We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Firewall vs Palo Alto Network Wildfire based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Based on the parameters we compared, with all other factors being more or less equal, Cisco Secure Firewall comes in a bit ahead of Palo Alto simply because of their stronger support.
"The most valuable feature of this solution is Quota."
"The most important feature, normally for small business customers, is link load balancing."
"The most valuable feature is the interface, which is very user friendly. We are utilizing most of the features, like content filtering. The firewall is powerful."
"Good anti-malware and web filtering features."
"The most valuable feature is the policy routing and application control."
"We purchased Fortinet because of the pricing, its functionality, because it met our requirements, and the total cost of ownership over five years was quite reasonable. In the market, Fortinet is rated quite well."
"Customers want to load balance more than eight lines or six internet lines. FortiGate is the only solution that can accomplish this."
"The solution is easy to configure and maintain remotely."
"The information coming from Talos does a good job... I like the fact that Cisco is working with them and getting the information from them and updating the firewall."
"The product offers good scalability."
"The solution offers very easy configurations."
"The product is quite robust and durable."
"The integration and configuration were pretty straightforward."
"One of the best features is the ease of use. It's also easy to teach new engineers to use the ASA CLI."
"Simple to deploy, stable."
"REST API offering with rich capabilities which makes the product very robust."
"Stability is never a concern."
"What I like about Palo Alto is that it is a complete product, with everything in it."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is how it keeps up-to-date with viruses."
"I like the analysis they apply to the unknown files, and I think they have good technology to use as a sandboxing tool. I didn't find something similar to WildFire in the marketplace."
"The solution has plenty of features."
"The most valuable features are all of the security features in terms of protection and SSL and VPN."
"You have better control because you define apps. You just don't define ports. You define apps, and the apps are monitored in the traffic. It is more specific than the Cisco firewall when it comes to our needs."
"We have found that Palo Alto Networks WildFire is scalable. We currently have six thousand users for the product."
"One of the features that I would like to have is to do with endpoint production, it should be integrated. For example, the firewall gets notified of any kind of forensic event that needs to be done, such as if there is a ransomware attack and how it originated, all those records have to be available from the firewall, which is not."
"I need user-behavior analytics, to find threat scenarios from inside the organization, insider attacks. That would be very helpful for us. In addition, I would like next-generation features for small and medium businesses. These businesses require UTM, all in one product. Fortinet must include it."
"The updates Fortinet provides are sometimes unstable."
"Fortinet FortiGate is a stable solution. However, my issue is the performance only. When I use all the profiles, this affects the performance. From the beginning, I should have had a better sizing of the box."
"The support is the main thing that needs to be improved."
"In the next release, maybe the documentation on how to use this solution could be improved."
"FortiGate should have a better way of detecting and managing the system memory because otherwise if the memory is too low, a system restart is required."
"The improvement is related to logs. Instead of the CLI, we should be able to have more insights into the logs of the firewall in the GUI."
"Most of the time, when I try to run Java, it is not compatible with ASA's current operating systems."
"Cisco provides us with application visibility and control, although it's not a complete solution compared to other vendors. Cisco needs to work on the application behavior side of things, in particular when it comes to the behavior of SSL traffic."
"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."
"it is not very user-friendly for the administration."
"In the next release, I would like to see the VPN and UTM features included."
"The solution's deployment is time-consuming, which should be minimized and made more user-friendly for us."
"Even on a smaller scale, people are finding you need HA pairs, and there's no way that the ASA can do that, at least in the virtual version."
"Cisco Secure Firewall's integration with cloud providers has room for improvement. We could do more in terms of integration, for example, if we had a tag on an instance."
"The only complaint that we receive from our customers is in regards to the price."
"The automation and responsiveness need improvement."
"The data analytical system for deployment needs to improve."
"The cost of the solution is excessively high."
"As a firewall and 360 degrees of security, there needs to be more maturity."
"The system performance degrades after the solution has been deployed for some time. The data that it gives us becomes a little bit slow. When you try to get some data for troubleshooting, it seems like it's working hard to extract that data."
"There are certain changes that I was expecting in the previous version, and I hope that they are soon fixed. All of the problems that I have faced so far have been resolved."
"The only problem with this solution is the cost. It's expensive."
Cisco Secure Firewall is ranked 4th in Firewalls with 404 reviews while Palo Alto Networks WildFire is ranked 3rd in Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) with 58 reviews. Cisco Secure Firewall is rated 8.2, while Palo Alto Networks WildFire is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Cisco Secure Firewall writes "Highlights and helps us catch Zero-day vulnerabilities traveling across our network". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Palo Alto Networks WildFire writes "Good technical support and provides automatic analysis that saves us time in filtering email". Cisco Secure Firewall is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Meraki MX, Sophos XG, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls and Juniper SRX Series Firewall, whereas Palo Alto Networks WildFire is most compared with Juniper SRX Series Firewall, Proofpoint Email Protection, Fortinet FortiSandbox, Check Point SandBlast Network and Zscaler Internet Access.
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