We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Firewall and Fortinet Fortigate based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Based on the parameters we compared, Fortinet Fortigate comes out on top. Its ease of deployment combined with its solid set of features and excellent service and support ratings make it a more desirable solution than Cisco Secure Firewall.
"The interface is user-friendly."
"The content filtering is good."
"The integration and configuration were pretty straightforward."
"It is scalable and stable."
"The product offers good scalability."
"One of the most valuable features is the GUI front end, which is very easy to use. But I'm also a command-line guy, and being able to access the device via command-line for advanced troubleshooting is quite important."
"The user interface, the UI, is excellent on the solution."
"The web interface was easy for me. The configuration is logical, so it's easy to use and easy to understand how to protect, how to open a port, how to manage and how to route a device. That's why I prefer Cisco. It's robust and I never have issues with the hardware. That's why I choose Cisco and not another vendor."
"The notable features that I have found most valuable are that it includes the antivirus, and also IPS, and even SD-WAN."
"Using this product makes the VPN seamless and almost invisible to me in the sense that I don't have to think about it."
"We are very happy with the general bandwidth agility we have seen from one website to another website."
"This solution made it very easy to manage our bandwidth."
"The customization potential is quite impressive."
"All of the features of Fortinet FortiGate are useful and the security protection is good."
"The most valuable feature of Fortinet FortiGate is the simple configuration."
"The web tutor and automatic rules by schedule are good features."
"It needs more tunneling capabilities."
"The Firepower FTD code is missing some old ASA firewalls codes. It's a small thing. But Firepower software isn't missing things that are essential, anymore."
"The solution’s GUI could be better."
"Its configuration through GUI as well as CLI can be improved and made easier."
"The interface for monitoring could be improved to allow better views to make troubleshooting easier."
"The software was very buggy, to the point it had to be removed."
"Report generation is an area that should be improved."
"In terms of functionality, there isn't much to improve. There could be more bandwidth and better interface speed."
"One area for improvement is the performance on the bandwidth demands for smaller devices, as well as better web filtering."
"Fortinet FortiGate can be integrated with different platforms. They have integrations in place, but I can't say they're 100%."
"It would be good if they had fewer updates."
"The logs need to be better. They need to be more visible and easier to access."
"The cloud management and automation capability could be improved."
"The process of configuring firewall rules appears excessively complex."
"It should be more stable. There should be full integration within Fortinet products themselves as well as with other third-party products. Especially when you're not dealing with SIEM and the correlation of the security box, we want Fortinet to be able to share that information with as many other products as it can."
"There can be more security in hybrid implementations. When a customer has a hybrid environment where some parts are in the cloud, we need a consistent security solution for such scenarios."
Cisco Secure Firewall is ranked 4th in Firewalls with 404 reviews while Fortinet FortiGate is ranked 2nd in Firewalls with 306 reviews. Cisco Secure Firewall is rated 8.2, while Fortinet FortiGate 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 Fortinet FortiGate writes "It's a reliable solution that's easy to install and cheaper than competitors ". Cisco Secure Firewall is most compared with Palo Alto Networks WildFire, Netgate pfSense, Meraki MX, Sophos XG and Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, whereas Fortinet FortiGate is most compared with Sophos XG, Netgate pfSense, Meraki MX, Check Point NGFW and WatchGuard Firebox. See our Cisco Secure Firewall vs. Fortinet FortiGate report.
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