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.
"I think that the firewall feature is the most valuable to me as it is one of the oldest features for this solution. We also appreciate how stable the VPN is."
"The transparency of the single UI to ensure security. A product has to be simple so that an administrator can use it."
"It is pretty stable. I haven't seen many issues during the past four years."
"The customer service/technical support is very good with this solution."
"The benefits we see from the ASA are connected to teleworking as well as, of course, having the basic functionality of a firewall in place and the prevention of attacks."
"Its Snort 3 IPS has better flexibility as far as being able to write rules. This gives me better granularity."
"Since the product is stable, we do not have to spend additional money to buy other firewalls. Once deployed, we can use the product for a long time. Thus, it is cost effective."
"Even in very big environments, Cisco comes in handy with configuration and offers reliability when it comes to managing multiple items on one platform."
"Fortigate is very scalable to serve our customers' needs. We have scaled already from fifty to more than a hundred instances of Fortinet FortiGate. Around 20 staff are required for deployment and maintenance, mostly engineers."
"I am "headache free" that I don't have to categorize all the websites and that security has been pre categorized by the people, and that the services are getting updated. At least one part of my problem is over."
"The customization potential is quite impressive."
"The product is very stable, easy to troubleshoot, and configure, so it has reduced the time it takes for support."
"The most valuable feature is the FortiManager for centralized management."
"It's user-friendly and easy to operate."
"In terms of security, we have not experienced any security flaws or loopholes, and it has proven to be quite stable."
"The management console is pretty simple, so anyone who understands networking can initially deploy the solution."
"It integrates with other security products from Cisco, but sometimes, there can be glitches or errors."
"ASDM needs to be able to customize applets."
"I would like to see more configurable feature parity with Cisco ASA, which is the legacy product that Cisco is moving away from. When configuring remote access VPN, not all of the options are there. You have to download another tool, which means that the configuration takes a little bit longer with Cisco Secure Firewall. Though it's getting there, there are still some features lagging behind."
"Migration with other appliances is not easy. It has to be done manually, and this takes a long time."
"The annual subscription cost is a bit high. They should try to make it comparable to other offerings. We have a number of Chinese products here in Pakistan, which are already, very cheap and have less annual maintenance costs compared to Cisco."
"The main problem we have is that things work okay until we upgrade the firmware, at which point, everything changes, and the net stops working."
"It could use a web-based portal for VPN. Earlier they had it in the ASA model, but currently they don't have it."
"The throughput highlighted on the datasheet (10Gbps) should be reviewed. This throughput is only for a UDP running environment, which you will never find in the real world. Rather consider a multiprotocol throughput."
"I need user-behavior analytics, to find threat scenarios from inside the organization, insider attacks. That would be very helpful for us. In addition, I would like next-generation features for small and medium businesses. These businesses require UTM, all in one product. Fortinet must include it."
"With the reports, you can see it, and you can get good feelings so upper management can go, "Oh, wow. That looks pretty." However, it's very basic."
"The initial setup and configuration are not intuitive and require training."
"They need to improve their technical support."
"Bandwidth usage in reporting could be improved for Fortinet FortiGate."
"Its reporting and pricing need improvement."
"They have to just improve its performance when we enable all UTM features. When you enable all the features, the performance of FortiGate, as well as of Sophos and SonicWall, goes down."
"The solution lacks sufficient filtering."
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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