We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Firewall and McAfee StoneGate [EOL] based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Netgate, Fortinet, OPNsense and others in Firewalls."I like several features that this product has, such as antivirus and internet navigation inspection. It is also simple to use."
"With FortiClient, you can easily connect when you are home, check out what you want to do, and connect to your network when you are not at work. You can switch on servers and you can check what is wrong."
"The pipe filter application is an outstanding feature."
"The web filtering facility and application control are the most valuable features from the point of view of our clients. The VPN feature is also quite popular amongst our clients. Two-factor authentication is one of the good features in Fortinet. These features are important for the current scenario of security. Security has become a necessity nowadays. With cyber-attacks becoming more common, protecting an organization's data is one of the major tasks. It is also very stable and scalable, and it is very straightforward to configure. Their technical support is also good."
"FortiGate firewalls are user-friendly, and I like the security profiling features."
"The next-gen features, the unified threat management capabilities are something that just about everybody is interested in at this point."
"The most valuable feature is the web filter."
"Valuable features include the Web Application Firewall, and it even has DLP (data leak prevention)."
"The most valuable feature is that it has the ability to divide the network into three parts; internal, external, and DMZ."
"I found that setting up rules for HTTPS and SSH access to the management interface are straightforward, including setting the cypher type."
"This solution helped us to identify the key areas where we need to focus to block traffic that is malicious to our organization."
"Among the top features are integrated threat defence and the fact that each virtual appliance is separate so you get great granular control."
"Being able to use it as a policy-based VPN is valuable. It's very easy to understand. It's very easy to troubleshoot."
"The most important features are the intrusion prevention engine and the application visibility and control. The Snort feature in Firepower is also valuable."
"For us, the most valuable features are the IPX and the Sourcefire Defense Center module. That gives us visibility into the traffic coming in and going out, and gives us the heads-up if there is a potential outbreak or potential malicious user who is trying to access the site. It also helps us see traffic generated by an end device trying to reach out to the world."
"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."
"It works well with a highly-active cluster."
"We did not have issues with scalabiliy."
"The improvement is related to logs. Instead of the CLI, we should be able to have more insights into the logs of the firewall in the GUI."
"One area for improvement is the performance on the bandwidth demands for smaller devices, as well as better web filtering."
"I'm not sure if it's something that they already have or are developing something, however, we need some dedicated features for container security."
"I would like reporting to be improved and should offer a lot more tools to monitor the products."
"Technical support is good but the response time could be faster."
"Usually, we sell the bundle with the UTM or threat management piece with IPS, IDS. Other providers, such as Palo Alto, are ahead in terms of safe functionality. So, for me, delivering truly safe service is probably something that still needs to be improved."
"Fortinet needs more memory to save the log files. We need it to save the logs on the hardware and not in the cloud. I know this feature is available in FortiCloud, but if we need this log locally, it is not available."
"Fortinet needs to overhaul its documentation."
"The main problem we have is that things work okay until we upgrade the firmware, at which point, everything changes, and the net stops working."
"The user interface for the Firepower management console is a little bit different from traditional Cisco management tools. If you look at products we already use, like Cisco Prime or other products that are cloud-based, they have a more modern user interface for managing the products. For Firepower, the user interface is not very user-friendly. It's a little bit confusing sometimes."
"We use the FTD management platform for the boxes. The GUI that manages multiple Firepower boxes could be improved so that the user experience is better."
"My team tells me that other solutions such as Fortinet and Palo Alto are easier to implement."
"Cisco Secure Firewall's integration with cloud providers has room for improvement. We could do more in terms of integration, for example, if we had a tag on an instance."
"There is limited data storage on the appliance itself. So, you need to ship it out elsewhere in order for you to store it. The only point of consideration is around that area, basically limited storage on the machine and appliance. Consider logging it elsewhere or pushing it out to a SIEM to get better controls and manipulation over the data to generate additional metrics and visibility."
"Setting it up is not as intuitive as other more modern NGFWs."
"The solution’s GUI could be better."
"After some experience with the solution, we had to do some redesign, but generally, we were happy with the product."
Earn 20 points
Cisco Secure Firewall is ranked 4th in Firewalls with 404 reviews while McAfee StoneGate [EOL] doesn't meet the minimum requirements to be ranked in Firewalls. Cisco Secure Firewall is rated 8.2, while McAfee StoneGate [EOL] is rated 7.0. 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 McAfee StoneGate [EOL] writes "The HA cluster had issues during deployment, but the solution gives us better application control than with our previous solution". Cisco Secure Firewall is most compared with Palo Alto Networks WildFire, Netgate pfSense, Meraki MX, Sophos XG and Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, whereas McAfee StoneGate [EOL] is most compared with .
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