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.
"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."
"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 love the ASDM (Adaptive Security Device Manager) which is the management suite. It's a GUI and you're able to see everything at a glance without using the command line. There are those who love the CLI, but with ASDM it is easier to see where everything is going and where the problems are."
"When I was managing these firewalls, I found them easy to understand, easy to deploy, and easy to maintain as compared to some of the other firewalls I have been involved with earlier. The opinion of my coworkers is that it's easy and quick to establish new zones, expand, and maintain."
"The interface is user-friendly."
"IPS and Snort are very important because they also differentiate Cisco from other vendors and competitors."
"Right now, Cisco ASA NGFW has given us a lot of improvement. We are planning to move to a new facility and will be a much larger organization."
"The most valuable feature of Cisco Secure Firewall is its ease of configuration and that it's scalable for firewalls and VPNs."
"The integration with Active Directory is one of the good features. Most of the customers are now looking for the Single Sign-on feature. So, being able to integrate Active Directory with the firewall is useful. It is also easy."
"We have found it to be very reliable and that's why our teams and various users in our company use it as our main firewall every day."
"Fortinet has a very good solution for Secure SD-WAN. One very good feature is that they have robust and simple FortiOS through which they provide all solutions. That's their strength. There's not much complexity involved with the Secure SD-WAN solution of Fortinet as compared to Cisco's solution, which has a lot of flexibility but complexity also comes with that flexibility."
"I like several features that this product has, such as antivirus and internet navigation inspection. It is also simple to use."
"Valuable features include the Web Application Firewall, and it even has DLP (data leak prevention)."
"Fortinet FortiGate is scalable for our users. Right now, we have almost 70 users. We do not have any plan to increase our usage of FortiGate. For maintaining the firewall solution, one staff member is enough."
"Good anti-malware and web filtering features."
"The user interface (UI) is very, very good."
"I wouldn't give them a ten. Nobody is perfect. I'll give them a nine because they help me with any issues I've had."
"It is hard to collaborate with our filtered environment."
"When comparing the graphical interface of this solution to other vendors it is more difficult to configure. There is a higher learning curve for administrators in this solution."
"Firepower's user experience should be a little bit better."
"In today's world, cyberattacks have become a common occurrence. However, so far, we have not faced any issues with our systems. I hope the situation remains the same in the future. If Cisco introduces even more advanced security measures, it would be beneficial."
"I would like to see improvement when you create policies on Snort 3 IPS on Cisco Firepower. On Snort 2, it was more like a UI page where you had some multiple choices where you could tweak your config. On Snort 3, the idea is more to build some rules on the text file or JSON file, then push it. So, I would like to see a lot of improvements here."
"We would like to see MS Word BPM as a feature."
"If Cisco could stop rebranding, combine all the CLIs/GUIs, and give a consistent experience, this would be great."
"We had some issues in the beginning while setting it up, but after doing the firmware update, it is working fine."
"The renewal price and the availability could be improved."
"Currently, FortiGate is providing SSL VPN. But they're missing some features that are available in Palo Alto's SSL VPN."
"I would like some automated custom reporting."
"They can do more tests before they release new versions because I would like to be more assured. We had some experiences where they release something new and great, but some of the old features are disabled or they don't work well, which impacts the product satisfaction. The manufacturer should be able to prove that everything works or not only that it might work. This is applicable to most of the other services, software, and hardware companies. They all should work on this. We cannot trust every new release, such as a beta release, on the first day. We wait for some comments on the forums and from other companies that we know. We always wait a few weeks before we use the updated version. They should also extend the VPN client application, especially for Linux versions. Currently, it has an application for Linux devices, but it doesn't work the way we want to connect to the VPN. They use only the old connection, not the new one. They have VPN client applications for Windows and Mac, but they can add more useful features to better manage the devices and monitor the current health of each device. Such features would be helpful for our company."
"The setup is pretty complex and not easy to implement."
"Fortinet FortiGate could improve by having better visibility. Palo Alto has better visibility."
"It does not have key authentication for admin access."
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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