We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Firewall and Fortinet FortiGate-VM based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Features: Cisco Secure Firewall provides important functionalities like protection against threats, visibility into applications, efficient problem-solving, compatibility with other Cisco offerings, and impressive data transfer rates. Fortinet FortiGate-VM stands out for its robust security features, geofencing capabilities, user-friendly interface, and ability to adapt to varying needs.
The reviews highlight various areas where both the Cisco Secure Firewall and the Fortinet FortiGate-VM need improvement, including network performance, policy administration, customization options, centralized management, logging functionality, public cloud functionality, cloud management, technical support, MFA offerings, web filtering options, application inspection, GUI features, availability and delivery, setup process, data center clustering, throughput enhancement, web application firewall integration, integration simplicity, policy customization, and web-filtering configuration improvement.
Service and Support: The opinions on customer service for Cisco Secure Firewall are divided, with some customers appreciating their technical support, while others express concerns about delays and difficulties. Fortinet FortiGate-VM receives mixed reviews, with some satisfied customers and others suggesting that their support could be improved.
Ease of Deployment: The setup process for Cisco Secure Firewall can be more complex depending on the user's familiarity and environment, while Fortinet FortiGate-VM offers a generally straightforward and easy initial setup, with assistance provided by Fortinet.
Pricing: The cost of setting up Cisco Secure Firewall can vary, and some reviewers find it pricey due to additional expenses for licensing, support, and hardware. Fortinet FortiGate-VM is seen as competitive and more affordable than certain alternatives. It provides flexible pricing options and includes support for entitlement in the licensing fees. However, costs may rise when scaling or adding extra features.
ROI: Cisco Secure Firewall offers different levels of ROI depending on how it is used and the overall system design, whereas Fortinet FortiGate-VM delivers enhanced security and stability, potentially resulting in ROI.
Comparison Results: Fortinet FortiGate-VM is the preferred choice when comparing it to Cisco Secure Firewall. Users find the initial setup of Fortinet FortiGate-VM to be straightforward and easy. Fortinet FortiGate-VM is highly praised for its strong security features, user-friendly interface, and easy deployment.
"Fortinet FortiGate is easy to use. Anyone can easily maintain it."
"Fortinet FortiGate is a stable solution."
"The solution is very user friendly. The user interface in particular is quite nice."
"Some of the valuable features are the firewall, IPS, web filter, and gateway capabilities. Additionally, it is easy to use and flexible."
"The SD-WAN feature is the most valuable. This feature evolved from link load balancing. It has helped us in terms of our uptime and privatizing applications whenever we experience an outage. The SD-WAN feature has been a plus for us. Two-factor authentication has allowed us to add more users in terms of remote working. We have two-factor authentication for remote workers to authenticate them before they get on the network."
"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 technical support in our region is excellent."
"The security on offer is very good."
"The Inline Mode configuration works really well, and ASA works very impressively."
"Cisco Secure Firewall has improved our customers' security posture because it offers Next-Gen features, granularity, and reporting on the back of it. You can see the amount of users accessing Office 365, for example, and whether they're having a good or bad experience. You can see the threats that are coming into your network. You can see anyone who is compromised from within your network."
"The IPS, as well as the malware features, are the two things that we use the most and they're very valuable."
"The most valuable feature is the access control list (ACL)."
"If you compare the ASA and the FirePOWER, the best feature with FirePOWER is easy to use GUI. It has most of the same functionality in the Next-Generation FirePOWER, such as IPS, IPS policies, security intelligence, and integration and identification of all the devices or hardware you have in your network. Additionally, this solution is user-friendly."
"The Firepower IPS, based on Snort technology, has an amazing detection engine and historical analysis capability of files that eases threat investigations a lot."
"On the network side, where you create your rules for allowing traffic — what can come inside and what can go out — that works perfectly, if you know what you want to achieve. It protects you."
"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."
"The pricing of the solution is good."
"It is highly scalable because it has a mesh architecture that allows consistent policies."
"The most valuable features are the SD-WAN and the web filtering applications control."
"The solution's initial setup process was very easy."
"Initial setup is very straightforward with a wizard, if needed."
"The functionality provided is very good."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiGate-VM are the ease of use, IPS system, application filter, web filtering, and email security. Additionally, there is a migration tool that other vendors do not provide. We only need to upload the configuration file to the tool, and it converts everything, except the passwords, and gives us the new configuration, which we can directly upload on the firewall. This migration process takes a maximum of 15 minutes."
"The dashboards are a good feature."
"When we cluster the two Fortinet FortiGate boxes together we have some issues."
"Fortinet FortiGate could improve if it had a cloud-managed solution."
"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."
"I don't like that anything more than very basic reporting is not included."
"It would be ideal if they had some sort of GUI interface for troubleshooting and diagnostics."
"Fortinet currently has many products bundled with FortiGate including the basic firewall and load balancer, and I think that that they need to have separate product portfolios for each of these specialized services."
"The support costs and licensing are sometimes so expensive."
"There are some tiny bugs that sometimes affect the operations. In the past revision of it, there was a bug. Because of the bug, we had to downgrade the version. It happened only with the last revision."
"We were also not too thrilled when Cisco announced that in the upcoming new-gen ASA, iOS was not going to be supported, or if you install them, they will not be able to be managed through the Sourcefire. However, it seems like Cisco is moving away from the ASA iOS to the Sourcefire FireSIGHT firmware for the ASA. We haven't had a chance to test it out."
"As it’s a GenX firewall, expertise for both implementation and troubleshooting the pain points can be a challenge. This could be a concern when companies are thinking about buying this product."
"The initial setup was a bit complex. It wasn't a major challenge, but due to our requirements and network, it was not very straightforward but still easy enough."
"The overall licensing structure could improve to make the solution better."
"One issue with Firepower Management Center is deployment time. It takes seven to 10 minutes and that's a long time for deployment. In that amount of time, management or someone else can ask me to change something or to provide permissions, but during that time, doing so is not possible. It's a drawback with Cisco. Other vendors, like Palo Alto or Fortinet do not have this deployment time issue."
"I would like it to be easier to work with and have a better user interface. It is not straightforward. You need to know the Cisco command-line interface."
"I would like to see them release a patch for ASAv with cross-platform FirePower integration."
"Most of the features don't work well, and some features are missing as well."
"Customization needs improvement."
"The performance could be better. Some features need to have quality control when the switch is working. The dedicated bandwidth for some users is not reliable."
"Sizing can be challenging for customers interested in using Fortinet FortiGate-VM."
"Their offering for MFA isn't the cleanest."
"We have encountered certain issues with the bandwidth in respect of the security layer."
"I have had a data issue with physical devices that could improve."
"Capacity-wise, I think the solution's log storage area is something that needs to be increased since, by default, it stores logs for only seven days."
"The biggest area for improvement is storage configuration. It could be smoother."
Cisco Secure Firewall is ranked 4th in Firewalls with 404 reviews while Fortinet FortiGate-VM is ranked 8th in Firewalls with 113 reviews. Cisco Secure Firewall is rated 8.2, while Fortinet FortiGate-VM 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-VM writes "It's a solidly stable device with minimal downtime". Cisco Secure Firewall is most compared with Palo Alto Networks WildFire, Netgate pfSense, Meraki MX, Sophos XG and Juniper SRX Series Firewall, whereas Fortinet FortiGate-VM is most compared with Azure Firewall, Palo Alto Networks VM-Series, Fortinet FortiOS, OPNsense and Zyxel Unified Security Gateway. See our Cisco Secure Firewall vs. Fortinet FortiGate-VM report.
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