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 ability to block almost all of the ports."
"The most valuable features are the provision of internet access, AnyConnect, and VPN capabilities."
"Very good as a stateful inspection firewall."
"You can also put everything into a nice, neat, little package, as far as configuration goes. I was formerly a command-line guy with the ASA, and I was a little nervous about dealing with a GUI interface versus a command line, but after I did my first deployment, I got a lot more comfortable with doing it GUI based."
"The ASA has seen significant improvement due to the IPS."
"The product is quite robust and durable."
"Its in-depth monitoring and analysis help us to make better decisions and policies."
"Its VPN and ASN features are very stable."
"I think that the UTM features are the most value, as it truly protects my infrastructure."
"It enables our organization to become more productive. Also, it protects our NEtWare from viruses and malware."
"It's quite comfortable to handle the FortiGate firewall."
"The product offers very good security."
"The pipe filter application is an outstanding feature."
"This product is definitely scalable."
"Using this product makes the VPN seamless and almost invisible to me in the sense that I don't have to think about it."
"A strong point of FortiGate is the graphical interface is complete and easy to use."
"The pricing is a bit high."
"Other firewalls, upgrading is a very easy task; from the graphical user interface, you just need to import the firmware versions into it and install it. In this firewall, you need to have a third-party solution in both. It's a process. It's a procedure, a hard procedure, actually, so there is no straightforward procedure for upgrading."
"It is confusing to have two management interfaces, e.g., ASDM and Firepower Management Center."
"Migration with other appliances is not easy. It has to be done manually, and this takes a long time."
"In a future release, it would be ideal if they could offer an open interface to other security products so that we could easily connect to our own open industry standard."
"The content filtering on an application level is not as good as other solutions such as Palo Alto."
"Cisco wasn't first-to-market with NGFWs... they should look at what other vendors are doing and try not only to be on the same wavelength but a little bit better."
"The artificial intelligence and machine learning (behavioral based threat detection), which I can this will be coming out in another year, these are what we need now."
"It is stable, but its stability can be improved."
"It can be a little bit more user-friendly in terms of policy definition and implementation. It seems a little bit complicated, and it could be simplified."
"The solution lacks multi-language support."
"The command line is complicated, and the interface could be better."
"Bandwidth usage in reporting could be improved for Fortinet FortiGate."
"There are some cloud-based features that could be much more flexible than they currently are."
"I think they need to improve more in order to be a competitor with the leaders of the field."
"When we cluster the two Fortinet FortiGate boxes together we have some issues."
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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