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 web filtering feature and the intrusion protection system are the most valuable. It is a resilient appliance. I never had an issue with it in terms of any security breaches."
"The feature I like most is the SD-WAN. It allows you to manage more than one ISP at the same time. And there is a high-availability mode, so if one of your ISPs is down, you still have a backup."
"Fortinet FortiGate's ease of management is the most valuable feature."
"UTM/NGFW features and FortiCloud for logs and backups are awesome."
"The solution can scale well."
"It's very good and very stable for businesses. It works very well."
"The license management is very valuable. You can get a new license each year, or you can enroll every two to four years. You can get the logs, and you will get the information on the risk in your network and the entire organization. With this information, you can take action on your actives, computers, or devices. You can bring your own device as an SSE."
"It's a firewall that secures our internal network. I have been using it since 2013, and I find that most of the features are advanced, and very user friendly."
"The most valuable features of this solution are advanced malware protection, IPS, and IDS."
"URL filtering is valuable."
"It's a flexible solution and is well-known in the community."
"It's a flexible solution."
"They wanted to leverage something which is equivalent that can give them the next gen features like application awareness and intrusion protection. So that is a major reason they were looking forward to this. The original ASA firewall did not have these features. This was the major reason the customer moved on to Cisco Firepower Threat Defense (FTD). Now they can go ahead and leverage those functionalities."
"With the pandemic, people began working from home. That was a pretty big move, having all our users working from a home. More capacity needed to be added to our remote VPN. ASA did this very well."
"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."
"One of the most valuable features is the AMP. It's very good and very reliable when it comes to malicious activities, websites, and viruses."
"We have found that Palo Alto Networks WildFire is scalable. We currently have six thousand users for the product."
"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."
"The graphic user interface of Palo Alto is good and it's easy to configure."
"The backup is the best feature."
"Detailed reporting on analysis of content. The inspections are easily applied to security policy profiles and profile groups, and may be assigned on a per-rule basis."
"The most valuable feature is the Automatic Verdict, to recognize whether something is a threat, or not."
"Scalable ATP solution that's quick to set up. It demonstrates good performance and stability."
"Being an application-based firewall, this is one of the critical focus factors along with the threat prevention services it provides."
"They should improve high CPU and memory usage that occurs."
"There are mainly two areas of improvement in Fortinet FortiGate— the licensing cost and the timing of upgrading licenses for boxes."
"There could be more integration between the logging and analytical platforms to make it more seamless and integrated."
"The support team for Fortinet FortiGate needs to be more customer friendly."
"Some of the web policy reports could be improved."
"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."
"Stability and technical support are the two major issues I have found with Fortinet."
"There aren't really any negative aspects to discuss."
"It's mainly the UI and the management parts that need improvement. The most impactful feature when you're using it is the user interface and the user experience."
"Most of the time, when I try to run Java, it is not compatible with ASA's current operating systems."
"There should be more integration with Microsoft Identity."
"In the future, I would like to be able to use an IP phone over a VPN connection."
"This product is managed using the Firepower Management Center (FMC), but it would be better if it also supported the command-line interface (CLI)."
"Comparing Cisco solution to others, it is expensive, it would be better for it to be cheaper."
"The virtual firewalls don't work very well with Cisco AnyConnect."
"Multiple WAN connections: Even though you can implement more than one interface to outside connections, it is lacking on load balances, etc."
"As a firewall and 360 degrees of security, there needs to be more maturity."
"It would be nice if there was an easier way to install and deploy it, such as through the inclusion of wizards."
"They provide a medium level of technical support."
"In the future, I would like to see more automation in the reporting."
"The deployment model could be better."
"The cost of this solution could still be improved, in particular, giving product discounts for charitable causes."
"The automation and responsiveness need improvement."
"It's not really their problem, it's a problem across the board. There will always be problems with interrupted traffic. We have to set it up where we're playing a middle man game where we're stripping it out, looking at it, and then putting it back together and sending it on its way. That requires CPU cycles. And there's some overhead with that."
Cisco Secure Firewall is ranked 4th in Firewalls with 404 reviews while Palo Alto Networks WildFire is ranked 3rd in ATP (Advanced Threat Protection) 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, Juniper SRX Series Firewall and Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, 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.
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