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 valuable features of this solution are advanced malware protection, IPS, and IDS."
"The whole firewall functionality, including firewall policies and IPS policies, is valuable. It has all kinds of functionalities. It has IPS, VPN, and other features. They are doing quite a lot of stuff with their devices."
"IPS and Snort are very important because they also differentiate Cisco from other vendors and competitors."
"At this point, we find that this product has high productivity and high availability and there is no need for improvement."
"I have access to the web version of Cisco Talos to see the reputation of IP addresses. I find this very helpful. It provides important information for my company to obtain the reputation of IP addresses. The information in Talos is quite complete."
"The IP filter configuration for specific political and Static NAT has been most valuable."
"The best solutions for our company are those we have yet to implement so it will be even better in the future for us than it already is."
"The most stable firewall I’ve ever worked with. Once you get the ASA set up properly, it can run for a whole year without any major issues, apart from the normal daily administration."
"It does a lot for you for intrusion protection and as an antivirus. The threat management bundle is worth the money. You don't need another company to monitor your web traffic for you. You can do everything yourself on the firewall. You restrict your own black list for people on the firewall. You don't need to pay some other company for another product to do that for you. The firewall can do that for you. So, it's an easy-to-use product for people to be independent. They don't need to rely on other vendors to do what the firewall can do. They can do everything."
"The most valuable feature is the FortiManager for centralized management."
"It enables our organization to become more productive. Also, it protects our NEtWare from viruses and malware."
"The solution is stable."
"The most valuable feature is the VDOM, which allows the customer to have multiple firewalls in a single campus."
"We've found the solution to be pretty stable."
"FortiGate has a strong security topic which allows all of the Fortinet devices to communicate and share information which makes their security more powerful."
"Customers are more inclined towards FortiGate because of application control, web filtering, and anti-spam features. The support from the FortiGate team is good, and price-wise, it is affordable."
"The intelligence has room for improvement. There are some hackers that we haven't seen before and its ability to detect those types of attacks needs to be improved."
"The initial setup was a bit complex. It wasn't a major challenge, but due to our requirements and network, it was not very straightforward but still easy enough."
"They should improve their interface."
"It is expensive."
"Cisco is not cheap, however, it is worth investing in these technologies."
"The Cisco ASA device needs overall improvement, as configurations alone do not completely secure my network."
"One thing that Cisco could improve is the GUI. The graphic user interface should be more user-friendly."
"Cisco ASA is not a next-generation firewall product."
"I have to say that the initial setup was complex. The deployment took a few days to get set up. Initially, we were using an IPVanish. We switched to this tool since we thought it would be easier. But it turns out it wasn't easier to set up and run."
"Fortinet FortiGate could improve by having more capabilities for troubleshooting VPN connections. For example, I do get some feedback about the current status, but I could use some history and logging of important events. The information is logged in our Syslog server, but I could use that information from the device. If they could provide a GUI to have some more insight on what's going with my VPN would be useful."
"Some features of Fortinet FortiGate are actually fee enabled that are inconvenient for deploying in production. Other issues relate to isolation with Cisco products and your server."
"They should offer special pricing to premium partners and customers."
"They need faster serviceability and more security features."
"The process of configuring firewall rules appears excessively complex."
"There are some complex administration tasks in their administration portal. That needs to be improved."
"Monitoring and reporting could be better."
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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