideration is around that area, basically limited storage on the machine and appliance. Consider logging it elsewhere or pushing it out to a SIEM to get better controls and manipulation over the data to generate additional metrics and visibility."
"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."
"SSL VPN license cost is not cheap."
"They are working on cloud-based options. However, they do not have the options fully functional in their solution at this time."
"I would like to have a little more control over access points and the ability to see the bandwidth that is passing through a specific access point. We are not able to see that. We can see what traffic is passing through the Firebox itself, but we can't identify if it is coming from a particular access point or not."
"I don't think I can get a full-blown DNS client from it. I've been trying to have DNS services. It has forwarding, but I don't get the services of a full DNS client. My main difficulty with it is that I can't run a complete service. I need NTP. I need DNS. I need DHCP for my domain, but I only get forwarding. As far as I can tell, I don't get caching and the kinds of reporting and registration needed to host a DNS for a domain. I have to have a separate solution for that."
"The only downside is that it is missing an API, that you can use to easily collect information from it."
"Its documentation could be improved. Sometimes, you need to search a bit longer to find what you are looking for."
"The way Secure Sign-On authentication is happening needs to be improved. When the Secure Sign-On portal is turned on, anybody who comes into the campus, whether he or she is a staff member or a guest, has to go past the initial portal. One of the shortcomings is the username. It shouldn't allow permutations or combinations with upper or lower cases. For example, when there is a username abc, it shouldn't allow ABC or Abc. It should not allow the same username, but currently, two separate people can go in. Therefore, its authentication or validation should be improved, and the case sensitiveness should be picked up. If I have restricted someone to two devices, they shouldn't be able to use different combinations of the same username and get into the third or fourth device. It shouldn't allow different combinations of alphabets to be used to log in."
"I haven’t dug deeply into the reporting features yet or if they are working well. However, I have generated several reports and there was too much unnecessary information, in comparison with the reporting features in the Sophos firewall. Sophos' reporting is more readable and easier to configure."
"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."
More Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall Pricing and Cost Advice →
Hillstone E-Series is ranked 27th in Firewalls with 2 reviews while WatchGuard Firebox is ranked 3rd in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 20 reviews. Hillstone E-Series is rated 9.0, while WatchGuard Firebox is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Hillstone E-Series writes "Efficient call processor and overall amazing ROI". On the other hand, the top reviewer of WatchGuard Firebox writes "Competent, basic front-end; the ports that I have assigned appear to be unattainable to outsiders". Hillstone E-Series is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate, Sophos XG, Hillstone T-Series, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls and Palo Alto Networks WildFire, whereas WatchGuard Firebox is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate, pfSense, Sophos XG, Meraki MX and Stormshield Network Security. See our Hillstone E-Series vs. WatchGuard Firebox report.
We monitor all Firewalls reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
