We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Firewall, Fortinet FortiGate, 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 very stable and mature."
"One of the best features is the ease of use. It's also easy to teach new engineers to use the ASA CLI."
"Its ability to work with the traffic."
"The VPN is our most widely used feature for Cisco Secure Firewall. Since we were forced into a hybrid working situation by COVID a few years back, VPN is the widely used feature because everybody is working remotely for our agency. So it came in very handy."
"I have found the most valuable feature to be the access control and IPsec VPN."
"The interface is user-friendly."
"URL filtering is valuable."
"Valuable features include AnyConnect, double translations, and an independent IPS module."
"Good performance, stability, and virtual domain ability."
"It is easy to use and performs very well."
"The stability and scalability of this solution are satisfactory. Its SD-WAN, VPN, and URL filtering features are very useful."
"The security on offer is very good."
"Anti-Spam web content filterinG."
"The most valuable feature is the ease of use."
"FortiGate has a strong security topic which allows all of the Fortinet devices to communicate and share information which makes their security more powerful."
"The multi-tenancy feature is most valuable. It integrates very well with FortiManager and FortiAnalyzer."
"They have a reporting system which can store data over a very long period of time. Not many other firewall vendors provide a reporting system, but if they do, like Fortinet does, then you've got buy that as an additional product and that can be more than twice as expensive as the initial investment in the firewall. And without reporting over a long-term period, you're just about wasting your time."
"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."
"After installing the product, we achieved awareness of our data protection needs and email misuse."
"WatchGuard XTM is fairly basic. We use it as the perimeter firewall. The main point is to protect from attack software and hacking."
"SNMP status monitoring and the Central Management Software."
"Monitoring of network activity is included in the box."
"I like the hostwatch because I can see what traffic uses the most bandwidth and I can block that site."
"We found it difficult to publish an antennae sidewalk with the ASDM. I think Cisco should improve this by creating a simpler interface for the firewall."
"<p>If there is old hardware, or appliances, it does not necessarily work with the new Cisco generation firewalls."
"The solution needs to have better logging features."
"They really need support for deployment."
"Also, they have a Firepower source file that I can work on the ASA device and on Firepower devices. A problem here lies in the way that you manage these devices. Some devices do not support the FMC, and some devices have to be managed through ASDM, and others have to be managed through FMC."
"FirePOWER does a good job when it comes to providing us with visibility into threats, but I would like to see a more proactive stance to it."
"One of the few things that are brought up is that for the overall management, it would be great to have a cloud instance of that. And not only just a cloud instance, but one of the areas that we've looked at is using an HA type of cloud. To have the ability to have a device file within a cloud. If we had an issue with one, the other one would pick up automatically."
"In general, they can make it easier to manage the solutions. They can make it easier in terms of administration and provide a single tool for different firewalling solutions. They have different tools to manage different firewalls, such as Firepower or ASA. Sometimes, both are on the same thing. You have ASA with Firepower modules, so you manage some of the things via HTML, and then you manage some of the things via another management tool. It's not seamless."
"Fortinet FortiGate could improve if it had a cloud-managed solution."
"The stability could be a bit better."
"One area for improvement is the performance on the bandwidth demands for smaller devices, as well as better web filtering."
"They should improve the interface to make it more user-friendly."
"The license renewal process, annual renewal price, and the web application firewall features should be improved."
"The solution needs to improve its integration with cybersecurity."
"Some configuration elements cannot be easily altered once created."
"Currently, without the additional reporting module, we only have access to basic reporting."
"Sometimes we have had issues with stability of the product."
"The VPN errors are not helpful when troubleshooting."
"I would like them to improve the product's overall protections. This would be good for all product users."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Syslog (Dimension) is focused on presentation, but needs more focus on utility like SonicWall syslog (GMS/Analyzer)."
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