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.
"This solution helped us to identify the key areas where we need to focus to block traffic that is malicious to our organization."
"URL filtering is valuable."
"Its in-depth monitoring and analysis help us to make better decisions and policies."
"Logging is great. It will show when it reaches its capacity before it is too late, unless you have bursts of traffic."
"The whole firewall functionality, including firewall policies and IPS policies, is valuable. It has all kinds of functionalities. It has IPS, VPN, and other features. They are doing quite a lot of stuff with their devices."
"Cisco ASA is very strong."
"The content filtering is good."
"Their performance is most valuable."
"The most valuable feature is the ease of use."
"The most valuable feature of Fortinet FortiGate is security. They are known for efficiency and are on the top of Gartner Quadrant reviews. Fortinet FortiGate has an easy-to-use platform with a good graphical interface. The configuration is simple and the solution provides an overall good layer of security."
"We've found the solution to be pretty stable."
"I like several features that this product has, such as antivirus and internet navigation inspection. It is also simple to use."
"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 VDOM, which allows the customer to have multiple firewalls in a single campus."
"Its stability is the most valuable."
"This is a quality product with ok support, and it is better than the competition we've tried."
"It is expensive."
"We are Cisco partners, and when we recommend Cisco FirePower to customers, they always think that FirePower is bad. For a single installation of FirePower, if I have to write about 18 tickets to Cisco, it's a big problem. There was an issue was related to Azure. We had Active Directory in Azure. The clients had to connect to FirePower through Azure. We had a lot of group policies. After two group policies, we had to make groups in Azure, and they had to sign in and sign back. It was a triple-layer authentication, and there was a big problem, so we didn't use it."
"They need to do an overhaul of the management console."
"When we're looking at full-stack visibility, it can be difficult to get the right information out of Firepower."
"This solution could be more granular and user-friendly."
"The solution's deployment is time-consuming, which should be minimized and made more user-friendly for us."
"Third-party integrations could be improved."
"We had an event recently where we had inbound traffic for SIP and we experienced an attack against our SIP endpoint, such that they were able to successfully make calls out... Both CTR, which is gathering data from multiple solutions that the vendor provides, as well as the FMC events connection, did not show any of those connections because there was not a NAT inbound which said either allow it or deny it."
"Technical support is good but the response time could be faster."
"The graphical user interface of Fortinet's FortiGate product does not function well with text-based interfaces."
"The process of configuring firewall rules appears excessively complex."
"I would like reporting to be improved and should offer a lot more tools to monitor the products."
"The inability to scale the FortiAnalyzer to match our growth necessitates the purchase of new hardware."
"There is room for improvement related to the logging and reporting aspect."
"If I had any criticism that I would give FortiGate, it would be that they need to stop changing their logging format. Every time we do a firmware upgrade, it is a massive issue on the SIM. Parsers have to be rebuilt. Even the FortiGate guys came in and said that they don't play well in the sandbox."
"The non-error conserve mode has room for improvement."
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.