We performed a comparison between Check Point NGFW and Cisco Secure Firewall based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Check Point users are happier with its VPN and with its pricing. However, Cisco Secure users are happier with its service and support.
"The GUI is good."
"Provides good firewall security and has great VPN features."
"We are very happy with the general bandwidth agility we have seen from one website to another website."
"Customers want to load balance more than eight lines or six internet lines. FortiGate is the only solution that can accomplish this."
"The Intrusion Prevention System and the web filtering are both working well."
"The technical support is great."
"What I like the most is the configuration and that it's simple, and straightforward to maintain."
"The stability and scalability of this solution are satisfactory. Its SD-WAN, VPN, and URL filtering features are very useful."
"The management interface is easy to operate and is a standardized way of managing different firewall modules in the same client application."
"The event logs are relatively informative and can provide information on why traffic was accepted or rejected."
"There are also additional features, compared to a Layer 4 or Layer 3 firewall, such as AV signatures and devices, which are very helpful for securing the company's network."
"One of the most valuable features is performance improvement, wherewith ClusterXL and CoreXL, you can improve performance."
"It is user-friendly and straightforward to manage, which simplifies our overall network security management."
"We use Check Point to complete the network compliance rules."
"The solution is scalable."
"One of the benefits that we have realized from using this product is that the user interface makes it easier to operate, compared to using the CLI."
"Firepower has been used for quite a few enterprise clients. Most of our clients are Fortune 500 and Firepower is used to improve their end to end firewall functionality."
"I like that it is easy to change the settings."
"IPSec Tunnel and AnyConnect (of course), the context awareness was a good feature, but clumsy at the beginning. I think it's better now."
"The most valuable feature of the Firepower solution is FireSIGHT, which can be easily managed and is user-friendly."
"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."
"What I like about Cisco is the security zone. By default when you configure it, it gives you a security zone, which other firewalls don't have."
"The primary benefits of using Cisco Secure solutions are time-saving, a robust API, and convenience for the security team."
"Cisco ASA provides us with very good application visibility and control."
"It would be good if they had fewer updates."
"The customization could be improved. Cisco, for example, is much better at this. They need to work to be at least as good as they are."
"Fortinet FortiGate could improve by having more storage in the hardware for log data."
"The initial setup and configuration are not intuitive and require training."
"They are doing good, but they can improve the distributor assignment. The availability of the product and the timeline of delivery are the main things. The distribution should be swift, and the distributor should not reach out to end customers directly. They should work as a distributor. There should also be one more local distributor. Currently, there is only one distributor in Pakistan, and the rest of them are in UAE. It is difficult to work with only one distributor. Sometimes, you don't get along with the same distributor, and that's why they should have one more distributor. Their licensing should also be improved. The activation or renewal of the product should be done from the date of renewal, not from the date on which the license expired."
"It could use more templates for third-party site-to-site VPN setups other than FortiGate and Cisco."
"Fortigate's hardware capacities could be improved."
"We would like to have the ability to disable some of the security functionalities."
"The whole solution has room for improvement."
"When you want to open the gateway by double-clicking on the interface, sometimes it can cause silly problems such as freezing."
"Geo-blocking would be very useful. There are too many attempts to infiltrate by non-country users. I can block access by IP address or IP network, however, a country-level blocking would be more useful and much quicker to implement."
"The speed of technical support is very slow and is something that should be improved."
"This product has room for improvement in technical support for Africa."
"I still don't have access to the reporting service."
"When installed on Windows, the system with low storage space slows down."
"One of the most complicated aspects is the VPN Configuration, which should be simplified in future releases."
"Implementations require the use of a console. It would help if the console was embedded."
"The ASA needs to incorporate the different modules you have to integrate to achieve UTM functions, especially for small businesses."
"It is surprising that you need to have a virtual appliance for the Firepower Management Center. It is not good if you have to setup a VMware server just for it."
"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."
"We use the FTD management platform for the boxes. The GUI that manages multiple Firepower boxes could be improved so that the user experience is better."
"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."
"We only have an issue with time sync with Cisco ASA and NTP. If the time is out of sync, it will be a disaster for the failover."
"There is room for improvement in the stability or software quality of the product. There were a few things in the past where we had a little bit of a problem with the product, so there is room for improvement."
Check Point NGFW is ranked 5th in Firewalls with 275 reviews while Cisco Secure Firewall is ranked 4th in Firewalls with 404 reviews. Check Point NGFW is rated 8.8, while Cisco Secure Firewall is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Check Point NGFW writes "Good antivirus protection and URL filtering with very good user identification capabilities". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Cisco Secure Firewall writes "Highlights and helps us catch Zero-day vulnerabilities traveling across our network". Check Point NGFW is most compared with Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Sophos XG, Netgate pfSense, Azure Firewall and OPNsense, whereas Cisco Secure Firewall is most compared with Palo Alto Networks WildFire, Netgate pfSense, Meraki MX, Sophos XG and OPNsense. See our Check Point NGFW vs. Cisco Secure Firewall 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.