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.
"My confidence continues to build upon using Cisco firewalls."
"The high-availability and remote VPN features are most valuable."
"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."
"The clusters in data centers are great."
"The initial setup was not complex."
"ASDM provides GUI for configurations. The ASDM has made configuring ASA easy. No need to memorize CLI commands."
"If we look at the Cisco ASA without Firepower, then one of the most valuable features is the URL filtering."
"It is much better than most of the other firewalls that I have worked with."
"It's great for capturing the traffic and troubleshooting it."
"It can expand easily."
"The most valuable features are that it is very simple to configure and to manage."
"The product is easy to use and is stable. The SV1 functionality is a benefit."
"FortiGate is on the cheaper end, and it offers good value."
"Its stability is the most valuable."
"The most valuable features are the possibility of having one fabric for switching on security."
"Fortinet has a very good solution for Secure SD-WAN. One very good feature is that they have robust and simple FortiOS through which they provide all solutions. That's their strength. There's not much complexity involved with the Secure SD-WAN solution of Fortinet as compared to Cisco's solution, which has a lot of flexibility but complexity also comes with that flexibility."
"The only con that I have really seen with it is the reporting structure. FirePOWER is good. It has been a great help because, before that, it was not good at all."
"I believe that the current feature set of the device is very good and the only thing that Cisco should work on is improving the user experience with the device."
"They should work on making it a little more intuitive for users and not quite as complex. Still, it's a good product."
"I would like to see the inclusion of more advanced antivirus features in the next release of this solution."
"It's mainly the UI and the management parts that need improvement. The most impactful feature when you're using it is the user interface and the user experience."
"There are some limitations with SSL. Regarding the security assessment for the ISO 27000 standard, there are certain features that Cisco needs to scale up. Not all products support it, so you need to be slightly careful, especially on the site track."
"It will be nice if they had what you traditionally would use a web application scanner for. If the solution could take a deeper look into HTTP and HTTPS traffic, that would be nice."
"There are always vulnerabilities that come up and there was one in early 2018 but this was patched with software updates."
"My only complaint about FortiGate is a lack of QinQ VLAN tunneling. I haven't found this feature in any Fortinet product. You can do this on all Cisco routers, including the smaller models. However, QinQ isn't available on the biggest, most expensive Fortinet units. They still don't have that. I think now we're on software version 6.0, and they still haven't found a solution for QinQ. It isn't a dealbreaker, but that's my main complaint."
"Fortinet already improved FortiGate, but in the current market, many brands of security devices have improved together. Fortinet still needs to catch up with market standards. Fortinet is lacking in features in comparison to competitors."
"Fortinet FortiGate can improve by integrating the web application firewall and the DDoS protection part of the solution. Having a WAF feature, web application firewall, and proxy together would be a good benefit."
"Fortinet Fortigate could benefit by simplifying some of their processes."
"The feature which gives us a lot of pain is ASIC architecture."
"There were quite a few problems with the stability of the system."
"Fortinet FortiGate needs to improve the logging and reporting. Additionally, the next-generation application's policies should be improved. When they were released they had bugs."
"They should offer special pricing to premium partners and customers."
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.
See our list of best Firewalls vendors.
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.