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.
"Application inspection, network segmentation, and encrypted traffic detection or encrypted traffic analysis (ETA) are valuable for our customers."
"Easy to deploy in a working environment between servers and users."
"The main thing that I love the most is its policy and objects. Whenever I try to give access to a user, I can create an object via group creation in the object fields. This way, I am not able to enter a user in the policy repeatedly."
"For business purposes, it's a very detailed solution, which is it's greatest benefit, as you can get almost any piece of information you need from the solution. It allows for admins to be able to troubleshoot pretty easily."
"Technical support services are excellent."
"I work with Cisco and other partners, but the Cisco team is the best team in our country. When I call them, they always help us."
"We use the solution for deep packet inspection, Internet Edge functionality, IDS, and IDP."
"One of the nice things about Firepower is that you can set it to discover the environment. If that is happening, then Firepower is learning about every device, software operating system, and application running inside or across your environment. Then, you can leverage the discovery intelligence to get Firepower to select the most appropriate intrusion prevention rules to use for your environment rather than picking one of the base policies that might have 50,000 IPS rules in it, which can put a lot of overhead on your firewall. If you choose the recommendations, as long as you update them regularly, you might be able to get your rule set down to only 1,000 or 1,500, which is a significant reduction in a base rule set. This means that the firewall will give you better performance because there are less rules being checked unnecessarily. That is really useful."
"The user interface is relatively easy. The devices are easy to deploy and figure out when you have experience with other security appliances."
"The most valuable features are simplicity, management, and that it's constantly evolving."
"FortiGate has a very strong unified threat management system."
"The ease of setting the solution up is a valuable aspect for us."
"I really like the captive portal feature for our guest network. It has nice VLAN features in terms of separating our network. The anti-virus is also good."
"Customers want to load balance more than eight lines or six internet lines. FortiGate is the only solution that can accomplish this."
"The most important feature, normally for small business customers, is link load balancing."
"The most valuable feature is the interface, which is very user friendly. We are utilizing most of the features, like content filtering. The firewall is powerful."
"I would like it to have faster deployment times. A typical deployment could take two to three minutes. Sometimes, it depends on the situation. It is better than it was in the past, but it could always use improvement."
"One area where the ASA could be improved is that it doesn't have AMP. When you get an ASA with the Firepower model, ASA with FTD, then you have advanced malware protection."
"The ability to integrate (as options) all-in-one features -- like anti-spam, anti-virus, etc."
"The intelligence has room for improvement. There are some hackers that we haven't seen before and its ability to detect those types of attacks needs to be improved."
"I would like more features in conjunction with other solutions, like Fortinet."
"In NGFW, Cisco should be aligned with the new technology and inspection intelligence because Cisco is far behind in this pipeline."
"We would like to be able to manage a set of firewalls rather than individual firewalls. We haven't really looked into it or yet implemented it, but a single pane of glass would be helpful. We also use another vendor's firewalls, and they have a centralized management infrastructure that we have implemented, which makes it a little bit easier when you're managing lots of firewalls."
"It seems very clunky and slow. I would like to be able to tune it to be a more efficient product."
"The support system could be improved."
"The scalability could be better."
"A lack of integration between our data centers."
"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."
"I would suggest that Fortinet add sandboxing to their solution."
"There are some cloud-based features that could be much more flexible than they currently are."
"The Web-filter in this solution is not very good."
"Its reporting and pricing need 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, WatchGuard Firebox and Check Point NGFW. See our Cisco Secure Firewall vs. Fortinet FortiGate report.
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