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.
"The configuration support is very good. You can find a lot of configuration samples and troubleshooting tips on the internet, which is very good."
"This solution helped us to identify the key areas where we need to focus to block traffic that is malicious to our organization."
"We definitely feel more secure. We have more control over things going in and out of our network."
"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."
"I work with Cisco and other partners, but the Cisco team is the best team in our country. When I call them, they always help us."
"Ease of configuration: It has gotten a lot easier to configure compared to the original Cisco Pix."
"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."
"Signature-based detection; user-defined signatures with regular expressions; integrated URL and content filtering; custom URL categories filtering."
"Fortinet FortiGate has many valuable features, such as IDS, and intrusion detection. It has security features that are in part with the technologies that are available in the market."
"Fortinet FortiGate's most valuable features are ease of use, flexibility, and most of the configuration we can be done using the GUI. When we compare Fortinet FortiGate with other solutions the firewall policy are very easy to understand."
"FortiGate has a very strong unified threat management system."
"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."
"It is a one box solution, which covers most of the edge device’s requirements."
"The management console is pretty simple, so anyone who understands networking can initially deploy the solution."
"The secure web gateway module and the application control module are valuable. HA operations are very easy."
"It's very easy to configure."
"I would like to see an IE version of the solution where it is ruggedized."
"This solution could be more granular and user-friendly."
"The maturity needs to be better."
"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."
"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."
"HTTPs inspection and higher throughput/spec would be good."
"The management of the firewalls could be improved because there are a lot of bugs."
"Migration with other appliances is not easy. It has to be done manually, and this takes a long time."
"The renewal price and the availability could be improved."
"Fortinet FortiGate could improve by having more storage in the hardware for log data."
"There are problems with the custom reporting of the unique traffic. The data is there, but it is too difficult for us to extract."
"The Web-filter in this solution is not very good."
"There aren't really any negative aspects to discuss."
"The web-cache feature which was previously on the FortiGate device, but was deleted with the recent upgrade should be returned. It was a very valuable feature for us."
"One issue that I have had is that sometimes I need to monitor the traffic, so I need to filter it according to the user and which user is using it the most. I experience a bottleneck most of the time, particularly at the peak time when the number of contracts and users are at maximum."
"Reporting is limited to providing an external appliance for improving the reporting capabilities of the FortiAnalyzer. It does not offer a central management and is also sold separably as an appliance."
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.
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