We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Firewall and Fortinet FortiOS based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Firewalls solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The solution is highly scalable because they have devices that can handle a large amount of traffic."
"The GUI is good."
"The threat prevention is the solution's most valuable aspect."
"The most valuable feature is the bundled subscription, which is IPS, TV and web filtering."
"The main benefit is the grouping of our security monitoring."
"It is useful for protecting and segregating the internal networks from the internet. Most of our customers also use the FortiGate client to connect to their offices by using the VPN client, and of course, they usually activate the antivirus, deep inspection, and intrusion prevention services. They are also using it for web filtering and implementing various policies dealing with forwardings, NAT, etc."
"Its performance in fulfilling our requirements has been satisfactory."
"The reporting you receive out of this appliance is excellent. You will not need an external management system."
"I like them mostly because they don't break and they have great diagnostics."
"The most important feature is its categorization because on the site and social media you are unified in the way they are there."
"Cisco ASA Firewall is a well known product. They're always updating it, and you know what they're doing and that it works."
"It's the VPN side of things that has been most useful for us. It allows us to secure our users even when they're working from home. They are able to access all of our resources, no matter where they are in the world."
"One of the nice things about Firepower is that you can set it to discover the environment. If that is happening, then Firepower is learning about every device, software operating system, and application running inside or across your environment. Then, you can leverage the discovery intelligence to get Firepower to select the most appropriate intrusion prevention rules to use for your environment rather than picking one of the base policies that might have 50,000 IPS rules in it, which can put a lot of overhead on your firewall. If you choose the recommendations, as long as you update them regularly, you might be able to get your rule set down to only 1,000 or 1,500, which is a significant reduction in a base rule set. This means that the firewall will give you better performance because there are less rules being checked unnecessarily. That is really useful."
"It's protecting the organization against the impact of cyber threats and cybersecurity. We run manufacturing plants that have hazardous material, and we don't want that manufacturing process to be impacted by break-in exposure, cyber threats, or any other similar thing."
"I have found the stability of this solution really good. This is why I use it."
"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."
"The pricing is excellent."
"The solution is very user friendly."
"FortiOS's most valuable feature is a next-generation firewall that can be used as the APT solution in advanced threat protection."
"There are many useful features, such as web security and advanced threat detection."
"The main features I find useful are intrusion prevention and web filtering. Additionally, the solution is easy to manage."
"It efficiently manages large-scale firewall deployments."
"The initial setup is easy. It's the easiest firewall installation process on the market. I work with three or four other products and this one is the easiest."
"The solution constantly adds features that are useful and user-friendly such as the ability to tweak firewalls through the CLI."
"With FortiGate, the main complaint that I have heard is about the technical support."
"I think the only issue that needs improvement is the interface."
"The scalability could be better."
"I would like to see more advanced developments of a wireless controller in the future."
"Compared to some other products, the DLP is not at par for the moment."
"The cloud features and integration could be improved."
"Technical support could be better. You don't always get the level of help you need right away."
"Scalability is one of the disadvantages. When it comes to scalability, you have to actually change the box. If you want to upgrade it, you need to actually change the existing box and probably you take the system off to other sites."
"Cisco makes horrible UIs, so the interface is something that should be improved."
"I was just trying to learn how this product actually operates and one thing that I see from internal processing is it does fire-walling and then sends it to the IPS model and any other model that needs to be performed. For example, content checking or filtering will be done in a field processing manner. That is something that causes delays in the network, from a security perspective. That is something that can be improved upon. Palo Alto already has implemented this as a pilot passed processing. So they put the same stream of data across multiple modules at the same time and see if it is giving a positive result by using an XR function. So, something similar can be done in the Cisco Firepower. Instead of single processing or in a sequential manner, they can do something similar to pile processing. Internal function that is something that they can improve upon."
"ASDM can be improved."
"The solution’s GUI could be better."
"The scalability has room for improvement."
"Tech support could not answer all of our questions. I had to do research on the web to solve my issues."
"In the next release, I would like to see the VPN and UTM features included."
"It's lacking one feature: VPN. Also, the 2100 Series lacks a DDoS feature. If they could add that to those platforms, that would be good."
"SD-WAN configuration could be easier."
"I would like to see the features of FortiAnalyzer included in Fortinet FortiOS. Right now, you're required to have an additional license and a different device for features such as processing the log, reporting, and analyzing traffic."
"Their technical support needs improvement."
"It could more scalable for the lower end users."
"I would like to see more statistics in the monitoring part."
"There is room for improvement in the reporting part. The reporting is only for logging data, and it's just a tabulation of the log in the report. I would like to be able to take down more information in the event of an incident."
"The solution needs improvement with DDoS protection."
"Fortinet FortiOS can improve the monitoring function, it could be more accurate, easy to use, and understandable."
Cisco Secure Firewall is ranked 4th in Firewalls with 404 reviews while Fortinet FortiOS is ranked 15th in Firewalls with 73 reviews. Cisco Secure Firewall is rated 8.2, while Fortinet FortiOS 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 FortiOS writes "Provides effective filtering features, good stability but initial setup is moderately challenging". 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 FortiOS is most compared with Fortinet FortiManager, Fortinet FortiGate-VM, Fortinet FortiWeb, Infoblox Advanced DNS Protection and Sangfor NGAF. See our Cisco Secure Firewall vs. Fortinet FortiOS report.
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