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 ASDM (Adaptive Security Device Manager) which is the graphical user interface, works out, and Cisco keeps it current."
"The product is easy to manage and simple. It works with the rest of our Cisco products. You can drop in new ones if you need more performance. The training and documentation provided are good."
"We have multiple secure internal networks linked with our plants. We are from a oil company, so we have multiple plant areas which need to have restricted network access. Therefore, we are using it for restricting access to the plant area."
"The most important feature is its categorization because on the site and social media you are unified in the way they are there."
"One thing I like about the product is the logging features, the way it logs, the way it forwards the logs in Syslog."
"It is a comprehensive suite and complete package."
"Another benefit has been user integration. We try to integrate our policies so that we can create policies based on active users. We can create policies based on who is accessing a resource instead of just IP addresses and ports."
"The clusters in data centers are great."
"FortiGate is very simple to manage and easy to use."
"The solution is easy to configure and maintain remotely."
"From the firewall perspective, the rules and policies are very sufficient and easy to use."
"The most valuable features are the policies, filtering, and configuration."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiGate are it is one of the most mature firewalls in the UTM bundle."
"The stability of the solution is excellent, as it is with other Fortinet products."
"The most valuable feature is the VDOM, which allows the customer to have multiple firewalls in a single campus."
"Fortinet FortiGate's ease of management is the most valuable feature."
"In terms of next-generation capabilities, Cisco is a little behind, and it is way behind the market leaders."
"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."
"Lacks a good graphical user interface."
"It would be better if we could manage all of our firewalls as a set rather than individually. I would like to see a single pane of glass type of option. We also use another vendor's firewalls and they have a centralized management infrastructure that we have implemented. This infrastructure is a bit easier to manage."
"It is a good firewall, though not NextGen."
"This solution could be more granular and user-friendly."
"There is no support here in Georgia. If something goes wrong, support is not always very helpful with the other firewalls or other products."
"As it’s a GenX firewall, expertise for both implementation and troubleshooting the pain points can be a challenge. This could be a concern when companies are thinking about buying this product."
"The updates Fortinet provides are sometimes unstable."
"This product needs to have an analysis feature, rather than having the analysis done through the integration of a different product."
"They can do more tests before they release new versions because I would like to be more assured. We had some experiences where they release something new and great, but some of the old features are disabled or they don't work well, which impacts the product satisfaction. The manufacturer should be able to prove that everything works or not only that it might work. This is applicable to most of the other services, software, and hardware companies. They all should work on this. We cannot trust every new release, such as a beta release, on the first day. We wait for some comments on the forums and from other companies that we know. We always wait a few weeks before we use the updated version. They should also extend the VPN client application, especially for Linux versions. Currently, it has an application for Linux devices, but it doesn't work the way we want to connect to the VPN. They use only the old connection, not the new one. They have VPN client applications for Windows and Mac, but they can add more useful features to better manage the devices and monitor the current health of each device. Such features would be helpful for our company."
"Its reporting capabilities can be improved. It should have some out-of-the-box reporting capabilities and some degree of customization. The basic reporting that it currently has is not sufficient to create more usable reports. It needs some sort of out-of-the-box reporting. They try to make customers purchase FortiAnalyzer for this kind of reporting, which is an additional cost. Other firewall vendors, such as SonicWall and Sophos, provide this sort of reporting without any additional cost."
"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."
"Maybe they could make some features more accessible, such as a way to translate directions between two networks that share the same subnets."
"The solution's framework needs to be frequently updated in order to have a stable solution."
"I would like reporting to be improved and should offer a lot more tools to monitor the products."
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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