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."It's great for capturing the traffic and troubleshooting it."
"Its administrative panel is very intuitive and simple. It is simpler than the other solutions that we had. As an administrator, we are always looking for the easiest solution to manage network policies. We are able to filter everything on our network and also use the VPN feature, which is important these days when people are working remotely during COVID."
"Good load balancing feature."
"The security features are about the best that I've seen anywhere."
"The most valuable feature is the bundled subscription, which is IPS, TV and web filtering."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiGate are the rules and quality of service."
"It's a firewall that secures our internal network. I have been using it since 2013, and I find that most of the features are advanced, and very user friendly."
"The interface is very user-friendly and I like it very much."
"Application inspection, network segmentation, and encrypted traffic detection or encrypted traffic analysis (ETA) are valuable for our customers."
"The stability of the solution is very good. We can see that it gets even better with every release."
"It is easy to create interfaces and routing, which all can be done at the GUI level."
"The IPS, as well as the malware features, are the two things that we use the most and they're very valuable."
"You do not have to do everything through a command line which makes it a lot easier to apply rules."
"Feature-wise, we mostly use IPS because it is a security requirement to protect against attacks from outside and inside. This is where IPS helps us out a bunch."
"There are some hiccups here and there, but compared to the technical support from other vendors, I have had the best experience with Cisco's technical support. I would rate them at nine out of ten."
"We have been using a 5520 for seven years in our datacenter and we are satisfied by this version."
"SNMP status monitoring and the Central Management Software."
"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."
"We have used technical support for WatchGuard many times and overall, we are satisfied with it. They are always listening and there is a good reaction time to our findings. When there are issues, they really try to resolve them."
"WatchGuard XTM is fairly basic. We use it as the perimeter firewall. The main point is to protect from attack software and hacking."
"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."
"I like the hostwatch because I can see what traffic uses the most bandwidth and I can block that site."
"It is stable and does not require you to reboot all the time."
"After installing the product, we achieved awareness of our data protection needs and email misuse."
"It's my understanding that more of the current generation features could be brought in. There could be more integration with EDRs, for example."
"Monitoring and reporting could be better."
"I would like to see better pricing in the next release, as well as a simplification of the installation."
"They should improve the interface to make it more user-friendly."
"Fortinet FortiGate is a stable solution. However, my issue is the performance only. When I use all the profiles, this affects the performance. From the beginning, I should have had a better sizing of the box."
"The solution could have licensing fees reduced in the future."
"A sandbox would be good in order to be able to inspect the emails containing spam and be able to validate the emails that contain malware, prior to delivering to the customer."
"Fortinet FortiGate could improve by adding FortiAnalyzer to its solution, we should not have to use another solution. FortiAnalyzer can provide more detailed information."
"These firewalls are not for beginners."
"The most valuable features of the product are the VPN and the NextGen firewall features such as application control, URL filtering, etc."
"I would like to see them add more next-generation features so that you don't need a lot of appliances to do just one task. It should be a single solution."
"An area of improvement for this solution is the console visualization."
"The Sandbox and the Web Censoring in this solution need to be improved."
"The performance should be improved."
"This product is managed using the Firepower Management Center (FMC), but it would be better if it also supported the command-line interface (CLI)."
"The visibility for VPN is one big part. The policy administration could be improved in terms of customizations and flexibility for changing it to our needs."
"Syslog (Dimension) is focused on presentation, but needs more focus on utility like SonicWall syslog (GMS/Analyzer)."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Sometimes we have had issues with stability of the product."
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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