We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Firewall and WatchGuard Firebox based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: The two solutions are very comparable. WatchGuard Firebox received slightly better ratings because it is easier to deploy than Cisco Secure Firewall.
"The SD-WAN is the most valuable feature."
"The interface is very user-friendly and I like it very much."
"We are very happy with the general bandwidth agility we have seen from one website to another website."
"The multi-tenancy feature is most valuable. It integrates very well with FortiManager and FortiAnalyzer."
"The customization potential is quite impressive."
"It's very good and very stable for businesses. It works very well."
"Offers good security and filtering."
"The SD-WAN feature is the most valuable. This feature evolved from link load balancing. It has helped us in terms of our uptime and privatizing applications whenever we experience an outage. The SD-WAN feature has been a plus for us. Two-factor authentication has allowed us to add more users in terms of remote working. We have two-factor authentication for remote workers to authenticate them before they get on the network."
"It has a good security level. It is a next-generation firewall. It can protect from different types of attacks. We have enabled IPS and IDS."
"I have access to the web version of Cisco Talos to see the reputation of IP addresses. I find this very helpful. It provides important information for my company to obtain the reputation of IP addresses. The information in Talos is quite complete."
"Cybersecurity resilience has been paramount. Because there is a threat of losing everything if ransomware or another sort of attack were to happen, the cybersecurity resilience has been top-notch."
"Once configured to suit your needs, these firewalls are rock solid appliances."
"If you have a solution that is creating a script and you need to deploy many implementations, you can create a script in the device and it will be the same for all. After that, you just have to do the fine tuning."
"The stability of the solution is very good. We can see that it gets even better with every release."
"Application inspection, network segmentation, and encrypted traffic detection or encrypted traffic analysis (ETA) are valuable for our customers."
"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."
"The most valuables feature of WatchGuard Firebox are the VPNs, and web filtering where we can stop users from going to malicious sites."
"Their support is excellent, and the stability is very good."
"The ease of use is most valuable. You can quickly train someone who hasn't seen a firewall in life. You can get people up to speed, and in a few months, they are able to manage this product very easily. It is a very user-friendly, scalable, and stable product. Its price is also spot-on."
"What I found most valuable in WatchGuard Firebox is that it's a functional platform that works, and each of its features works well. The solution also has good reporting and dashboard capabilities. I also find the overall performance of WatchGuard Firebox great."
"They've done a lot of work with their SD-WAN, which we do use, to have our old internet service with our new internet service. If anything goes down on a particular interface, I can have different rules applied. Most of my users don't even know when our primary internet goes down anymore... I don't have to be here to do anything to switch it to our backup internet or to switch it back."
"Firebox operates effectively in the background, blocking potential threats without a need for constant monitoring."
"[A] valuable feature would be the branch office. We have five offices throughout the United States, and it coordinates the connections of those offices."
"The most valuable feature of WatchGuard Firebox is the VPN. It's easy to connect to the VPN."
"Compared to some other products, the DLP is not at par for the moment."
"The initial setup and configuration are not intuitive and require training."
"In the next release, I would like to see the interface simplified to be more user-friendly."
"The debugging and troubleshooting has room for improvement."
"I would like to see better pricing in the next release, as well as a simplification of the installation."
"They are doing good, but they can improve the distributor assignment. The availability of the product and the timeline of delivery are the main things. The distribution should be swift, and the distributor should not reach out to end customers directly. They should work as a distributor. There should also be one more local distributor. Currently, there is only one distributor in Pakistan, and the rest of them are in UAE. It is difficult to work with only one distributor. Sometimes, you don't get along with the same distributor, and that's why they should have one more distributor. Their licensing should also be improved. The activation or renewal of the product should be done from the date of renewal, not from the date on which the license expired."
"We had some issues in the beginning while setting it up, but after doing the firmware update, it is working fine."
"Bandwidth usage in reporting could be improved for Fortinet FortiGate."
"It should have an additional “operating mode”, like a “candidate configuration mode”, where you would have the possibility to test the changes you are going to implement and also the possibility to validate these changes."
"When we first got it, we were doing individual configuring. Now, there is a way to manage from one location."
"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."
"Cisco's inspection visibility could be better."
"If the implementation was easier, it would be a lot better for us."
"I don't have any specific improvements to recommend. However, when you compare the throughput of a Cisco firewall to the competitors, especially Fortinet, what you find is that Cisco has lagged a little bit behind in terms of firewall throughput, especially for the price that you pay for that throughput."
"The operation of the ASA is good but the problem is that whenever you require an upgrade, there are multiple pieces of software that you have to upgrade. Extensive planning is required, because if you upgrade one piece of the software it has to be compatible with the others as well. You always need to check the compatibility metrics."
"The license system is also good but it's not very impressive. It's a very regular licensing system. They call it a smart license which means that your device will connect to the internet. This is a little bit of a headache for some customers. It doesn't make the customer happy because most of the customers prefer not to connect their firewall or system to the internet."
"If they could make the traffic monitoring easier that would be great. I don't use it that frequently, but I would like to see some improvements in the ease of use of that component, so it makes more sense. I know it's a technical component so there's going to be some difficulty trying to make that easier."
"It's sometimes not easy to understand and can require specialist assistance."
"We use WatchGuard to manage our failover for internet. If a primary internet goes down, it does a failover to the secondary the internet. However, what it doesn't do so well is that if the primary internet has a lot of latency but it's not completely down, it doesn't do a failover to the backup in a timely manner."
"I believe there is a need for additional measures to connect mobile devices securely to the Firebox router."
"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."
"In terms of what could be improved, I would say their web blocker feature. It is still quite a confusing setup, especially when you want to filter out a particular category for granularity. For example, you do not want to filter Facebook but you do want to filter Facebook games only. It can be done, but the process to do it is very confusing."
"The software in it could be a bit more friendly for an amateur user. I look at it and don't understand what half the stuff is. Looking at the interface, it is all mumbo-jumbo to me. It's not a simple interface. You have to be an IT guy to understand it. It is not for your average person to use, then walk away from it. It is much more entailed."
"The product's technical support services need improvement."
Cisco Secure Firewall is ranked 4th in Firewalls with 404 reviews while WatchGuard Firebox is ranked 13th in Firewalls with 79 reviews. Cisco Secure Firewall is rated 8.2, while WatchGuard Firebox 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 WatchGuard Firebox writes "Offers a streamlined deployment, intuitive interface and robust security features". Cisco Secure Firewall is most compared with Palo Alto Networks WildFire, Netgate pfSense, Meraki MX, Sophos XG and Sophos UTM, whereas WatchGuard Firebox is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Sophos XG, OPNsense, SonicWall TZ and Sophos UTM. See our Cisco Secure Firewall vs. WatchGuard Firebox report.
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