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.
"One of the best features is the ease of use. It's also easy to teach new engineers to use the ASA CLI."
"The technical support is excellent. I would rate it as 10 out of 10. When there has been an issue, we have had a good response from them."
"The feature set is fine and is rarely a problem."
"If configured, Firepower provides us with application visibility and control."
"The most valuable features of this solution are the integrations and IPS throughput."
"On the network side, where you create your rules for allowing traffic — what can come inside and what can go out — that works perfectly, if you know what you want to achieve. It protects you."
"The integration of network and workload micro-segmentation helps a lot to provide unified segmentation policies across east-west and north-south traffic. One concrete example is with Cisco ACI for the data center. Not only are we doing what is called a service graph on the ACI to make sure that we can filter traffic east-west between two endpoints in the same network, but when we go north-south or east-west, we can then leverage what we have on the network with SGTs on Cisco ISE. Once you build your matrix, it is very easy to filter in and out on east-west or north-south traffic."
"It is extremely stable I would say — at least after you deploy it."
"We use a southern institution that's audited for IT security and the reporting that automatically comes off the unit makes it much easier to meet compliance standards and makes it easier as far as the amount of time that has to be spent to compile that information. If you get your reporting set up correctly when you initially set it up, you just select the one you want and hit print. The auditing trail on it is the best feature."
"Its user interface is good, and it is always working fine."
"The product is very stable, easy to troubleshoot, and configure, so it has reduced the time it takes for support."
"The security on offer is very good."
"This version is stable. I don't have any issues with this solution, in our environment, it works well."
"The most valuable feature of Fortinet FortiGate is security. They are known for efficiency and are on the top of Gartner Quadrant reviews. Fortinet FortiGate has an easy-to-use platform with a good graphical interface. The configuration is simple and the solution provides an overall good layer of security."
"It's very easy to configure."
"We are a visual effects company, and there have been a number of high profile security issues in our industry. This has brought us to a higher standard of security, which our clients are very keen on these days."
"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."
"Most users do not have awareness of this product's functionality and features. Cisco should do something to make them aware of them. That would be quite excellent and useful to organizations that are still using legacy data-center-security products."
"The initial setup was complex."
"The management of the firewalls could be improved because there are a lot of bugs."
"I would like to see the inclusion of more advanced antivirus features in the next release of this solution."
"Multiple WAN connections: Even though you can implement more than one interface to outside connections, it is lacking on load balances, etc."
"The solution has not had any layer upgrades. It does not have layer five and upwards, it only has up to layer four. This has caused some problems for us."
"One feature lacking is superior anti-virus protection, which must be added."
"The debugging and troubleshooting has room for improvement."
"There are some license issues. Not every feature must have a separate license. There must be some of kind synergy between the license so we don't have to pay for every individual license that we would like to have."
"WAN load-balancing could be a lot better at detecting when a link is poor or inconsistent, and not just flat out dead."
"From a reporting perspective, there's room for improvement. They're providing FortiAnalyzer through which one can get some enhancements, but the visibility and reporting still need slight improvement."
"The scalability could be better."
"The cloud management and automation capability could be improved."
"They should improve high CPU and memory usage that occurs."
"The monitor and the visibility, in this proxy, is very weak."
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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