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 most important feature is its categorization because on the site and social media you are unified in the way they are there."
"The most valuable feature is the Intrusion Prevention System."
"The Firepower+ISE+AMP for endpoint integration is something that really stands it out with other vendor solutions. They have something called pxGrid and i think it is already endorsed by IETF. This allows all devices on the network to communicate."
"I have found the most valuable feature to be the access control and IPsec VPN."
"I found that setting up rules for HTTPS and SSH access to the management interface are straightforward, including setting the cypher type."
"Being able to determine our active users vs inactive users has led us to increased productivity through visibility. Also, if an issue was happening with our throughput, then we wouldn't know without research. Now, notifications are more proactively happening."
"It has a good security level. It is a next-generation firewall. It can protect from different types of attacks. We have enabled IPS and IDS."
"The traffic inspection and the Firepower engine are the most valuable features. It gives you full details, application details, traffic monitoring, and the threats. It gives you all the containers the user is using, especially at the application level. The solution also provides application visibility and control."
"We have been able to offer several services to customers in a single box."
"The security features are about the best that I've seen anywhere."
"It's a firewall that secures our internal network. I have been using it since 2013, and I find that most of the features are advanced, and very user friendly."
"The most important features of Fortinet FortiGate are the Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) and firewall control applications."
"The ease of setting the solution up is a valuable aspect for us."
"This is a quality product with ok support, and it is better than the competition we've tried."
"What's most important is the ease of use."
"I like Fortinet FortiGate's antispam filter, SPN, and clustering features."
"Technical support takes a long time to respond."
"The solution could offer better control that would allow the ability to restrictions certain features from a website."
"We have encountered problems when implementing new signatures and new versions on our firewall. Sometimes, there is a short outage of our services, and we have not been able to understand what's going on. This is an area for improvement, and it would be good to have a way to monitor and understand why there is an outage."
"I would like the ability to drill down into certain reports because currently, that cannot be done."
"One thing that Cisco could improve is the GUI. The graphic user interface should be more user-friendly."
"Cisco Secure Firewall's integration with cloud providers has room for improvement. We could do more in terms of integration, for example, if we had a tag on an instance."
"On the VPN side, Firepower could be better. It needs more monitoring on VPNs. Right now, it's not that good. You can set up a VPN in Firepower, but you can't monitor it."
"The scalability has room for improvement."
"I haven't had a single issue since using Fortinet."
"It would be ideal if they had some sort of GUI interface for troubleshooting and diagnostics."
"If they could extend their fabric towards other vendor environments for integration, that would be great."
"The pricing could be a bit better, especially when you consider how they have the most basic offering priced."
"It needs more available central management."
"I would like to have logs, monitoring, and reporting for a month without extra fees."
"The visibility of the network can be better. The GUI can be improved for better visibility of the network flow. Other solutions have better GUI in terms of network visibility."
"Fortinet Fortigate could benefit by simplifying some of their processes."
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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