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 most beneficial aspect of the Cisco Secure Firewall is the AnyConnect component within the firewall package, which we selected specifically for VPN usage due to its exceptional integration with various third-party devices and applications."
"It is a very user-friendly product."
"The most valuable feature is stability."
"Logging is great. It will show when it reaches its capacity before it is too late, unless you have bursts of traffic."
"They are easy to maintain."
"VPN load balancing has been particularly essential for my connections to integrate via multiple time zones."
"Once configured to suit your needs, these firewalls are rock solid appliances."
"It is a secure product."
"We've found the solution to be pretty stable."
"We use a southern institution that's audited for IT security and the reporting that automatically comes off the unit makes it much easier to meet compliance standards and makes it easier as far as the amount of time that has to be spent to compile that information. If you get your reporting set up correctly when you initially set it up, you just select the one you want and hit print. The auditing trail on it is the best feature."
"Reliability is the best feature. We faced some issues when we were setting it up, but the service, portal, and administration are good."
"Mainly the FortiGate reporting system is very good. It guides us through all the expectations of security. Fortinet provides us all that we need for security. Also, Fortinet FortiGate is a next-generation firewall. It is much more advanced than others."
"Its stability is the most valuable."
"A strong point of FortiGate is that the graphical interface is complete and easy to use, especially if we think there is a list of operations that we are able to perform inside."
"Its user interface is good, and it is always working fine."
"Unified Threat Management (UTM) features."
"The software was very buggy, to the point it had to be removed."
"One feature lacking is superior anti-virus protection, which must be added."
"The user interface is a little clunky and difficult to work with. Some things aren't as easy as they should be."
"Other products are becoming easier to access and configure. They are providing UI interfaces to configure, take backup, synchronize redundant machines, and so on. It is very easy to take backup and upgrade the images in those products. Cisco ASA should have such features. If one redundant machine is getting upgraded, the technology and support should be there to upgrade other redundant machines. In a single window, we should be able to do more in terms of backups, restores, and upgrades."
"Licensing is complex, and I'd like it to be simplified. This is an area for improvement."
"I would like to see them release a patch for ASAv with cross-platform FirePower integration."
"When you make any changes, irrespective of whether they are big or small, Firepower takes too much time. It is very time-consuming. Even for small changes, you have to wait for 60 seconds or maybe more, which is not good. Similarly, when you have many IPS rules and policies, it slows down, and there is an impact on its performance."
"The overall licensing structure could improve to make the solution better."
"They sometimes hide some features and if you want to enable them, you have to go in the CLI, enable the feature and configure it through the CLI. Customers, typically, like everything to be done by the GUI."
"Improvement is needed in the Web Filter quotas to restrict users with allocated quotas."
"There is room for improvement related to the logging and reporting aspect."
"Web security solutions can be improved."
"They've become quite expensive."
"The reports are very basic."
"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."
"One issue that I have had is that sometimes I need to monitor the traffic, so I need to filter it according to the user and which user is using it the most. I experience a bottleneck most of the time, particularly at the peak time when the number of contracts and users are at maximum."
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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