We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Firewall and Fortinet FortiGate-VM based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Features: Cisco Secure Firewall provides important functionalities like protection against threats, visibility into applications, efficient problem-solving, compatibility with other Cisco offerings, and impressive data transfer rates. Fortinet FortiGate-VM stands out for its robust security features, geofencing capabilities, user-friendly interface, and ability to adapt to varying needs.
The reviews highlight various areas where both the Cisco Secure Firewall and the Fortinet FortiGate-VM need improvement, including network performance, policy administration, customization options, centralized management, logging functionality, public cloud functionality, cloud management, technical support, MFA offerings, web filtering options, application inspection, GUI features, availability and delivery, setup process, data center clustering, throughput enhancement, web application firewall integration, integration simplicity, policy customization, and web-filtering configuration improvement.
Service and Support: The opinions on customer service for Cisco Secure Firewall are divided, with some customers appreciating their technical support, while others express concerns about delays and difficulties. Fortinet FortiGate-VM receives mixed reviews, with some satisfied customers and others suggesting that their support could be improved.
Ease of Deployment: The setup process for Cisco Secure Firewall can be more complex depending on the user's familiarity and environment, while Fortinet FortiGate-VM offers a generally straightforward and easy initial setup, with assistance provided by Fortinet.
Pricing: The cost of setting up Cisco Secure Firewall can vary, and some reviewers find it pricey due to additional expenses for licensing, support, and hardware. Fortinet FortiGate-VM is seen as competitive and more affordable than certain alternatives. It provides flexible pricing options and includes support for entitlement in the licensing fees. However, costs may rise when scaling or adding extra features.
ROI: Cisco Secure Firewall offers different levels of ROI depending on how it is used and the overall system design, whereas Fortinet FortiGate-VM delivers enhanced security and stability, potentially resulting in ROI.
Comparison Results: Fortinet FortiGate-VM is the preferred choice when comparing it to Cisco Secure Firewall. Users find the initial setup of Fortinet FortiGate-VM to be straightforward and easy. Fortinet FortiGate-VM is highly praised for its strong security features, user-friendly interface, and easy deployment.
"Unified Threat Management (UTM) features."
"It is very flexible to use."
"The next-gen features, the unified threat management capabilities are something that just about everybody is interested in at this point."
"Advanced routing (RIP, OSPF, BGP, PBR). It gives you a seamless and simple integration into a large network."
"The solution is scalable."
"The most important features with FortiGate are the web filter and application controls. We can control our internet usage and use the web filter for application purposes."
"The pricing is excellent. It's much less expensive than Cisco."
"The solution is stable."
"We have not had to deal with stability issues."
"It is scalable and stable."
"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."
"Once you add Firepower onto to it and you start enabling some of its features, you get some IDS/IPS involved with it and you can even do web filtering."
"The grouping of the solutions helps save time. If you have a problem and you have a high-level overview of the system, you can easily dig deeper into the problem. For example, I can check to see why ASA isn't working but the reason for the outage is actually because of Duo. I can spend a lot of time working in the wrong direction because I didn't have an overview."
"Previously, our customers had to always utilize hand-to-hand delivery. Now, they are able to move completely to a secure digital method. They use a strictly dark fiber optics connection from a central location to the endpoint."
"The return on investment is not going to be restricted to just the box... Now, these genres have been expanded to cyber, to third-party integrations, having integrated logging, having integrated micro and macro segmentations. The scope has been widened, so the ROI, eventually, has multiplied."
"It protects our network."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiGate-VM are its flexibility and scalability. This solution is available as a license, which allows us to activate it based on the specific needs of the customer. This gives us and the customer a great deal of versatility and customization options."
"In spite of the solution being inexpensive, it has everything one would need."
"GitDM, like FortiGate VM, provides similar features to FortiGate appliances or cloud solutions. However, FortiGate VM is more suitable for heavy traffic and inspection compared to GitDM. Unfortunately, FortiGate VM lacks a dedicated SPU for inspection, and all features rely on CPU and RAM."
"The stability of the solution is good. We haven't faced any issues at all while using the product."
"In terms of administration, it's perfect."
"The most valuable features are the IPS and Antivirus."
"There is an interesting possibility of building a tunnel to a firewall from access points. We use this feature for small branch offices with one to two employees with access to central RDP servers."
"Initial setup was quite straightforward, as we can simply head to the required sections to apply the planned network."
"The pricing could be a bit better, especially when you consider how they have the most basic offering priced."
"There are some tiny bugs that sometimes affect the operations. In the past revision of it, there was a bug. Because of the bug, we had to downgrade the version. It happened only with the last revision."
"Maybe they could make some features more accessible, such as a way to translate directions between two networks that share the same subnets."
"It would be nice if backups could more easily migrate between different models."
"The support from Fortinet FortiGate could improve. They are not easily accessible when we need them. They could improve their response time."
"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."
"They should improve high CPU and memory usage that occurs."
"The biggest "gotcha" is that if the client purchases what they call the UTM shared bundle, which has unified threat management on both, it's not as easy to manage if you have more than one firewall."
"In the next release, I would like to see the VPN and UTM features included."
"ASDM needs to be able to customize applets."
"There is limited data storage on the appliance itself. So, you need to ship it out elsewhere in order for you to store it. The only point of consideration is around that area, basically limited storage on the machine and appliance. Consider logging it elsewhere or pushing it out to a SIEM to get better controls and manipulation over the data to generate additional metrics and visibility."
"One big pain point I have is the ASDM interface because it's Java, and sometimes, it's a bit buggy and has low performance. That's something that probably won't be improved because of backward compatibility."
"The intelligence has room for improvement. There are some hackers that we haven't seen before and its ability to detect those types of attacks needs to be improved."
"There was an error in the configuration, related to our uplink switches, that caused us to contact technical support, and it took a very long time to resolve the issue."
"Cisco suffers from some integration issues with other products... There is a problem with the Cisco Catalyst Switches in terms of assembling bursts and having them interact properly with the Cisco Firepower."
"Cisco should work on ASDM. One of the biggest drawbacks of Cisco ASA is ASDM GUI. Cisco should improve the ASDM GUI. The configuration through ASDM is really difficult as compared to CLI. Sometimes when you are doing the configuration in ASDM, it suddenly crashes. It also crashes while pushing a policy. Cisco should really work on this."
"There are certain GUI features that should be present but are not."
"We have encountered certain issues with the bandwidth in respect of the security layer."
"It should have the SD-WAN feature. This would increase the number of features that are available in the box."
"The product's initial setup phase is a bit complex."
"To improve FortiGate-VM, Fortinet needs to harden it more. For example, if you are using Hyper-V, then you need guidelines for hardening FortiGate-VM that are specific to the Hyper-V environment. If it's VMware, there should be at least a guideline on how to harden the firewall."
"The price and licensing of the solution can be better."
"The product needs to focus on cloud-nativeness and pricing."
"Improvements are needed for the responsive UI and JIT traffic reporting."
Cisco Secure Firewall is ranked 4th in Firewalls with 404 reviews while Fortinet FortiGate-VM is ranked 9th in Firewalls with 113 reviews. Cisco Secure Firewall is rated 8.2, while Fortinet FortiGate-VM 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-VM writes "An easy-to-manage and configure tool that provides ample documentation to help with the setup phase". 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-VM is most compared with Azure Firewall, Palo Alto Networks VM-Series, Fortinet FortiOS, OPNsense and Netgate pfSense. See our Cisco Secure Firewall vs. Fortinet FortiGate-VM report.
See our list of best Firewalls vendors.
We monitor all Firewalls reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
