We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Firewall and WatchGuard XTM [EOL] based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Netgate, Fortinet, OPNsense and others in Firewalls."The CLI is robust and powerful, enabling rapid, consistent changes via SSH."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiGate are the different types of profiling. It has been the most effective for me. The WAF and the antivirus profile are the most effective in network protection."
"It is simple to manage, and there are a lot of functionalities in the same box."
"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 reporting you receive out of this appliance is excellent. You will not need an external management system."
"Mainly the FortiGate reporting system is very good. It guides us through all the expectations of security. Fortinet provides us all that we need for security. Also, Fortinet FortiGate is a next-generation firewall. It is much more advanced than others."
"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."
"The most valuable features are SD-WAN, application control, IPS control, and FortiSandbox."
"We found the initial setup to be easy."
"One thing I like about the product is the logging features, the way it logs, the way it forwards the logs in Syslog."
"One of the most valuable features of Firepower 7.0 is the "live log" type feature called Unified Event Viewer. That view has been really good in helping me get to data faster, decreasing the amount of time it takes to find information, and allowing me to fix problems faster. I've found that to be incredibly valuable because it's a lot easier to get to some points of data now."
"Very good as a stateful inspection firewall."
"I like the user interface because the navigation is very easy, straightforward on your left side pane you have all the sites that you need to browse. Unlike any other firewalls, it's pretty straightforward."
"The monitoring dashboard is valuable to us for troubleshooting."
"This solution helped us to identify the key areas where we need to focus to block traffic that is malicious to our organization."
"I like the IPS feature, it is the most valuable."
"After installing the product, we achieved awareness of our data protection needs and email misuse."
"I like the hostwatch because I can see what traffic uses the most bandwidth and I can block that site."
"They have a reporting system which can store data over a very long period of time. Not many other firewall vendors provide a reporting system, but if they do, like Fortinet does, then you've got buy that as an additional product and that can be more than twice as expensive as the initial investment in the firewall. And without reporting over a long-term period, you're just about wasting your time."
"It is stable and does not require you to reboot all the time."
"Reputation Enabled Defense indicates that some websites are so infested that it's not even worth visiting them, and therefore saving the bandwidth of going through the detection process."
"Application Control is fantastic with over 2,500 applications and the granularity that we can either allow people to view but not be able to log on to Facebook; or view it and log onto it if they're in the marketing department, but not play Facebook games. There are all sorts of different options like that. So it's highly granular."
"SNMP status monitoring and the Central Management Software."
"There is a site-to-site VPN configuration between others people."
"FortiGate support could do some improvements on their IPv6 configuration. Right now it's still in the very early stage for utilizing in an enterprise level network environment."
"Bandwidth usage in reporting could be improved for Fortinet FortiGate."
"It should be more stable. There should be full integration within Fortinet products themselves as well as with other third-party products. Especially when you're not dealing with SIEM and the correlation of the security box, we want Fortinet to be able to share that information with as many other products as it can."
"There are SD-WAN network monitoring, SD-WAN features, Industrial Databases, Internet of Things, Detection, etc., however, we do have not licenses for those features. We thought that if you bought a product, you should have all of the features it offers. Why should you need to make so many extra purchases to enable features? They should have one price for the entire offering."
"The firmware needs improvement because there are bugs when a new release comes through. Sometimes, the configuration changes, and it's a bit harder to see where the fail is. The first time that you have the firmware, it tends to have some issues, and it's better to wait a bit to update the equipment."
"In some cases, its initial setup could be hard for customers."
"It should come integrated or have its own type of network monitor tool in a module. There should just be one package, and you are good to go."
"Fortinet FortiGate needs to improve the protection, it did not prevent us from being attacked. Additionally, Fortinet FortiGate could provide more features for WAF devices. I should not have to purchase two solutions, it would be a benefit to combine these features into one solution."
"If the implementation was easier, it would be a lot better for us."
"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 needs to provide the next-generation firewall features that other vendors provide, like data analytics, telemetry, and deep packet inspection."
"Critical bugs need to be addressed before releasing the version."
"The stability could be better because we have a lot of issues with the stability of Cisco Firepower."
"I would like to see more integration with third-party devices in general. There is great integration with Cisco devices, but there's not much integration with third-party devices."
"It is hard to collaborate with our filtered environment."
"You have to know the ASA command line very well because not all operations are available in the graphical interface"
"The setting policies need improvement. It needs an easier way to do static NAT and check on what policy is being used for that specific traffic."
"The VPN errors are not helpful when troubleshooting."
"WatchGuard doesn't have a product that allows them to get into the data center. And that's just because there is no hardware to do the job. The software could do it, but there's no hardware that allows that to happen at the moment. So it doesn't scale as well as some other products, that's for sure."
"The initial setup is neither simple nor complex. If you know the base in networking and how the firewall works, you will be able to figure it out."
"I would like them to improve the product's overall protections. This would be good for all product users."
"Sometimes we have had issues with stability of the product."
"Syslog (Dimension) is focused on presentation, but needs more focus on utility like SonicWall syslog (GMS/Analyzer)."
"One huge issue with WatchGuard XTM is that I'm not getting reports in a readable format. Readable means, I don't want Excel online. We repeat auditing when we trigger the report or setup calendar. That functionality is what we are looking for from WatchGuard XTM here."
Earn 20 points
Cisco Secure Firewall is ranked 4th in Firewalls with 404 reviews while WatchGuard XTM [EOL] doesn't meet the minimum requirements to be ranked in Firewalls. Cisco Secure Firewall is rated 8.2, while WatchGuard XTM [EOL] is rated 8.0. 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 WatchGuard XTM [EOL] writes "The multi-layer security of the products are the primary reason we use these appliances, however, the gateway wireless functionality for managing access points leaves much to be desired". Cisco Secure Firewall is most compared with Palo Alto Networks WildFire, Netgate pfSense, Meraki MX, Sophos XG and Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, whereas WatchGuard XTM [EOL] is most compared with .
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