We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Firewall and Fortinet FortiOS 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.
"The technical support in our region is excellent."
"The most valuable feature is the ease of use."
"It is a good source for firewall protection."
"The pricing is great and very reasonable."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the analytics."
"We were looking for the VPN feature and controlling the inflow and outflow of all the traffic within the site and across the sites. We are also using it for the VPN and VLANs."
"FortiGate improved our security. It's one of the best hardware firewalls."
"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."
"I have found the stability of this solution really good. This is why I use it."
"Integration with all the other Cisco tools is valuable."
"The most valuable features of Cisco firewalls are the IPS and IDS items. We find them very helpful. Those are the biggest things because we have some odd, custom-made products in our environment. What we've found through their IPS and IDS is that their vulnerability engines have caught things that are near-Zero-day items, inside of our network."
"One of the nice things about Firepower is that you can set it to discover the environment. If that is happening, then Firepower is learning about every device, software operating system, and application running inside or across your environment. Then, you can leverage the discovery intelligence to get Firepower to select the most appropriate intrusion prevention rules to use for your environment rather than picking one of the base policies that might have 50,000 IPS rules in it, which can put a lot of overhead on your firewall. If you choose the recommendations, as long as you update them regularly, you might be able to get your rule set down to only 1,000 or 1,500, which is a significant reduction in a base rule set. This means that the firewall will give you better performance because there are less rules being checked unnecessarily. That is really useful."
"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."
"The product is easy to manage and simple. It works with the rest of our Cisco products. You can drop in new ones if you need more performance. The training and documentation provided are good."
"Management Console and user profiling to define activities."
"The grouping of the solutions helps save time. If you have a problem and you have a high-level overview of the system, you can easily dig deeper into the problem. For example, I can check to see why ASA isn't working but the reason for the outage is actually because of Duo. I can spend a lot of time working in the wrong direction because I didn't have an overview."
"FortiOS' most valuable features are management, security, and easy updates with no downtime."
"The solution is extremely scalable."
"The VDOM (Virtual DOM) is a virtualized firewall that has some opportunities for flexibility that are an advantage in certain configurations."
"A good network security system for medium-sized businesses with an excellent GUI interface that gives a graphic view of network status."
"I like that the firewall gives me a lot of control in terms of outgoing and inbound traffic, and it scores better in deep packet inspections when compared with the Azure Firewall."
"It's very easy to use."
"There are many useful features, such as web security and advanced threat detection."
"The most important features of Fortinet FortiOS are the ability to block and make white and black lists. Additionally, the filtering of user access to websites is useful."
"The support we receive when we need to upgrade is not satisfactory and has room for improvement."
"Some of the features in the graphical user interface do not work, which requires that we used the command-line-interface."
"In the next release, I would like to see the interface simplified to be more user-friendly."
"There are some tiny bugs that sometimes affect the operations. In the past revision of it, there was a bug. Because of the bug, we had to downgrade the version. It happened only with the last revision."
"Fortinet FortiGate is a firewall solution and once it's deployed, you can rest assured that your system is secure."
"The platform's interface could improve."
"Fortinet FortiGate should improve the VPN tokens."
"Fortinet FortiGate could improve by having more storage in the hardware for log data."
"Cisco ASDM is a problem because it is old."
"One feature lacking is superior anti-virus protection, which must be added."
"The product needs real-time logs to be able to monitor our services, so we can know if any our services have been blocked via the firewall or on the application side."
"The reporting and other features are nice, but there is an issue with applying the configuration. That part needs some improvement."
"It is expensive."
"One thing that Cisco could improve is the GUI. The graphic user interface should be more user-friendly."
"FMC could be improved because management with FMC is quite difficult compared to using Firepower web-based management."
"The Firepower FTD code is missing some old ASA firewalls codes. It's a small thing. But Firepower software isn't missing things that are essential, anymore."
"The additional features I would like to see included in the next release is better troubleshooting and reporting."
"Fortinet FortiOS can improve the monitoring function, it could be more accurate, easy to use, and understandable."
"The complexity of the VPNs should be improved."
"In terms of what needs improvement, the pricing could be lower. The price is very steep."
"The reporting for this solution could be improved. It could also be more stable and offer better pricing."
"The product needs a feature that allows users to create another site on a VPN."
"Right now, we have to contend with CLI. We'd like it to be easier. We need the features to be in a UI."
"While it is a solid solution, there are some product limitations which exclude it from deployment in some situations."
Cisco Secure Firewall is ranked 4th in Firewalls with 404 reviews while Fortinet FortiOS is ranked 15th in Firewalls with 73 reviews. Cisco Secure Firewall is rated 8.2, while Fortinet FortiOS 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 FortiOS writes "Provides effective filtering features, good stability but initial setup is moderately challenging". 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 FortiOS is most compared with Fortinet FortiManager, Fortinet FortiWeb, Fortinet FortiGate-VM, Infoblox Advanced DNS Protection and Zyxel Unified Security Gateway. See our Cisco Secure Firewall vs. Fortinet FortiOS report.
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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.
