We performed a comparison between Cisco IOS Security and Fortinet FortiWeb based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Netgate, Fortinet, OPNsense and others in Firewalls."Security solution with a straightforward and quick setup. It's a stable and scalable product."
"The product offers very good security."
"It is simple to manage, and there are a lot of functionalities in the same box."
"A strong point of FortiGate is the graphical interface is complete and easy to use."
"The features that I have found most valuable are the SD-WAN and their IP4 policy."
"Security, SD-WAN, and Streetscape are valuable features."
"It has improved our security capabilities."
"I have found Fortinet FortiGate to be scalable."
"Cisco IOS Security has many good features, but compared to other solutions, it has a more user-friendly interface with steps to apply and manage rules. Another good part of the solution is that it's more straightforward."
"We use the product for firewalls."
"Previously, anyone in the organization would see any data point in the wall. They could just go and connect their machine with that data point and could access the network. But now, even if someone came and tried that, they will not be given access."
"The VPN was valuable for us because more people are working from home. It has a lot of reporting and easy-to-use management tools."
"The VPN is the most valuable feature."
"Cisco products are very secure and integrate easily with other devices."
"We are able to filter a lot of traffic especially when a lot of the traffic is in layer 7."
"The solution is stable."
"FortiWeb is easy to operate with a reasonably high level of protection. FortiWeb provides multiple deployment options with a physical or virtual (FortiWeb-VM) appliance, and acts either as a reverse/transparent proxy or out-of-band. It is also available on AWS and Azure."
"Also, if you serve files or you accept files with your server, Fortiweb has built-in antivirus. The Fortinet product family also provides good IP intelligence (botnet C&C, etc.)."
"The most valuable feature of Fortinet FortiWeb is the reports and the AI-based features."
"The most valuable feature is that this product represents a whole solution, including a WAF, and even anti-defacements."
"When we had Cisco we had around thirty thousand entries on our firewalls. Now we are down to three thousand. Fortinet has a mechanism to detect all of your entries which are not used, and it can clean it up."
"High-performance and detection engines, provide a high rate of exposure of web attacks."
"This product is very user-friendly."
"The most important feature of this solution is protection from attack."
"The Wi-Fi controller needs a lot of improvement."
"Fortinet FortiGate could improve by adding enhancements to FortiMail, FortiSOAR, and FortiDeceptor."
"Fortinet FortiGate could improve by having more capabilities for troubleshooting VPN connections. For example, I do get some feedback about the current status, but I could use some history and logging of important events. The information is logged in our Syslog server, but I could use that information from the device. If they could provide a GUI to have some more insight on what's going with my VPN would be useful."
"If I had any criticism that I would give FortiGate, it would be that they need to stop changing their logging format. Every time we do a firmware upgrade, it is a massive issue on the SIM. Parsers have to be rebuilt. Even the FortiGate guys came in and said that they don't play well in the sandbox."
"FortiGate support could do some improvements on their IPv6 configuration. Right now it's still in the very early stage for utilizing in an enterprise level network environment."
"In the next release, I would like to see the interface simplified to be more user-friendly."
"They've become quite expensive."
"Price, of course, can always be more competitive or better."
"An area for improvement in Cisco IOS Security is the performance because it's not as stable sometimes. There's also some latency in the solution, which could be improved. Cisco IOS Security integrates with other solutions, but you'll encounter many errors after integration, so this is another area for improvement. I'd like to see enhanced performance and a simplified setup in the next version of Cisco IOS Security."
"The company needs to make its solution more affordable to make it more accessible to larger markets. Otherwise, it's seen as an enterprise-level solution that small or medium-sized organizations can't afford and therefore they won't even look at it."
"The user interface needs to be improved."
"The routers, don't have like long-term tendency features, or higher availability features available for the IOS. It could also use a better user interface."
"I wish it would be more like the next generation firewall technology. There should be more selection between the application and filtering."
"The graphical user interface or the GUI could be better. Beginners can use some devices with the GUI, but some security devices are configured using CLI. It would also be better if it had its own Intrusion Protection Service and Intrusion Detection Service on the server."
"We cannot directly upgrade the system. The tool's deployment is also very difficult in legacy environments. The tool needs to have bigger ports as well."
"There are the usual bugs that are inherent to some software upgrades. Sometimes this provides some unexpected issues, however, it happens with all brands all the time."
"The product's scalability could be better."
"Their support needs improvement."
"The GUI could be better. It's limited."
"Fortinet FortiWeb is not scalable. You'll need more budget to change the hardware."
"Lacks functionalities that are available in other solutions."
"Describing security rules should be improved. It's tricky to define new feature tools when you want to describe an attack pattern and want to block it."
"Fortinet WAF came out recently, and there is not much feedback about customer experience. For each project, customers ask about the scenarios and references of the customers who have implemented this solution, which we don't have. They need to simplify the customer experience and provide more information so that we can propose Fortinet Fortiweb as a WAF solution to customers and convince them. They need to improve their service and training. We need good training to implement and use it properly and know more about it. We still don't know much about Fortinet WAF. We didn't get any proper training sessions. Other vendors like Cisco, Palo Alto, Check Point, and Barracuda provide such sessions. Whenever we receive a request from a customer for this solution, we just give the price. We don't propose this solution because we don't know much about it. We propose whatever we are familiar with and what is supported."
"It may be better if it were easier to create roles."
Cisco IOS Security is ranked 22nd in Firewalls with 47 reviews while Fortinet FortiWeb is ranked 4th in Web Application Firewall (WAF) with 83 reviews. Cisco IOS Security is rated 8.0, while Fortinet FortiWeb is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Cisco IOS Security writes "User-friendly and excels in documentation, making it easier to resolve issues". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Fortinet FortiWeb writes "Cost-effective, easy to configure, and works very well as a single solution for multiple environments". Cisco IOS Security is most compared with Cisco Secure Firewall, Meraki MX, Fortinet FortiOS, Netgate pfSense and OPNsense, whereas Fortinet FortiWeb is most compared with F5 Advanced WAF, Fortinet FortiADC, AWS WAF, Azure Web Application Firewall and Imperva Web Application Firewall.
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