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 solution is pretty easy to deploy."
"The ASA has seen significant improvement due to the IPS."
"VPN, firewall, and IDS/IPS allow us to deliver services to meet client needs across various industry verticals."
"The content filtering is good."
"The most valuable features are the provision of internet access, AnyConnect, and VPN capabilities."
"Beats sophisticated cyber attacks with a superior security appliance."
"The most valuable feature is the Intrusion Prevention System."
"We get the Security Intelligence Feeds refreshed every hour from Talos, which from my understanding is that they're the largest intelligence Security Intelligence Group outside of the government."
"The simplicity of the configuration and the stability of the product are most valuable. The VPN concentrator is very useful."
"The most valuable feature is the web filter."
"All of the features of Fortinet FortiGate are useful and the security protection is good."
"Our security improved from being able to put in rules and close off unwanted traffic."
"LinkGreat firewall capabilities"
"The most valuable feature of Fortinet FortiGate is load balancing. It can provide central management and VPNA. Additionally, it has enhanced our security environment."
"The solution is very user-friendly."
"We have been able to offer several services to customers in a single box."
"Cisco still has a lot of work to do. You can convert an ASA over to a Firepower, but the competitors, like Palo Alto and Juniper, are coming in. And believe it or not, they are a little bit more intuitive. Cisco has a little bit more work to do. They're playing catch up."
"Other firewalls, upgrading is a very easy task; from the graphical user interface, you just need to import the firmware versions into it and install it. In this firewall, you need to have a third-party solution in both. It's a process. It's a procedure, a hard procedure, actually, so there is no straightforward procedure for upgrading."
"We don't have any serious problems. The firewall models that we have are quite legacy, and they have slower performance. We are currently investigating the possibility of migrating to next-generation firewalls."
"Nowadays, nobody is in the office, so I need to figure out how to put the firewall outside. If I could have a centralized firewall that also receives information from external locations, like peoples' home offices, that would help us consolidate everything into one appliance."
"We have encountered problems when implementing new signatures and new versions on our firewall. Sometimes, there is a short outage of our services, and we have not been able to understand what's going on. This is an area for improvement, and it would be good to have a way to monitor and understand why there is an outage."
"The graphical interface should be improved to make the configuration easier, to do things with a single click."
"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."
"The Cisco Firewall UI could be improved."
"Fortinet FortiGate needs to improve to be on par with its competitors, such as Palo Alto and Sophos. They are the market leaders. Fortinet FortiGate needs to improve its capabilities. However, we are happy with Fortinet FortiGate."
"We sometimes have issues with FortiGate's routing table in the latest firmware update. We had to downgrade the device because our customers complained about bugs."
"I would like to have logs, monitoring, and reporting for a month without extra fees."
"There were quite a few problems with the stability of the system."
"Price, of course, can always be more competitive or better."
"One area for improvement is the performance on bandwidth demands for smaller devices, as well as better web filtering."
"With FortiGate, the main complaint that I have heard is about the technical support."
"Backup can be improved."
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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We monitor all Firewalls reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.