We performed a comparison between Check Point NGFW and Cisco Secure Firewall based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Check Point users are happier with its VPN and with its pricing. However, Cisco Secure users are happier with its service and support.
"I like several features that this product has, such as antivirus and internet navigation inspection. It is also simple to use."
"It can expand easily."
"The license management is very valuable. You can get a new license each year, or you can enroll every two to four years. You can get the logs, and you will get the information on the risk in your network and the entire organization. With this information, you can take action on your actives, computers, or devices. You can bring your own device as an SSE."
"The features that we have found most valuable are the SSL VPN and the User Portal."
"It's very good and very stable for businesses. It works very well."
"The security features that they have are quite good. On top of that, their licensing model is quite nice where they don't charge you anything for the SD-WAN functionality for the firewall."
"Unified Threat Management (UTM) features."
"Reliability is the best feature. We faced some issues when we were setting it up, but the service, portal, and administration are good."
"We have found the central management (Smart Console) to be very helpful in managing all the firewalls and keeping the software/hotfix versions up to date."
"The configuration is one of the best features of this product."
"Making configuring numerous layers of security policies easy to use was always one of the things I liked most about their firewall solution."
"They utilize various gateway features, including Identity as a Service (IDaaS), anti-spam, antivirus, and other security measures, effectively creating a robust defense against a wide range of potential risks."
"The most valuable feature is the central management system through the Security Management Server. Apart from that, the graphical user interface helps us to do things easily."
"It provides a central station where it is very easy to deploy our firewall policy in one click to many firewalls. This is one of the leading perks. It saves time by having one central station because I can deploy the same kind of policy to many firewalls at once."
"The firewall feature and DDoS Protector, when turned on, keep away attacks from the outside. They also prevent users from accessing things on the Internet that they are not supposed to access."
"The simplicity of the access control is the most valuable feature for us. It gives us the ability to easily identify traffic that is either being allowed or denied to our network."
"The feature my customers find the most valuable is the exportability."
"It makes it very easy to have delineated roles and responsibilities between network engineering and network security."
"Right now, Cisco ASA NGFW has given us a lot of improvement. We are planning to move to a new facility and will be a much larger organization."
"The most important feature is the intensive way you can troubleshoot Cisco Firepower Firewalls. You can go to the bit level to see why traffic is not handled in the correct way, and the majority of the time it's a networking issue and not a firewall issue. You can solve any problem without Cisco TAC help, because you can go very deeply under the hood to find out how traffic is flowing and whether it is not flowing as expected. That is something I have never seen with other brands."
"An eight because it's a good security solution. It's more mature than its competitors."
"The stability of Cisco ASA is excellent compared to other products on the market. Because of our customer experience as an integrator company, our clients never report any performance problems. We have a good performance reputation with Cisco ASA."
"The most valuable feature is the access control list (ACL)."
"The feature set is fine and is rarely a problem."
"Fortinet should focus on enhancing the capabilities of FortiGate by consolidating its various products, such as FortiGate Cloud, FortiManager, and FortiAnalyzer."
"They should improve high CPU and memory usage that occurs."
"I'm not sure if it's something that they already have or are developing something, however, we need some dedicated features for container security."
"It needs to improve its ISP load balancing."
"The cloud features and integration could be improved."
"One issue that I have had is that sometimes I need to monitor the traffic, so I need to filter it according to the user and which user is using it the most. I experience a bottleneck most of the time, particularly at the peak time when the number of contracts and users are at maximum."
"When we cluster the two Fortinet FortiGate boxes together we have some issues."
"The graphical user interface of Fortinet's FortiGate product does not function well with text-based interfaces."
"The virtual environment is not stable at all. We have some customers who are using the virtual environment feature, and sometimes it crashes. We have many tickets open and the response is not as good as expected. We have to wait months for a resolution."
"I still don't have access to the reporting service."
"Our SAM rule is also not working to block the IP address which we don't allow in our organization so we have to create a traditional rule base block which is a time-consuming job for me and my team."
"The tool must improve its support."
"Check Point solutions have always been more complex to deploy than their competitors."
"The firewall should be easily deployable and scalable in any major cloud environment and enable an organization’s security team to manage all of its security settings from a single console."
"Including some sort of menu or grouping for VOIP would help the small business area that has limited support."
"It should be user-friendly from an implementation point of view. Its setup is a little bit difficult."
"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."
"The ease of use needs improvement. It is complex to operate the solution. The user interface is not friendly."
"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."
"Implementations require the use of a console. It would help if the console was embedded."
"It can be improved when it comes to monitoring. Today, the logs from the firewalls could be improved a bit more without integrating with other devices."
"The Cisco Firewall UI could be improved."
"The ASA needs to incorporate the different modules you have to integrate to achieve UTM functions, especially for small businesses."
"Multiple WAN connections: Even though you can implement more than one interface to outside connections, it is lacking on load balances, etc."
Check Point NGFW is ranked 5th in Firewalls with 277 reviews while Cisco Secure Firewall is ranked 4th in Firewalls with 404 reviews. Check Point NGFW is rated 8.8, while Cisco Secure Firewall is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Check Point NGFW writes "Good antivirus protection and URL filtering with very good user identification capabilities". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Cisco Secure Firewall writes "Highlights and helps us catch Zero-day vulnerabilities traveling across our network". Check Point NGFW is most compared with Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Sophos XG, Netgate pfSense, Azure Firewall and OPNsense, whereas Cisco Secure Firewall is most compared with Palo Alto Networks WildFire, Netgate pfSense, Meraki MX, Sophos XG and OPNsense. See our Check Point NGFW vs. Cisco Secure Firewall report.
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