We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Firewall and Fortinet Fortigate based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Based on the parameters we compared, Fortinet Fortigate comes out on top. Its ease of deployment combined with its solid set of features and excellent service and support ratings make it a more desirable solution than Cisco Secure Firewall.
"I like them mostly because they don't break and they have great diagnostics."
"The transparency of the single UI to ensure security. A product has to be simple so that an administrator can use it."
"The most important feature is the VPN connection."
"I like that it is easy to change the settings."
"The protection and security features, like URL filtering, the inspection, and the IPS feature, are also very valuable for us. We don't have IT staff at most of the sites so for us it's important to have a robust firewall at those sites"
"Logging is great. It will show when it reaches its capacity before it is too late, unless you have bursts of traffic."
"Cisco has the best documentation. You can easily find multiple documents by searching the web. Even a child can go online and find the required information."
"I have access to the web version of Cisco Talos to see the reputation of IP addresses. I find this very helpful. It provides important information for my company to obtain the reputation of IP addresses. The information in Talos is quite complete."
"There are lots of features and most of them are deployed for internet security. Users are protected if they accidentally go to some malicious sites."
"Valuable features include the Web Application Firewall, and it even has DLP (data leak prevention)."
"FortiGate improved our security. It's one of the best hardware firewalls."
"The customization potential is quite impressive."
"The simplicity of the product is great. It's very easy to use, which is a compliment we get all the time in terms of feedback."
"The most valuable feature of Fortinet FortiGate is the simple configuration."
"The product is very stable, easy to troubleshoot, and configure, so it has reduced the time it takes for support."
"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."
"Firewalls, in general, were not really designed for normal IT personnel, but for firewall and network experts. Therefore, they missed a lot of options and did not provide any good reporting or improvement options."
"I would say that in inexperienced hands, the interface can be kind of overwhelming. There are just a lot of options. Too much, if you don't know what you are looking for or trying to do."
"I would like the ability to drill down into certain reports because currently, that cannot be done."
"I don't have any specific improvements to recommend. However, when you compare the throughput of a Cisco firewall to the competitors, especially Fortinet, what you find is that Cisco has lagged a little bit behind in terms of firewall throughput, especially for the price that you pay for that throughput."
"Cisco should improve its user interface design. There is a deep learning curve to the product if you are a newcomer."
"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."
"In terms of functionality, there isn't much to improve. There could be more bandwidth and better interface speed."
"Cisco should work on ASDM. One of the biggest drawbacks of Cisco ASA is ASDM GUI. Cisco should improve the ASDM GUI. The configuration through ASDM is really difficult as compared to CLI. Sometimes when you are doing the configuration in ASDM, it suddenly crashes. It also crashes while pushing a policy. Cisco should really work on this."
"The customization could be improved. Cisco, for example, is much better at this. They need to work to be at least as good as they are."
"Difficult to add or define, and not that easy to configure and manage."
"I would like Fortinet to add more automation to FortiGate."
"The main aspect of FortiGate that could be improved is load balancing. Our management team does not want to buy another appliance for only load balancing."
"The monitor and the visibility, in this proxy, is very weak."
"A sandbox would be good in order to be able to inspect the emails containing spam and be able to validate the emails that contain malware, prior to delivering to the customer."
"It could use better throughput on some of the smaller boxes for the branch offices."
"Improvement is needed in the Web Filter quotas to restrict users with allocated quotas."
Cisco Secure Firewall is ranked 4th in Firewalls with 404 reviews while Fortinet FortiGate is ranked 2nd in Firewalls with 306 reviews. Cisco Secure Firewall is rated 8.2, while Fortinet FortiGate 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 writes "It's a reliable solution that's easy to install and cheaper than competitors ". Cisco Secure Firewall is most compared with Palo Alto Networks WildFire, Netgate pfSense, Meraki MX, Sophos XG and Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, whereas Fortinet FortiGate is most compared with Sophos XG, Netgate pfSense, Meraki MX, Check Point NGFW and WatchGuard Firebox. See our Cisco Secure Firewall vs. Fortinet FortiGate 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.
