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.
"A powerful enterprise security solution that is dependible."
"It makes it very easy to have delineated roles and responsibilities between network engineering and network security."
"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."
"It's pretty reliable and allows for isolation capabilities within the network."
"The deep packet inspection is useful, but the most useful feature is application awareness. You can filter on the app rather than on a static TCP port."
"The stability of the product is good."
"The monitoring dashboard is valuable to us for troubleshooting."
"At this point, we find that this product has high productivity and high availability and there is no need for improvement."
"The most valuable features of the solution are SD-WAN, filtering testing applications, web filtering, and the new VPN."
"FortiGate has a very strong unified threat management system."
"There is an easy process for configuring it, and it is straightforward to implement the device from scratch."
"The most valuable feature is the ease of configuration."
"Our project needs to link two sides through the internet. One of these was in Cairo and the other in another city. We used FortiGate as the integrating solution between the two locations, i.e. the Fortinet 30E & 100E."
"Whenever I need something, Fortinet improves and updates the software for me."
"The solution has very good threat and content filtering switches."
"The CLI and GUI do a good job of putting a lot at your fingertips."
"The Cisco Firewall UI could be improved."
"There is room for improvement in the stability or software quality of the product. There were a few things in the past where we had a little bit of a problem with the product, so there is room for improvement."
"We are Cisco partners, and when we recommend Cisco FirePower to customers, they always think that FirePower is bad. For a single installation of FirePower, if I have to write about 18 tickets to Cisco, it's a big problem. There was an issue was related to Azure. We had Active Directory in Azure. The clients had to connect to FirePower through Azure. We had a lot of group policies. After two group policies, we had to make groups in Azure, and they had to sign in and sign back. It was a triple-layer authentication, and there was a big problem, so we didn't use it."
"Tech support could not answer all of our questions. I had to do research on the web to solve my issues."
"We don't have any serious problems. The firewall models that we have are quite legacy, and they have slower performance. We are currently investigating the possibility of migrating to next-generation firewalls."
"Cisco is not cheap, however, it is worth investing in these technologies."
"Also, they have a Firepower source file that I can work on the ASA device and on Firepower devices. A problem here lies in the way that you manage these devices. Some devices do not support the FMC, and some devices have to be managed through ASDM, and others have to be managed through FMC."
"10Gb interfaces should be available on more models."
"This product could be improved with Active directory integration and better handling in IPsec and GRE Tunnels."
"There are a lot of bugs I have found in the solution and it is difficult to upgrade. These areas need improvement."
"One area for improvement is the performance on bandwidth demands for smaller devices, as well as better web filtering."
"Its filtering is sometimes too precise or strict. We sometimes have to bypass and authorize some of the sites, but they get blocked. We know that they are trusted sites, but they are blocked, and we don't know why."
"I use the FortiGate 60D model and realized the 300Mbps bandwidth limitation. Because it is a product that offers many services, I think it could have greater bandwidth capacity."
"They need to improve their technical support."
"Fortinet Fortigate could benefit by simplifying some of their processes."
"We'd like more management across other integrations."
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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