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.
"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."
"At this point, we find that this product has high productivity and high availability and there is no need for improvement."
"Once you add Firepower onto to it and you start enabling some of its features, you get some IDS/IPS involved with it and you can even do web filtering."
"The features I found most valuable in this solution, are the overall security features."
"The most valuable feature we have found to be the VPN because we use it often."
"Clustering architecture which offers zero downtime upgrades, keeping uptime close to 99.999%."
"Its VPN and ASN features are very stable."
"REST API offering with rich capabilities which makes the product very robust."
"We can detect any attack of viruses or malware at the first point of contact."
"The performance is good."
"I appreciate FortiGate's flexibility, which allows for centralized management through FortiManager."
"This solution has solid UTM features combined with a nice GUI."
"Its administrative panel is very intuitive and simple. It is simpler than the other solutions that we had. As an administrator, we are always looking for the easiest solution to manage network policies. We are able to filter everything on our network and also use the VPN feature, which is important these days when people are working remotely during COVID."
"Their reliability and their policy of pre-shipping replacements when a unit has failed."
"Some of the key features of the solution is that it has good reporting, you can receive many details from the connection, for example, clients and website information."
"It performs very well."
"Make the IPS baked-in."
"The configuration is an area that needs improvement."
"In the past though, colleagues have had issues during the upgrade process. The failover didn't work and production was down."
"They need to do an overhaul of the management console."
"You shouldn't have to use the ASDM to help manage the client."
"The solution's deployment is time-consuming, which should be minimized and made more user-friendly for us."
"In general, they can make it easier to manage the solutions. They can make it easier in terms of administration and provide a single tool for different firewalling solutions. They have different tools to manage different firewalls, such as Firepower or ASA. Sometimes, both are on the same thing. You have ASA with Firepower modules, so you manage some of the things via HTML, and then you manage some of the things via another management tool. It's not seamless."
"It is not the newest, cutting-edge technology"
"The solution is very expensive."
"We had some issues in the beginning while setting it up, but after doing the firmware update, it is working fine."
"FortiOS is not simple."
"As far as wanting more scalability or things in the network diagram, it's going to cost you."
"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."
"Scalability is one of the disadvantages. When it comes to scalability, you have to actually change the box. If you want to upgrade it, you need to actually change the existing box and probably you take the system off to other sites."
"The monitor and the visibility, in this proxy, is very weak."
"There are mainly two areas of improvement in Fortinet FortiGate— the licensing cost and the timing of upgrading licenses for boxes."
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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