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 user interface, the UI, is excellent on the solution."
"Valuable features include AnyConnect, double translations, and an independent IPS module."
"The dashboard is the most important thing. It provides good visibility and makes management easy. Firepower also provides us with good application visibility and control."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is its ability to integrate vertically."
"Everything is all documented in the file or in the command line script that gets uploaded to the device. It gives us great visibility."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to block almost all of the ports."
"It's protecting the organization against the impact of cyber threats and cybersecurity. We run manufacturing plants that have hazardous material, and we don't want that manufacturing process to be impacted by break-in exposure, cyber threats, or any other similar thing."
"The product offers good scalability."
"The most valuable feature is the VDOM, which allows the customer to have multiple firewalls in a single campus."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the analytics."
"FortiGate improved our security. It's one of the best hardware firewalls."
"The application control features, such as Facebook blocking and Spotify blocking, are the most valuable."
"Overall security features and performance routing is good."
"The simplicity of the configuration and the stability of the product are most valuable. The VPN concentrator is very useful."
"It's very fast and easy to configure."
"Initial setup is straightforward. There weren't too many issues with setting it up. It takes one hour or so."
"It lacks management. For me, it still doesn't have a proper management tool or GUI for configuration, logging, and visualization. Its management is not that easy. It is also not very flexible and easy to configure. They used to have a product called CSM, but it is no longer being developed. FortiGate is better than this solution in terms of GUI, flexibility, and user-friendliness."
"One thing that Cisco could improve is the GUI. The graphic user interface should be more user-friendly."
"The user interface for the Firepower management console is a little bit different from traditional Cisco management tools. If you look at products we already use, like Cisco Prime or other products that are cloud-based, they have a more modern user interface for managing the products. For Firepower, the user interface is not very user-friendly. It's a little bit confusing sometimes."
"Maybe the dashboard could be a bit better."
"There is no support here in Georgia. If something goes wrong, support is not always very helpful with the other firewalls or other products."
"Cisco provides us with application visibility and control, although it's not a complete solution compared to other vendors. Cisco needs to work on the application behavior side of things, in particular when it comes to the behavior of SSL traffic."
"It should be easier for the IT management or the admin to configure products. For example, the firewall products are not very straightforward for many users. They should be easier to configure and should be more straightforward."
"The IPS module is combined with the main operating system."
"They should improve the interface to make it more user-friendly."
"One area for improvement is the performance on bandwidth demands for smaller devices, as well as better web filtering."
"In terms of what could be improved, the SD-WAN is quite difficult, because if you install the new box, 15 is okay, but if you change from an old configuration, if there is already configuration and a policy when you change to SD-WAN, you must change the whole policy that you see in the interface."
"I think the only issue that needs improvement is the interface."
"The inability to scale the FortiAnalyzer to match our growth necessitates the purchase of new hardware."
"In the future, I would like to see improvements made to cloud-based management."
"There is a lot of improvement needed with SSL-VPN."
"Fortinet FortiGate is not very easy to use. The navigation could be improved to make it easier to use."
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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