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.
"What I like about Cisco is the security zone. By default when you configure it, it gives you a security zone, which other firewalls don't have."
"It is extremely stable I would say — at least after you deploy it."
"Collaboration with other Cisco products such as ISE and others is the most valuable feature."
"It's got the capabilities of amassing a lot of throughput with remote access and VPNs."
"It joins all branches and permits employees to work outside their offices, but everything is based on high securities standards (PCI compliance)."
"They wanted to leverage something which is equivalent that can give them the next gen features like application awareness and intrusion protection. So that is a major reason they were looking forward to this. The original ASA firewall did not have these features. This was the major reason the customer moved on to Cisco Firepower Threat Defense (FTD). Now they can go ahead and leverage those functionalities."
"URL filtering is valuable."
"IPSec Tunnel and AnyConnect (of course), the context awareness was a good feature, but clumsy at the beginning. I think it's better now."
"The secure web gateway module and the application control module are valuable. HA operations are very easy."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiGate are the rules and quality of service."
"It has improved our organization with control data."
"One of the valuable features is a standardized OS."
"The SD-WAN is the most valuable feature."
"Fortigate is very scalable to serve our customers' needs. We have scaled already from fifty to more than a hundred instances of Fortinet FortiGate. Around 20 staff are required for deployment and maintenance, mostly engineers."
"A strong point of FortiGate is the graphical interface is complete and easy to use."
"Fortinet FortiGate's reliability is valuable."
"If they want to add better features to the current Cisco ASA, they can start by increasing the encryption. That is the only thing they need to improve."
"The dashboard can be improved."
"In my experience, a number of engineers get tunnel vision with devices. This is exacerbated by vendors fostering a silo mentality in disciplines."
"It can be improved when it comes to monitoring. Today, the logs from the firewalls could be improved a bit more without integrating with other devices."
"REST API stability needs improvement in order for customizing resource allocation available to the user rather than just being there transparently. This way users can customize REST API and tailor it to their needs."
"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."
"It is slowly not supported and other vendors are a few years ahead of Cisco in development."
"Its configuration through GUI as well as CLI can be improved and made easier."
"There were quite a few problems with the stability of the system."
"It should have a better pricing plan. It is too expensive. It should also have a more granular view of the attack. I don't have FortiAnalyzer, and it is difficult for me to have a complete view when there is an attack on my server."
"Some of the features in the graphical user interface do not work, which requires that we used the command-line-interface."
"The pricing could be reduced or include the first year warranty."
"The cloud features can be improved."
"The integration with third-party tools may be something that they should work on."
"Fortinet FortiGate is a firewall solution and once it's deployed, you can rest assured that your system is secure."
"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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