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 most valuable feature is the anti-malware protection. It protects the endpoints on my network."
"The most valuable features of this solution are the integrations and IPS throughput."
"Cybersecurity resilience has been paramount. Because there is a threat of losing everything if ransomware or another sort of attack were to happen, the cybersecurity resilience has been top-notch."
"It's very stable and mature."
"It's got the capabilities of amassing a lot of throughput with remote access and VPNs."
"The stability is very good; there's no vagueness. Either it works or it doesn't, and it's also very easy to find out why."
"One of the best features is the ease of use. It's also easy to teach new engineers to use the ASA CLI."
"So far, it has been very stable."
"Their reliability and their policy of pre-shipping replacements when a unit has failed."
"I like Fortinet's cloud management. It allows me to manage all my devices in different branches for three cloud accounts. Even though I use on-prem devices, I can manage everything on the cloud."
"The performance is good."
"Fortinet offers the latest versions to cater to the needs of enterprises."
"It is a good source for firewall protection."
"The UTM feature is quite good. FortiAP is easy to deploy because both Fortigate and FortiAP are under the same brand. Otherwise, you need to do more work on the configuration."
"Fortinet FortiGate appears to be scalable."
"It has very easy management and an amazing ETM configuration."
"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."
"It needs to provide the next-generation firewall features that other vendors provide, like data analytics, telemetry, and deep packet inspection."
"I have worked with the new FTD models and they have more features than the ASA line."
"It is confusing to have two management interfaces, e.g., ASDM and Firepower Management Center."
"Most of the features don't work well, and some features are missing as well."
"The ease of use needs improvement. It is complex to operate the solution. The user interface is not friendly."
"One area that could be improved is its logging functionality. Your logs are usually displayed on the screen, but if you want to go back one or two days, then you need another solution in place because those logs are overwritten within minutes."
"10Gb interfaces should be available on more models."
"Technical support is good but the response time could be faster."
"The solution can have more features in a single box that can be multi-applied to integrate everything."
"The monitor and the visibility, in this proxy, is very weak."
"Some of the filtering is not robust, you can escape it with a VPN. Some of the users bypass some of the filters. It catches some but it also misses some, that area could be improved. It's functioning reasonably but there's room for improvement in that area."
"Usually, we sell the bundle with the UTM or threat management piece with IPS, IDS. Other providers, such as Palo Alto, are ahead in terms of safe functionality. So, for me, delivering truly safe service is probably something that still needs to be improved."
"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."
"Fortinet doesn't provide multiple virtual firewalls which would facilitate end users and customers."
"We would like to see an upgrade to the VPN feature, we are using the VPN from outside of our office and there is a limitation to 10 connections, more connections would be suitable."
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 Juniper SRX Series Firewall, 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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