We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Firewall and Zscaler Internet Access 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."We can detect any attack of viruses or malware at the first point of contact."
"It's great for capturing the traffic and troubleshooting it."
"The user interface (UI) is very, very good."
"The main reason why I purchased the particular unit was that it had good reviews and what other people were saying as far as its completeness and its leading capabilities in terms of endpoint security was very good."
"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."
"There are great templates, so you don't have to customize them if you don't want to. You do have the option to custom create some folders and some reports, however, with what is there, you don't really need to go through extra effort, as they already give you a lot of predefined views of reports and so forth."
"It can expand easily."
"It's very fast and easy to configure."
"Even in very big environments, Cisco comes in handy with configuration and offers reliability when it comes to managing multiple items on one platform."
"ASA integrates with FirePOWER, IPS functionality, malware filtering, etc. This functionality wasn't there in the past. With its cloud architecture, Cisco can filter traffic at the engine layer. Evasive encryptions can be entered into the application, like BitTorrent or Skype. This wasn't possible to control through a traditional firewall."
"The management aspect of the product is very straightforward."
"Stability is perfect. I haven't had any problems."
"The web interface was easy for me. The configuration is logical, so it's easy to use and easy to understand how to protect, how to open a port, how to manage and how to route a device. That's why I prefer Cisco. It's robust and I never have issues with the hardware. That's why I choose Cisco and not another vendor."
"The most valuable feature for the customers is that they can control what communication is allowed and what is not allowed. That is, they can allow or deny client traffic."
"It is very stable."
"The technical support is excellent. I would rate it as 10 out of 10. When there has been an issue, we have had a good response from them."
"The solution offers a distributed organization to master and to control all of the endpoints."
"The most valuable feature is bandwidth control."
"Zscaler Internet Access's roaming user feature is most valuable and is much better compared to other secure web gateways."
"The initial setup is very straightforward."
"The protection is most valuable."
"The most valuable feature of Zscaler Internet Access is that it is a consolidated solution, it comes with many features, such as DLP."
"The best thing about Zscaler Internet Access is the website filtering. In the UAE it's quite an important feature because most of the malware comes through the SQL injection and through downloads from websites. Zscaler helps protect against that."
"The solution is scalable and stable."
"The updates Fortinet provides are sometimes unstable."
"In terms of what could be improved, the SD-WAN is quite difficult, because if you install the new box, 15 is okay, but if you change from an old configuration, if there is already configuration and a policy when you change to SD-WAN, you must change the whole policy that you see in the interface."
"The solution could be more evenly structured."
"There aren't really any negative aspects to discuss."
"FortiGate should have a better way of detecting and managing the system memory because otherwise if the memory is too low, a system restart is required."
"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."
"Fortigate's hardware capacities could be improved."
"If I had any criticism that I would give FortiGate, it would be that they need to stop changing their logging format. Every time we do a firmware upgrade, it is a massive issue on the SIM. Parsers have to be rebuilt. Even the FortiGate guys came in and said that they don't play well in the sandbox."
"The ability to integrate (as options) all-in-one features -- like anti-spam, anti-virus, etc."
"We would like to see improvement in recovery. If there is an issue that forces us to do recovery, we have to restart or reboot. In addition, sometimes we have downtime during the maintenance windows. If Cisco could enhance this, so that upgrades would not necessarily require downtime, that would be helpful."
"Initial setup was fairly complex."
"Most of the features don't work well, and some features are missing as well."
"The stability and the product features have to really be worked on."
"For what we use it for, it ends up being the perfect product for us, but it would help if they could expand it into some of the other areas and other use cases working with speeding up and the reliability of the pushes from the policy manager."
"Cisco makes horrible UIs, so the interface is something that should be improved."
"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 interface for administration could be better. They should upgrade the management portal."
"The reporting functionality could be a bit easier to use. There is a reporting function, but it's quite hard to do any good reporting, from a user-management perspective. For example, if a department manager wants to know how his department is using the web, there is a way to get the data, but it's quite cumbersome to get it and show it well. And that's true for comparing between departments."
"One thing that needs to be improved is their presence in China. I'm not sure if that's a Zscaler thing or if it's a problem with all vendors in this space, but it would be nice to have better coverage in China. This concern is a common one for vendors across the board when dealing with the Chinese market."
"When you have appliances, SSL inspection is always a headache due to poor performance and/or lack of ciphers implemented. "
"In every cloud service in the world, you have multiple upstream internet providers to create diversity so that if one of your providers fails, your network just continues. In South Africa, there is only one upstream provider, and that's not right. That that's a problem."
"Cloud App’s database should be improved."
"Zscaler Internet Access can improve by adding traffic filtering based on the DNS."
"In terms of user experience, it could be better."
Cisco Secure Firewall is ranked 4th in Firewalls with 404 reviews while Zscaler Internet Access is ranked 2nd in Secure Web Gateways (SWG) with 46 reviews. Cisco Secure Firewall is rated 8.2, while Zscaler Internet Access is rated 8.2. 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 Zscaler Internet Access writes "Provides integrated CASB and file sandboxing but could be less expensive ". Cisco Secure Firewall is most compared with Palo Alto Networks WildFire, Netgate pfSense, Meraki MX, Sophos XG and Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, whereas Zscaler Internet Access is most compared with Cisco Umbrella, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, Netskope , Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks and Appgate SDP. See our Cisco Secure Firewall vs. Zscaler Internet Access report.
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