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 wireless control is helpful."
"There are great templates, so you don't have to customize them if you don't want to. You do have the option to custom create some folders and some reports, however, with what is there, you don't really need to go through extra effort, as they already give you a lot of predefined views of reports and so forth."
"Initial setup is straightforward. There weren't too many issues with setting it up. It takes one hour or so."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"The most useful functionality of Fortinet FortiGate is the user interface, multiple engines, and their cloud with the latest integrations. Additionally, the Security Fabric tool is very good."
"The most valuable feature of FortiGate is FortiView which provides proactive monitoring."
"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."
"The technical support is great."
"I like all of the features."
"It provides security for our company and users."
"The management aspect of the product is very straightforward."
"I like the user interface because the navigation is very easy, straightforward on your left side pane you have all the sites that you need to browse. Unlike any other firewalls, it's pretty straightforward."
"Its ability to work with the traffic."
"Clustering architecture which offers zero downtime upgrades, keeping uptime close to 99.999%."
"It integrates with various Cisco security portfolios and products, and there is an easy and seamless integration for building a complete security framework for our customers."
"So far, it has been very stable."
"I have found the most valuable features to be the policies, cache, and the SD-WAN."
"The stability of Fortinet FortiOS is great."
"FortiOS allows us to set up alarms for blocked websites and SSL verifications. When someone tries to access a blocked site, the solution sends a notification to the IT manager's mailbox."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiOS are the granular control and their interoperability is good."
"It's easy to use."
"FortiOS's most valuable feature is a next-generation firewall that can be used as the APT solution in advanced threat protection."
"The classification of the websites is helpful."
"This is an easy means of setting up high-availabilty firewall protection."
"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."
"FortiOS is not simple."
"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."
"The solution can have more features in a single box that can be multi-applied to integrate everything."
"If they could extend their fabric towards other vendor environments for integration, that would be great."
"If they had better integration with security products, such as Cisco ISE or Rapid Threat Containment, then it would be an improvement."
"Backup can be improved."
"Fortinet FortiGate is a stable solution. However, my issue is the performance only. When I use all the profiles, this affects the performance. From the beginning, I should have had a better sizing of the box."
"Even on a smaller scale, people are finding you need HA pairs, and there's no way that the ASA can do that, at least in the virtual version."
"The stability could be better because we have a lot of issues with the stability of Cisco Firepower."
"FlexConfig is there as a bridge for features that are not yet natively integrated into Firepower. It is a way of allowing you to be able to configure things that wouldn't otherwise be possible until the development team can add them into Firepower's native capability. There is still some work that needs to be done around FlexConfig. There are still quite a few complex things, like policy-based routing, that have to be done in FlexConfig, and it doesn't always work perfectly. Sometimes, there are some glitches. It is recommended that you configure FlexConfig policies with Cisco TAC. It would be good to see Cisco accelerate some of those configurations that you can only do in FlexConfig into the platform, so that they are there natively."
"In NGFW, Cisco should be aligned with the new technology and inspection intelligence because Cisco is far behind in this pipeline."
"The Cisco Secure Firewall could benefit from enhancements in its API, documentation, and automation tools."
"The ASA needs to incorporate the different modules you have to integrate to achieve UTM functions, especially for small businesses."
"The most valuable features of the product are the VPN and the NextGen firewall features such as application control, URL filtering, etc."
"The integration between different tools could be improved. For example, with SecureX, I am yet to find out how to forward security events to different tools such as Microsoft Sentinel, which is what we use for log detection."
"Real-time threat monitoring is not there."
"Lacks flexibility for different scenario configurations."
"For me, it is important to be able to block VPN applications, like Facebook, so I would like to see that included in the next release. With this version, if you want to block or allow a site, you now have to drag all the domains related to this site."
"In the future I would like to see more user-friendly dashboards and a drop in the price."
"Right now, we have to contend with CLI. We'd like it to be easier. We need the features to be in a UI."
"I would like to see smaller and more frequent updates."
"For monitoring purposes, we don't have any option to monitor the ISP link."
"Fortinet FortiOS can improve the GUI and remove the command line interface. All the functionality should be available from the GUI. Day-to-day management can be tough for IT administrators. Additionally, the reporting is not very good."
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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