We performed a comparison between Check Point NGFW and Cisco IOS Security 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."FortiGate has a very strong unified threat management system."
"It's great for capturing the traffic and troubleshooting it."
"The security features are about the best that I've seen anywhere."
"Allows for firewall rules to be programmed and named in a way that makes it “readable”"
"The scalability of Fortinet FortiGate is good."
"I appreciate FortiGate's flexibility, which allows for centralized management through FortiManager."
"The most valuable features are simplicity, management, and that it's constantly evolving."
"The solution is very user friendly. The user interface in particular is quite nice."
"The threat emulation blade and user identity awareness feature has helped us a lot in terms of perimeter security and have given us granular visibility of user access."
"The feature I like the most is their central management, the Smart controller which you can use to manage all the firewalls from one location... Being able to access almost everything in one location — manage all your gateways and get all your logs — for me, is the best feature to work with."
"Newer versions are much more stable."
"AV, IPS, AntiSpam, Sandbox. That's gentlemen set for any basic security, and it was implemented very well. In our reports, the most exciting results belong to AV and IPS. It can be explained by using ThreatCloud - a global knowledge base, which accumulates signatures for all existing and new coming malware, and all the Check Point solutions are always up to date with potential threats."
"Check Point offers excellent security."
"The platform helps our organization to save working hours."
"The features that are important include: IPS, sandbox, SandBlast, Anti-Bot, and URL filtering."
"The SmartView monitor and SmartReporter help us to monitor and report on traffic."
"We use Cisco IOS Security mostly for routers to route off the firewall. It's a next-generation device."
"I've found their network routing to be very good."
"Cisco IOS Security is a mature product with extensive capabilities, serving as the base for the defense layer. It offers good network visibility, which helps in rapid response through the Rapid Threat Containment feature. Its deployment and configuration are straightforward."
"In Pakistan, we only use Cisco because they have good local support infrastructure. Huawei and Fortinet don't offer direct support in Pakistan."
"The most valuable feature is the scalability. The nice thing with the bigger vendors is that they're very good at scale."
"Cisco is head-and-shoulders above all of the competition when it comes to technical support."
"The product's stability is good."
"The solution effectively integrates with Umbrella."
"The UI could be improved."
"They sometimes hide some features and if you want to enable them, you have to go in the CLI, enable the feature and configure it through the CLI. Customers, typically, like everything to be done by the GUI."
"Pricing for it is a bit high. It could be cheaper."
"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 claims it does DLP, but the degree and level of controls are very basic."
"Fortinet FortiGate is a stable solution. However, my issue is the performance only. When I use all the profiles, this affects the performance. From the beginning, I should have had a better sizing of the box."
"There are a lot of bugs I have found in the solution and it is difficult to upgrade. These areas need improvement."
"The logs need to be better. They need to be more visible and easier to access."
"Of the areas of improvement that I want to see in this product, without a doubt, one is the technical support. In this time of globalization, with so many cyberattacks and risks, the Check Point support staff take a long time to attend to incidents due to the high demand."
"When it comes to Check Point's small business gateway series, there might be a need for hardware upgrades, as configuring them can sometimes be a bit challenging."
"The tool’s architecture could be improved a bit."
"One thing to improve is the VSX gateway. It is quite complex to work with VSX and they are quite easy to break if you aren't familiar with them."
"I would like there to be a way to run packets that capture more easily in the GUI environment. Right now, if we want to read packet captures, we have to do so from the command line."
"The area where Check Point can improve is the antivirus, as it only provides a small number of updates for it. Updates should be more frequent."
"Unfortunately, the API is not fully complete and also it is not an API which I would refer to as a RESTful API as there are different endpoints for the same entity."
"The debugging of VPN tunnels is very stressful."
"There could be a bit more functions on offer that could make it easier to use."
"Sometimes I find it difficult to manage. Some configurations are difficult for new engineers, for example."
"We faced significant challenges related to licensing issues, particularly when licenses expire."
"Cisco IOS Security could improve by having more compatibility with other Cisco solutions."
"Signatures and other critical definitions need to be updated more frequently."
"I think they should bring back remote VPN for users."
"Cisco IOS Security's monitoring is rather rudimentary and could be improved."
"The solution’s setup process could be better."
Check Point NGFW is ranked 5th in Firewalls with 275 reviews while Cisco IOS Security is ranked 22nd in Firewalls with 47 reviews. Check Point NGFW is rated 8.8, while Cisco IOS Security is rated 8.0. 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 IOS Security writes "User-friendly and excels in documentation, making it easier to resolve issues". Check Point NGFW is most compared with Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Sophos XG, Cisco Secure Firewall, Netgate pfSense and Azure Firewall, whereas Cisco IOS Security is most compared with Cisco Secure Firewall, Meraki MX, Fortinet FortiOS, Netgate pfSense and OPNsense. See our Check Point NGFW vs. Cisco IOS Security 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.
