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 firepower sensors have been great; they do a good job of dropping unwanted traffic."
"It's a flexible solution and is well-known in the community."
"The stability of the product is good."
"At this point, we find that this product has high productivity and high availability and there is no need for improvement."
"The fact that we can use Firepower Management Center gives us visibility. It allows us to see and manage the traffic that is going through the network."
"VPN load balancing has been particularly essential for my connections to integrate via multiple time zones."
"The security features are the most valuable. My customers find the security products very useful because nowadays there are many threats from the internet and other malicious users. The security products really help."
"You do not have to do everything through a command line which makes it a lot easier to apply rules."
"The UTM feature is quite good. FortiAP is easy to deploy because both Fortigate and FortiAP are under the same brand. Otherwise, you need to do more work on the configuration."
"It has improved our security capabilities."
"The simplicity of the configuration and the stability of the product are most valuable. The VPN concentrator is very useful."
"It's very good and very stable for businesses. It works very well."
"It enables our organization to become more productive. Also, it protects our NEtWare from viruses and malware."
"The technical support is great."
"The solution is extremely reliable."
"What's most important is the ease of use."
"Cisco suffers from some integration issues with other products... There is a problem with the Cisco Catalyst Switches in terms of assembling bursts and having them interact properly with the Cisco Firepower."
"I wouldn't give them a ten. Nobody is perfect. I'll give them a nine because they help me with any issues I've had."
"When comparing the graphical interface of this solution to other vendors it is more difficult to configure. There is a higher learning curve for administrators in this solution."
"This is an older product and has reached end-of-life."
"A feature that would allow me to load balance among multiple ISPs, especially since we have deployed it as a perimeter firewall, would be a great addition."
"It can probably provide a holistic view of different appliances because many customers do not have only one brand, besides the traditional SNMP protocols, to cover all their devices. There are some specific requirements in terms of configurations or actions that sometimes have to be done in a very manual way because of the different versions or brands in a customer's infrastructure. It could also have some additional analytics capabilities. It has some very interesting ways to monitor the traffic and identify false positives from the architecture and the environment. It would be good if there is a way to patch with some other industry-specific solutions and synchronize some of the information, such as what other customers experience in their operations and probably share some additional information that could be leveraged or shared among the industry. Such information would be something interesting to see. It could have AI capabilities related to how the appliances could benefit from learning the current environment and different exposures."
"The artificial intelligence and machine learning (behavioral based threat detection), which I can this will be coming out in another year, these are what we need now."
"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."
"Fortinet FortiGate could improve by having a frequent ask questions(FAQ) area for people to receive quick answers to popular questions. Additionally, it would be beneficial to have an SMS notification feature. For example, if you cannot access your email you could receive an SMS message."
"The solution could be more evenly structured."
"The central management for the FortiGate Fortinet Firewall needs improvement. They have the manager to do the essential management for both SD-WAN and for the security policy. They should also improve the SD-WAN function."
"There are some cloud-based features that could be much more flexible than they currently are."
"We would like to see better pricing."
"While FortiGate is cheaper than most other solutions, we're seeing increased license renewal costs. Most of our clients are asking for more significant discounts because the price is going up."
"There aren't really any negative aspects to discuss."
"MTBF: Hardware failure is more common when compared to SonicWall or Cisco ASA."
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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