We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Firewall and OPNsense 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 is highly regarded for its robust threat defense, comprehensive application visibility, effective troubleshooting capabilities, seamless integration with other Cisco products, and reliable high-availability capabilities. OPNsense is praised for its impressive scalability, excellent guest access capabilities, impressive flexibility, unwavering stability, and commendable IDS/IPS features.
Secure Firewall could benefit from enhancements in network performance, policy administration, customization options, and rule creation. It also requires better licensing flexibility, support for standard interfaces, and advanced features like web filtering. The management interface, deployment times, reporting, and logging functionalities should be enhanced as well. OPNsense needs improvements in its user-friendly interface, bandwidth management, multi-provider internet protection, high availability feature, logging, IPS solution, peer-blocking features, installation and deployment process, reporting capabilities, SSL inspection, and learning curve.
Service and Support: The feedback on customer service for Cisco Secure Firewall varies, with certain customers appreciating their technical assistance while others encountered delays and challenges. OPNsense's support has received both positive and negative assessments, with some customers finding it outstanding while others believe there is room for improvement.
Ease of Deployment: The setup process for Cisco Secure Firewall can be complex, relying on the user's knowledge and environment. OPNsense's initial setup is straightforward and does not present major challenges.
Pricing: Cisco Secure Firewall has a costly setup, involving additional expenses for licensing, support, and hardware. OPNsense is more budget-friendly, as the software itself is free, with expenses primarily related to hardware and deployment choices. Additionally, OPNsense provides a free version, whereas Cisco necessitates licensing.
ROI: Cisco Secure Firewall offers varying ROI depending on the use case and organization's architecture. It brings reduced operational costs and enhanced security, leading to positive ROI. OPNsense delivers ROI in under three months by eliminating recurring fees and recouping savings within that timeframe.
Comparison Results: Cisco Secure Firewall is the preferred choice when comparing it to OPNsense. The initial setup for Cisco Secure Firewall was generally considered straightforward and easy, thanks to the availability of Cisco's resources and documentation. Cisco Secure Firewall offers more valuable features such as threat defense, intensive troubleshooting capabilities, integration with other Cisco products, and advanced features like IPS and web filtering.
"It's very easy to set up, it's very easy to make policies and, for an organization, that means you don't need IT expert in firewalls. You just need to have somebody who knows a little bit of IT, and that's it. With other products, you need someone with a "Masters" degree in firewalls."
"I like that they have given me a solution at a fair price."
"The interface is very good."
"Customers are more inclined towards FortiGate because of application control, web filtering, and anti-spam features. The support from the FortiGate team is good, and price-wise, it is affordable."
"This is an easy solution to deploy."
"It does a lot for you for intrusion protection and as an antivirus. The threat management bundle is worth the money. You don't need another company to monitor your web traffic for you. You can do everything yourself on the firewall. You restrict your own black list for people on the firewall. You don't need to pay some other company for another product to do that for you. The firewall can do that for you. So, it's an easy-to-use product for people to be independent. They don't need to rely on other vendors to do what the firewall can do. They can do everything."
"The security features are about the best that I've seen anywhere."
"The most valuable features are that it is very simple to configure and to manage."
"The CLI is the most valuable feature. This solution is very flexible and offers different functionality including firewalls and VPN connectivity."
"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."
"The product is easy to manage and simple. It works with the rest of our Cisco products. You can drop in new ones if you need more performance. The training and documentation provided are good."
"The fact that we can use Firepower Management Center gives us visibility. It allows us to see and manage the traffic that is going through the network."
"The dashboard is the most important thing. It provides good visibility and makes management easy. Firepower also provides us with good application visibility and control."
"The stability of the solution is very good. We can see that it gets even better with every release."
"The technical team is always available when we have problems."
"We moved from a legacy firewall to the ASA with FirePOWER, increasing our Internet Edge defense dramatically."
"It's open source."
