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.
"For business purposes, it's a very detailed solution, which is it's greatest benefit, as you can get almost any piece of information you need from the solution. It allows for admins to be able to troubleshoot pretty easily."
"I have found the most valuable feature to be the access control and IPsec VPN."
"We have multiple secure internal networks linked with our plants. We are from a oil company, so we have multiple plant areas which need to have restricted network access. Therefore, we are using it for restricting access to the plant area."
"It is easy to create interfaces and routing, which all can be done at the GUI level."
"It is a very stable product. I've not had any issues with it. It is a super product, and I won't need to change it anytime soon."
"Cisco Secure Firewall is reliable, which is why we opted for it during the pandemic for our remote users."
"Cisco ASA has an okay CLI with a nice GUI."
"One of the most valuable features of Firepower 7.0 is the "live log" type feature called Unified Event Viewer. That view has been really good in helping me get to data faster, decreasing the amount of time it takes to find information, and allowing me to fix problems faster. I've found that to be incredibly valuable because it's a lot easier to get to some points of data now."
"The stability of the solution is excellent, as it is with other Fortinet products."
"The interface is very good."
"I really like the captive portal feature for our guest network. It has nice VLAN features in terms of separating our network. The anti-virus is also good."
"The pricing is great and very reasonable."
"It's a user-friendly firewall. Most of the tasks are very simple. It's simple to configure and troubleshoot this firewall."
"Some of the valuable features are the firewall, IPS, web filter, and gateway capabilities. Additionally, it is easy to use and flexible."
"A strong point of FortiGate is the graphical interface is complete and easy to use."
"The solution is extremely reliable."
"I have a lot of difficulties with the solution's Firewall Management Center (FMC) and the GUI. Neither is responsive enough and should be improved."
"The integration between different tools could be improved. For example, with SecureX, I am yet to find out how to forward security events to different tools such as Microsoft Sentinel, which is what we use for log detection."
"The virtual firewalls don't work very well with Cisco AnyConnect."
"The one thing that the ASAs don't have is a central management point. We have a lot of our environments on FTD right now. So, we are using a Firewall Management Center (FMC) to manage all those. The ASAs don't really have that, but they are easy to use if you physically go into them and manage them."
"Cisco still has a lot of work to do. You can convert an ASA over to a Firepower, but the competitors, like Palo Alto and Juniper, are coming in. And believe it or not, they are a little bit more intuitive. Cisco has a little bit more work to do. They're playing catch up."
"The solution's deployment is time-consuming, which should be minimized and made more user-friendly for us."
"The Cisco ASA device needs overall improvement, as configurations alone do not completely secure my network."
"The SSL VPN is, and always has been, painful to configure and the Java plugin does not guarantee a uniform deployment."
"My only complaint about FortiGate is a lack of QinQ VLAN tunneling. I haven't found this feature in any Fortinet product. You can do this on all Cisco routers, including the smaller models. However, QinQ isn't available on the biggest, most expensive Fortinet units. They still don't have that. I think now we're on software version 6.0, and they still haven't found a solution for QinQ. It isn't a dealbreaker, but that's my main complaint."
"There is a lot of improvement needed with SSL-VPN."
"Fortinet FortiGate can be integrated with different platforms. They have integrations in place, but I can't say they're 100%."
"Palo Alto has a feature called WildFire Analysis that is unavailable in FortiGate. WildFire is better than a sandbox because it can address zero-day threats and vulnerabilities. It can immediately identify zero-day threats from the cloud."
"The cloud features can be improved."
"Fortinet FortiGate could improve by having more storage in the hardware for log data."
"The solution could be more secure and stable."
"It should provide better visibility over the network and more information in the form of reports for the end users. Its installation should also be easier."
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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