We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Firewall vs Palo Alto Network Wildfire based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Based on the parameters we compared, with all other factors being more or less equal, Cisco Secure Firewall comes in a bit ahead of Palo Alto simply because of their stronger support.
"It's super reliable. I don't think I've ever had a reliability issue with it."
"The most valuable feature is the ease of use."
"We use a southern institution that's audited for IT security and the reporting that automatically comes off the unit makes it much easier to meet compliance standards and makes it easier as far as the amount of time that has to be spent to compile that information. If you get your reporting set up correctly when you initially set it up, you just select the one you want and hit print. The auditing trail on it is the best feature."
"The most valuable features are SD-WAN, application control, IPS control, and FortiSandbox."
"The next-generation firewall is great."
"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 Intrusion Prevention System and the web filtering are both working well."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"The most valuable feature would be ASDM. The ability to go in, visualize and see the world base in a clear and consistent manner is very powerful."
"The monitoring dashboard is valuable to us for troubleshooting."
"The main thing that I love the most is its policy and objects. Whenever I try to give access to a user, I can create an object via group creation in the object fields. This way, I am not able to enter a user in the policy repeatedly."
"It protects our network."
"The architecture of FTD is great because it has an in-depth coverage and because it uses the AVC, (Application, Visibility, and Control) and also rate limits. Also, the architecture of fast paths is great."
"They wanted to leverage something which is equivalent that can give them the next gen features like application awareness and intrusion protection. So that is a major reason they were looking forward to this. The original ASA firewall did not have these features. This was the major reason the customer moved on to Cisco Firepower Threat Defense (FTD). Now they can go ahead and leverage those functionalities."
"The most valuable feature would be the IP blocking. It gets rid of things that you don't need in your environment."
"We have multiple secure internal networks linked with our plants. We are from a oil company, so we have multiple plant areas which need to have restricted network access. Therefore, we are using it for restricting access to the plant area."
"It is stable and pretty much scalable."
"They have many different options with Palo Alto WildFire and the set-up is quick. If you have all the details in hand, it does not take more than 15 minutes to deploy a firewall."
"Stability is never a concern."
"The backup is the best feature."
"Being an application-based firewall, this is one of the critical focus factors along with the threat prevention services it provides."
"It has a user-friendly interface."
"The technical support is good."
"It gives a more accurate assessment of a virus in terms of whether it's truly a virus, malware, or a false positive. We have some legacy software that could pop up as being something that is malware. WildFire goes through and inspects it, and then it comes back and lets us know if it's a false positive. Usually, when it finds out that it's not a virus, it lets us know that it's benign, and it can exclude it from that scan, which means I don't even have to worry about that one popping up anymore."
"Scalability for Fortinet FortiGate needs to be improved. SD-WAN security for this solution also needs some improvement."
"In the future, I would like to see improvements made to cloud-based management."
"I don't like that anything more than very basic reporting is not included."
"Tunnel flapping was one of the major things I had seen wherein your internet link remains but your VPN tunnel is down. However, since I got a fix from the TAC team, I have not noticed it, but the customer complained a few times that they couldn't access the internet because of this problem."
"Currently, without the additional reporting module, we only have access to basic reporting."
"I would like to see improvements with the antivirus and IPS as they are not working properly all the time."
"If I had any criticism that I would give FortiGate, it would be that they need to stop changing their logging format. Every time we do a firmware upgrade, it is a massive issue on the SIM. Parsers have to be rebuilt. Even the FortiGate guys came in and said that they don't play well in the sandbox."
"Their software support needs improvement. I would prefer to have better support for bug fixes. Sometimes, we open a ticket, and it is very difficult to get a solution. Specifically, we are not at all happy with their support for load balancing."
"I believe that the current feature set of the device is very good and the only thing that Cisco should work on is improving the user experience with the device."
"I would like the ability to drill down into certain reports because currently, that cannot be done."
"10Gb interfaces should be available on more models."
"The service could use a little more web filtering. If I compare it to Cyberoam, Cyberoam has more the web filtering, so if you want to block a website, it's easier in other solutions than in Cisco."
"We have seen some bugs come up with Cisco Secure Firewall in terms of high availability. The solution should be improved to avoid these bugs."
"I would like it to have faster deployment times. A typical deployment could take two to three minutes. Sometimes, it depends on the situation. It is better than it was in the past, but it could always use improvement."
"If the implementation was easier, it would be a lot better for us."
"They should work on making it a little more intuitive for users and not quite as complex. Still, it's a good product."
"It would be nice if there was an easier way to install and deploy it, such as through the inclusion of wizards."
"Palo Alto Networks WildFire should be more real-time in nature. The signature updates should happen in a minute or less than a minute to be a very good feature for the customer."
"There are certain changes that I was expecting in the previous version, and I hope that they are soon fixed. All of the problems that I have faced so far have been resolved."
"The size of Palo Alto's cloud is big but it could be easier to use from a product management perspective."
"In the future, Palo Alto could reduce the time it takes to process the file."
"The initial setup was a little bit complex, mainly due to the GUI console and management challenges."
"I don't think it needs to improve anything, except maybe the speed to deploy the changes."
"Management and web filtering can be improved. There should also be better reporting, particularly around web filtering."
Cisco Secure Firewall is ranked 4th in Firewalls with 404 reviews while Palo Alto Networks WildFire is ranked 3rd in Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) with 58 reviews. Cisco Secure Firewall is rated 8.2, while Palo Alto Networks WildFire 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 Palo Alto Networks WildFire writes "Good technical support and provides automatic analysis that saves us time in filtering email". Cisco Secure Firewall is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Meraki MX, Sophos XG, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls and Juniper SRX Series Firewall, whereas Palo Alto Networks WildFire is most compared with Juniper SRX Series Firewall, Proofpoint Email Protection, Fortinet FortiSandbox, Check Point SandBlast Network and Zscaler Internet Access.
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