"We have found pretty much all the features of the solution to be valuable."
"What I like the most about OPNsense is that it offers an easy-to-use dashboard for device management and control."
"We can open a new VPN connection easily. It's much easier than with Fortinet in our experience."
"URL blocking, Wireguard, Tail Scale, Engine Blocker, and VPN are the most valuable features for me."
"It has firewall and VPN capabilities, which are very valuable features."
"The most valuable feature is the Dual WAN in OPNSense, which offers advanced capabilities."
"The graphic user interface is very good and it is user-friendly which makes the product easy-to-use."
"Fortinet FortiGate is not very easy to use. The navigation could be improved to make it easier to use."
"There are some license issues. Not every feature must have a separate license. There must be some of kind synergy between the license so we don't have to pay for every individual license that we would like to have."
"Currently, without the additional reporting module, we only have access to basic reporting."
"Fortinet FortiGate could improve by having a frequent ask questions(FAQ) area for people to receive quick answers to popular questions. Additionally, it would be beneficial to have an SMS notification feature. For example, if you cannot access your email you could receive an SMS message."
"I feel that the reporting needs to be improved."
"There is room for improvement related to the logging and reporting aspect."
"The non-error conserve mode has room for improvement."
"I would prefer to have more detailed logs within the FortiGate products themselves rather than relying on a separate tool."
"It seems very clunky and slow. I would like to be able to tune it to be a more efficient product."
"The policies module in FMC specifically isn't the most user-friendly. Coming from Cisco ASA, Cisco ASA is a little bit easier to use. When you get into particularly complex deployments where you have a lot of different interfaces and all that kind of stuff, it's a little bit tricky. Some usability improvements there would be nice."
"I would like to see them release a patch for ASAv with cross-platform FirePower integration."
"This product is managed using the Firepower Management Center (FMC), but it would be better if it also supported the command-line interface (CLI)."
"It would be better if we could manage all of our firewalls as a set rather than individually. I would like to see a single pane of glass type of option. We also use another vendor's firewalls and they have a centralized management infrastructure that we have implemented. This infrastructure is a bit easier to manage."
"Managing various product integrations, such as Umbrella, is challenging."
"The Cisco Firewall UI could be improved."
"Multiple WAN connections: Even though you can implement more than one interface to outside connections, it is lacking on load balances, etc."
"The IPS solution could be more reliable."
"I would like to see better SD-WAN performance."
"The ability to set the VPN IP address would be a welcome addition."
"There are issues with stability and reliability."
"There are some add-ons that need enhancements to make management easier for users, especially the reporting features. Some reports don't show the level of detail I'm looking for, and I've had trouble installing certain add-ons, especially for Internet bandwidth shaping within my company."
"We did not like the fact that you have to configure everything with the graphic user interface. We have used other firewalls, such as FortiGate, that you can configure via code. OPNsense is not easy to integrate. When you are deploying via GitHub or another source repository, this is not possible. That's one thing we didn't like much."
"OPNsense could improve by making the configuration more web-based rather than shell or command-line-based."
"The only thing that I would like to see improved is the Insight or the NetFlow analysis part. It would be good to have the possibility to dig down on the Insight platform. Right now, we can easily do only a few analyses. If this page becomes more powerful, it surely will be a well-adopted platform."
Cisco Secure Firewall is ranked 4th in Firewalls with 404 reviews while OPNsense is ranked 3rd in Firewalls with 36 reviews. Cisco Secure Firewall is rated 8.2, while OPNsense 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 OPNsense writes "Good interface and firewall capabilities and overall easy to use". Cisco Secure Firewall is most compared with Palo Alto Networks WildFire, Netgate pfSense, Meraki MX, Sophos XG and SonicWall TZ, whereas OPNsense is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Sophos XG, Untangle NG Firewall, Sophos UTM and WatchGuard Firebox. See our Cisco Secure Firewall vs. OPNsense report.
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