We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Firewall and Zscaler Cloud Firewall based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Firewalls solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
"Their interface is very easy to use, it is without bugs."
"It's an easy solution to set up."
"The main benefit is the grouping of our security monitoring."
"We use the filtering feature the most. It has filtering and inbuilt securities. We can create customized rules to define which users can access a particular type of site. We can create policies inside the firewall."
"FortiGate has a very strong unified threat management system."
"The most valuable feature is the FortiManager for centralized management."
"Fortinet has a very good solution for Secure SD-WAN. One very good feature is that they have robust and simple FortiOS through which they provide all solutions. That's their strength. There's not much complexity involved with the Secure SD-WAN solution of Fortinet as compared to Cisco's solution, which has a lot of flexibility but complexity also comes with that flexibility."
"The most valuable features are that it is very simple to configure and to manage."
"I work with Cisco and other partners, but the Cisco team is the best team in our country. When I call them, they always help us."
"One of the best features is the ease of use. It's also easy to teach new engineers to use the ASA CLI."
"ASA integrates with FirePOWER, IPS functionality, malware filtering, etc. This functionality wasn't there in the past. With its cloud architecture, Cisco can filter traffic at the engine layer. Evasive encryptions can be entered into the application, like BitTorrent or Skype. This wasn't possible to control through a traditional firewall."
"The TAC is always very helpful. We pay for Tier 1 support, so we get whatever we need from them. They always give us a solution. If they can't give us an answer that day, they get back to us within at least 24 hours with a solution or fix. I have never had a problem with the TAC. I would rate them as 10 out of 10."
"The most valuable feature is the access control list (ACL)."
"Signature-based detection; user-defined signatures with regular expressions; integrated URL and content filtering; custom URL categories filtering."
"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."
"Its ability to work with the traffic."
"It helps a lot of companies to reduce their downtime. Also, It helps businesses in terms of being secured and protected from any threats."
"Once you have Zscaler running you have access to configure it however you want."
"It is a stable solution."
"The scalability is okay. We have around 2200 people using this solution."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"Most of the features that Zscaler has to offer, we will deploy."
"I like the ease of deployment and its flexibility. We don't need to deal with license, quotes, procurement, delivery, and installation. Everything is software-based, and it's very easy to operate."
"Zscaler provides effective protection against various cyber threats ensuring a safe environment"
"It would be nice if FortiGate incorporated some built-in endpoint protection features. I would also like a built-in SOC dashboard for managing multiple Fortinet firewalls."
"The main aspect of FortiGate that could be improved is load balancing. Our management team does not want to buy another appliance for only load balancing."
"There is one big configuration file with no separations for the unique VDOMs. Maybe they could separate individual VDOM configuration files with the root VDOM configuration file referencing the individual VDOM config files."
"I use the FortiGate 60D model and realized the 300Mbps bandwidth limitation. Because it is a product that offers many services, I think it could have greater bandwidth capacity."
"The solution could be more user friendly."
"FortiGate support could do some improvements on their IPv6 configuration. Right now it's still in the very early stage for utilizing in an enterprise level network environment."
"The solution lacks multi-language support."
"They've become quite expensive."
"The Cisco ASA device needs overall improvement, as configurations alone do not completely secure my network."
"This product is managed using the Firepower Management Center (FMC), but it would be better if it also supported the command-line interface (CLI)."
"Initial setup was fairly complex."
"Sometimes my customers say that Cisco Firewalls are a bit more difficult compared to Fortigate or Palo Alto. There is complexity in the configuration and the GUI could be improved."
"I would like it to be easier to work with and have a better user interface. It is not straightforward. You need to know the Cisco command-line interface."
"The price and SD-WAN capabilities are the areas that need improvement."
"The ability to better integrate with other tools would be an improvement."
"Report generation is an area that should be improved."
"Because it's on cloud, it doesn't allow application of extra settings."
"Certain criteria need to be met if you want to scale this solution."
"They do not provide a few components that are fundamental to differentiate the products"
"The issue right now is probably that Zscaler is not providing web browser isolation. Another solution, Menlo, offers this. For one customer, we had to send traffic to Menlo to do the isolation for us. It was requested by the customer so that they could integrate any iframe. Zscaler needs to add this type of feature in their next release."
"Pricing is a challenge."
"It would be better if they improved their policy, package visibility, and flexibility while we're creating rules for inspection. It could also be cheaper or more things could be included in the basic package. In the next release, I would like better coverage in the Asia Pacific region and better quality of service."
"When it comes to customer support, there is room for improvement in Zscaler's service."
"There are some areas it could improve when it comes to blocking, we have to block some things manually. For example, if we block a top-level domain we have seen that the new IPs come through, the IPs are not blocked. There should be some more granular way of doing it. My only request is if you're blocking something at a top level, the sub-level sub-domains and all those other IPs should be blocked too automatically."
Cisco Secure Firewall is ranked 4th in Firewalls with 404 reviews while Zscaler Cloud Firewall is ranked 26th in Firewalls with 15 reviews. Cisco Secure Firewall is rated 8.2, while Zscaler Cloud Firewall 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 Zscaler Cloud Firewall writes "A highly stable and comprehensive cloud security and access solution". Cisco Secure Firewall is most compared with Palo Alto Networks WildFire, Netgate pfSense, Meraki MX, Sophos XG and Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, whereas Zscaler Cloud Firewall is most compared with Azure Firewall, OPNsense, Cisco Multicloud Defense, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls and Sophos XG. See our Cisco Secure Firewall vs. Zscaler Cloud Firewall report.
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