We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Firewall and Fortinet Fortigate based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Based on the parameters we compared, Fortinet Fortigate comes out on top. Its ease of deployment combined with its solid set of features and excellent service and support ratings make it a more desirable solution than Cisco Secure Firewall.
"The VPN feature is the most valuable to us because it accomplishes the task well. We're able to do everything we need to do."
"A powerful enterprise security solution that is dependible."
"It has definitely improved our organization. It gives us remote connectivity, helps workers connect remotely, and also gives us good connectivity to our other branches."
"Being able to use it as a policy-based VPN is valuable. It's very easy to understand. It's very easy to troubleshoot."
"The customer service/technical support is very good with this solution."
"It allowed us to consolidating multiple security devices into a single appliance."
"One of the most valuable features is the GUI front end, which is very easy to use. But I'm also a command-line guy, and being able to access the device via command-line for advanced troubleshooting is quite important."
"You do not have to do everything through a command line which makes it a lot easier to apply rules."
"What's most important is the ease of use."
"Fortinet FortiGate is a stable solution."
"The technical support is great."
"The pipe filter application is an outstanding feature."
"Using this product makes the VPN seamless and almost invisible to me in the sense that I don't have to think about it."
"The technical support in our region is excellent."
"The solution is stable."
"The solution can scale well."
"FMC could be improved because management with FMC is quite difficult compared to using Firepower web-based management."
"I'm working on a slightly older version, but what it needs is a better alert management. It's pretty standard, but there's no real advanced features involved around it."
"Most of the time, when I try to run Java, it is not compatible with ASA's current operating systems."
"There should be more integration with Microsoft Identity."
"The solution’s GUI could be better."
"Cisco should redo their website so it's actually usable in a faster way."
"I would like it if they made the newer generation a bit simpler. You can do ASA code and FXOS. It is just a bit confusing with the newer generational equipment on what it can do."
"I wish the Cisco interface was not so granular. Check Point was easier to create specific rules than with ASAv."
"The support team for Fortinet FortiGate needs to be more customer friendly."
"I could not configure sFlow from the FortiGate graphical user interface. I realized that the sFlow configuration is available only from the CLI, and discovered that sFlow is not supported on virtual interfaces, such as VDOM links, IPsec, or GRE."
"I feel that the reporting needs to be improved."
"It could use better throughput on some of the smaller boxes for the branch offices."
"It can be a little bit more user-friendly in terms of policy definition and implementation. It seems a little bit complicated, and it could be simplified."
"Some of the software stability could improve."
"The Web-filter in this solution is not very good."
"Fortinet FortiGate could improve by having more storage in the hardware for log data."
Cisco Secure Firewall is ranked 4th in Firewalls with 404 reviews while Fortinet FortiGate is ranked 2nd in Firewalls with 306 reviews. Cisco Secure Firewall is rated 8.2, while Fortinet FortiGate 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 writes "It's a reliable solution that's easy to install and cheaper than competitors ". 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 is most compared with Sophos XG, Netgate pfSense, Meraki MX, WatchGuard Firebox and Check Point NGFW. See our Cisco Secure Firewall vs. Fortinet FortiGate report.
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