We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Firewall vs Palo Alto Network Wildfire based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Based on the parameters we compared, with all other factors being more or less equal, Cisco Secure Firewall comes in a bit ahead of Palo Alto simply because of their stronger support.
"The tool is a nice product and easy to handle. The software's user interface is also good. You can easily implement remote access in the solution."
"Whenever I need something, Fortinet improves and updates the software for me."
"The solution has very good threat and content filtering switches."
"Reliability is the best feature. We faced some issues when we were setting it up, but the service, portal, and administration are good."
"You can purchase switches and you don't need to do anything with them. You just put in the firewall and the switches get all the policies and rules that you already have in the firewall. With Fortinet, you just connect the FortiSwitch to the Fortinet and that's it."
"The most valuable features are simplicity, management, and that it's constantly evolving."
"Customers want to load balance more than eight lines or six internet lines. FortiGate is the only solution that can accomplish this."
"The most valuable feature is the web filter."
"ASA is stable and with a low level of work required on the maintenance side."
"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."
"We can shift traffic, block certain content, or redirect policies."
"It has definitely improved our organization. It gives us remote connectivity, helps workers connect remotely, and also gives us good connectivity to our other branches."
"The information coming from Talos does a good job... I like the fact that Cisco is working with them and getting the information from them and updating the firewall."
"The security features are the most valuable. My customers find the security products very useful because nowadays there are many threats from the internet and other malicious users. The security products really help."
"Cisco tech is always good and helpful. I would rate them as 10 out of 10."
"The firepower sensors have been great; they do a good job of dropping unwanted traffic."
"You have better control because you define apps. You just don't define ports. You define apps, and the apps are monitored in the traffic. It is more specific than the Cisco firewall when it comes to our needs."
"The most valuable feature is the Automatic Verdict, to recognize whether something is a threat, or not."
"It is stable and pretty much scalable."
"The solution has plenty of features."
"The graphic user interface of Palo Alto is good and it's easy to configure."
"Being an application-based firewall, this is one of the critical focus factors along with the threat prevention services it provides."
"Installing this product as a datacenter firewall for segregation and segmentation, and also configuring policies between zones has improved my organization."
"I love the idea of Palo Alto Networks WildFire. It's more geared toward preventing malware. If someone's laptop or phone is malware-infected, the tool prevents it from uploading valuable corporate data outside the corporate network. That's what I love about Palo Alto Networks WildFire. It stops malware in its tracks."
"One issue that I have had is that sometimes I need to monitor the traffic, so I need to filter it according to the user and which user is using it the most. I experience a bottleneck most of the time, particularly at the peak time when the number of contracts and users are at maximum."
"Fortinet FortiGate needs to improve to be on par with its competitors, such as Palo Alto and Sophos. They are the market leaders. Fortinet FortiGate needs to improve its capabilities. However, we are happy with Fortinet FortiGate."
"The firewall engine is not so strong as of now, in my opinion... My second concern is that, while they have Zero-day vulnerability and anti-malware features, the threat engine needs to be strengthened, its efficiency can be increased."
"They should improve the interface to make it more user-friendly."
"The cloud features can be improved."
"It needs to improve its ISP load balancing."
"If they could extend their fabric towards other vendor environments for integration, that would be great."
"My only complaint about FortiGate is a lack of QinQ VLAN tunneling. I haven't found this feature in any Fortinet product. You can do this on all Cisco routers, including the smaller models. However, QinQ isn't available on the biggest, most expensive Fortinet units. They still don't have that. I think now we're on software version 6.0, and they still haven't found a solution for QinQ. It isn't a dealbreaker, but that's my main complaint."
"Its interface is sometimes is a little bit slow, and it can be improved. When you need to put your appliance in failover mode, it is a little difficult to do it remotely because you need to turn off the appliance in Cisco mode. In terms of new features, it would be good to have AnyConnect VPN with Firepower. I am not sure if it is available at the moment."
"The ASAs are being replaced with the new Firepowers and they have a different type of structure in the configuration to be able to migrate from one to the other."
"They should work on making it a little more intuitive for users and not quite as complex. Still, it's a good product."
"It should have an additional “operating mode”, like a “candidate configuration mode”, where you would have the possibility to test the changes you are going to implement and also the possibility to validate these changes."
"It is a good firewall, though not NextGen."
"In NGFW, Cisco should be aligned with the new technology and inspection intelligence because Cisco is far behind in this pipeline."
"It should have packets, deep level inspections and controls, like the features which other IPS solutions used to have."
"I wouldn't give them a ten. Nobody is perfect. I'll give them a nine because they help me with any issues I've had."
"I would give this product a rating of 9 out of 10 due to some slight issues of performance."
"The cost of this solution could still be improved, in particular, giving product discounts for charitable causes."
"The technical support response needs improvement."
"I would like to see them continue on their developmental roadmap for the product."
"The only problem with this solution is the cost. It's expensive."
"They can keep on doing more updates. As new malware and viruses are coming out, they can make sure that WildFire is up to date."
"There are some formats that the solution cannot support ."
"Other vendors have some sort of bandwidth management built into the firewall itself and Palo Alto is missing that."
Cisco Secure Firewall is ranked 4th in Firewalls with 404 reviews while Palo Alto Networks WildFire is ranked 3rd in Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) with 58 reviews. Cisco Secure Firewall is rated 8.2, while Palo Alto Networks WildFire 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 Palo Alto Networks WildFire writes "Good technical support and provides automatic analysis that saves us time in filtering email". Cisco Secure Firewall is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Meraki MX, Sophos XG, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls and Juniper SRX Series Firewall, whereas Palo Alto Networks WildFire is most compared with Proofpoint Email Protection, Juniper SRX Series Firewall, Fortinet FortiSandbox, Check Point SandBlast Network and Zscaler Internet Access.
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.
