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 configuration support is very good. You can find a lot of configuration samples and troubleshooting tips on the internet, which is very good."
"The primary benefits of using Cisco Secure solutions are time-saving, a robust API, and convenience for the security team."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to block almost all of the ports."
"Ease of configuration: It has gotten a lot easier to configure compared to the original Cisco Pix."
"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."
"I like the user interface because the navigation is very easy, straightforward on your left side pane you have all the sites that you need to browse. Unlike any other firewalls, it's pretty straightforward."
"I haven't had any major problems so I haven't had to open a ticket with technical support."
"IPS and Snort are very important because they also differentiate Cisco from other vendors and competitors."
"The initial setup of Fortinet FortiGate was straightforward."
"We purchased Fortinet because of the pricing, its functionality, because it met our requirements, and the total cost of ownership over five years was quite reasonable. In the market, Fortinet is rated quite well."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is Quota."
"In terms of security, we have not experienced any security flaws or loopholes, and it has proven to be quite stable."
"We were looking for the VPN feature and controlling the inflow and outflow of all the traffic within the site and across the sites. We are also using it for the VPN and VLANs."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiGate are the APIs. They are the most widely known."
"The most valuable features are SD-WAN, application control, IPS control, and FortiSandbox."
"Its performance in fulfilling our requirements has been satisfactory."
"You need to have a little bit of knowledge to be able to configure it. Otherwise, it would be very difficult to configure because there is no GUI. The latest software available in the market has a GUI and probably zero-touch provisioning and auto-configuration. All these things are not available in our version. You need to manually go and configure everything in the switch. In terms of new features, we would definitely want to have URL-based filtering, traffic steering, and probably a little bit steering in the bandwidth based on the per-user level and per-user group. We will definitely need some of these features in the near future."
"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."
"Most of the features don't work well, and some features are missing as well."
"They should improve their interface."
"In the past though, colleagues have had issues during the upgrade process. The failover didn't work and production was down."
"A major area of improvement would be to have more functionality in public clouds, especially in terms of simplifying it. The high availability doesn't work right now because of the limitations in the cloud."
"The user interface for the Firepower management console is a little bit different from traditional Cisco management tools. If you look at products we already use, like Cisco Prime or other products that are cloud-based, they have a more modern user interface for managing the products. For Firepower, the user interface is not very user-friendly. It's a little bit confusing sometimes."
"It would be nice if you didn't have to configure using a command-line interface. It's a bit technical that way."
"The performance and speed are aspects of the solution that could always be improved upon."
"I feel that the reporting needs to be improved."
"I would like to see improvements in the product's application rules."
"It could use better throughput on some of the smaller boxes for the branch offices."
"The platform's interface could improve."
"The process of configuring firewall rules appears excessively complex."
"We had some issues in the beginning while setting it up, but after doing the firmware update, it is working fine."
"The way everything is set up could be easier. Currently, people need a lot of experience and knowledge to administer it and to link it to devices."
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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