"If configured, Firepower provides us with application visibility and control."
"The integration of network and workload micro-segmentation helps a lot to provide unified segmentation policies across east-west and north-south traffic. One concrete example is with Cisco ACI for the data center. Not only are we doing what is called a service graph on the ACI to make sure that we can filter traffic east-west between two endpoints in the same network, but when we go north-south or east-west, we can then leverage what we have on the network with SGTs on Cisco ISE. Once you build your matrix, it is very easy to filter in and out on east-west or north-south traffic."
"I have integrated it for incidence response. If there is a security event, the Cisco firewall will automatically block the traffic, which is valuable."
"A good intrusion prevention system and filtering."
"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."
"It's got the capabilities of amassing a lot of throughput with remote access and VPNs."
"The most valuable feature would be ASDM. The ability to go in, visualize and see the world base in a clear and consistent manner is very powerful."
"Its Snort 3 IPS has better flexibility as far as being able to write rules. This gives me better granularity."
"The only firewall able to monitor traffic from a CCTV network. Can detect unauthorized devices plugged into the network, which standard firewalls can't do."
"It has been stable so far."
"I think cloud management is key. The cloud management and support are the two things that make the product great."
"Meraki MX offers advanced filtration options, plus it behaves like a router and a firewall at the same time."
"Meraki makes it easy to be secure and know where the holes are to fix them. We have been fixing anything that we have ever found for 20 years. We keep up-to-date with firmware upgrades. We just try to stay on top of everything for security, like maintaining updates and getting rid of old systems. I feel like we're on top of it."
"The technical support people from Meraki are brilliant."
"I love the simplicity of Meraki MX — specifically, the simplicity of the dashboard."
"Point-to-point VPNs can dynamically follow IP changes with no need for static IPs."
"Dual WAN connections are greatly simplified and point-to-point VPNs automatically connect regardless of what WAN connection is active."
"It is easy to manage, which is one of the most important things for us. It is also flexible, stable, and scalable."
"Report generation is an area that should be improved."
"They could improve by having more skilled, high-level engineers that are available around the clock. I know that's an easy thing to say and a hard thing to do."
"I'm not a big fan of the FDM (Firepower Device Manager) that comes with Firepower. I found out that you need to use the Firepower Management Center, the FMC, to manage the firewalls a lot better. You can get a lot more granular with the configuration in the FMC, versus the FDM that comes out-of-the-box with it. FDM is like Firepower for dummies."
"The only drawback of the user interface is when it comes to policies. When you open it and click on the policies, you have to move manually left and right if you want to see the whole field within the cell. Checkpoint has a very detailed user interface."
"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."
"It would be great if some of the load times were faster."
"Its interface is sometimes is a little bit slow, and it can be improved. When you need to put your appliance in failover mode, it is a little difficult to do it remotely because you need to turn off the appliance in Cisco mode. In terms of new features, it would be good to have AnyConnect VPN with Firepower. I am not sure if it is available at the moment."
"This product is managed using the Firepower Management Center (FMC), but it would be better if it also supported the command-line interface (CLI)."
"They have a very good technical support team, but I think there are some communication issues due to language differences."
"Licensing is not cheap."
"The security is not as strong as it could be"
"The whole Cisco Meraki range requires easier access for cameras. For a security center, it would be helpful to have easier access to cameras through the portal. Its licensing cost could also be better."
"In general, the SD-WAN feature needs to be improved. The load sharing and load balancing of the traffic should be improved. I have had some problems with these features in the past."
"From the improvement perspective, we need more monitoring capabilities. We want to have full-based access visibility, such as, what is happening when something is trying to reach and it is denying. We cannot see some parts of it. The integration of active directory with this product is not very fruitful. It has some bugs or lacks in the functionality of active directory integration. We are unable to identify where exactly and whether it has really applied our policy."
"Meraki tech support staff have a lot more visibility into your network than you do, which is frustrating at times. I understand the approach is to keep the dashboard easier to understand. This will frustrate more advanced users at times."
"We have been having a problem with the VPN. When the energy goes down and is back again, the VPN link doesn't get established. We have to manually turn off the modems and other pieces of equipment and manually establish the VPN. It has been around one month since we have been having this problem, and we don't have enough support from Meraki to solve the problem."
"You can only have one tunnel in the whole infrastructure — one tunnel with one device."
"You cannot use switching behaviors as you see on the Meraki switch."
More Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall Pricing and Cost Advice →
Hillstone T-Series is ranked 32nd in Firewalls with 2 reviews while Meraki MX is ranked 2nd in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 15 reviews. Hillstone T-Series is rated 7.0, while Meraki MX is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Hillstone T-Series writes "Customizable reports with advanced threat protection". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Meraki MX writes "Makes it easy to stay on top of everything for security". Hillstone T-Series is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate, Hillstone E-Series, Cisco ASA Firewall, Sangfor NGAF and Juniper SRX, whereas Meraki MX is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate, Cisco ASA Firewall, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Sophos XG and SonicWall NSa.
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.
