We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Firewall and Fortinet FortiGate-VM based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Features: Cisco Secure Firewall provides important functionalities like protection against threats, visibility into applications, efficient problem-solving, compatibility with other Cisco offerings, and impressive data transfer rates. Fortinet FortiGate-VM stands out for its robust security features, geofencing capabilities, user-friendly interface, and ability to adapt to varying needs.
The reviews highlight various areas where both the Cisco Secure Firewall and the Fortinet FortiGate-VM need improvement, including network performance, policy administration, customization options, centralized management, logging functionality, public cloud functionality, cloud management, technical support, MFA offerings, web filtering options, application inspection, GUI features, availability and delivery, setup process, data center clustering, throughput enhancement, web application firewall integration, integration simplicity, policy customization, and web-filtering configuration improvement.
Service and Support: The opinions on customer service for Cisco Secure Firewall are divided, with some customers appreciating their technical support, while others express concerns about delays and difficulties. Fortinet FortiGate-VM receives mixed reviews, with some satisfied customers and others suggesting that their support could be improved.
Ease of Deployment: The setup process for Cisco Secure Firewall can be more complex depending on the user's familiarity and environment, while Fortinet FortiGate-VM offers a generally straightforward and easy initial setup, with assistance provided by Fortinet.
Pricing: The cost of setting up Cisco Secure Firewall can vary, and some reviewers find it pricey due to additional expenses for licensing, support, and hardware. Fortinet FortiGate-VM is seen as competitive and more affordable than certain alternatives. It provides flexible pricing options and includes support for entitlement in the licensing fees. However, costs may rise when scaling or adding extra features.
ROI: Cisco Secure Firewall offers different levels of ROI depending on how it is used and the overall system design, whereas Fortinet FortiGate-VM delivers enhanced security and stability, potentially resulting in ROI.
Comparison Results: Fortinet FortiGate-VM is the preferred choice when comparing it to Cisco Secure Firewall. Users find the initial setup of Fortinet FortiGate-VM to be straightforward and easy. Fortinet FortiGate-VM is highly praised for its strong security features, user-friendly interface, and easy deployment.
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the analytics."
"The most valuable features are simplicity, management, and that it's constantly evolving."
"The reporting and monitoring are very good."
"The VPN is the most valuable feature."
"The SD-WAN feature is the most valuable. This feature evolved from link load balancing. It has helped us in terms of our uptime and privatizing applications whenever we experience an outage. The SD-WAN feature has been a plus for us. Two-factor authentication has allowed us to add more users in terms of remote working. We have two-factor authentication for remote workers to authenticate them before they get on the network."
"Initial setup is easy to configure."
"The main benefit is the grouping of our security monitoring."
"The most valuable features are the policies, filtering, and configuration."
"The IPS, as well as the malware features, are the two things that we use the most and they're very valuable."
"The benefits we see from the ASA are connected to teleworking as well as, of course, having the basic functionality of a firewall in place and the prevention of attacks."
"This solution made our organization more secure and gave us better control."
"We find all of its features very useful. Its main features are policies and access lists. We use both of them, and we also use routing."
"The user interface is very easy to manage and find rules. You can do object searches, which are very easy. Also, the logging is very simple to use. So, it is a lot easier to troubleshoot and find items inside the firewall."
"Being able to use it as a policy-based VPN is valuable. It's very easy to understand. It's very easy to troubleshoot."
"We chose Cisco because it had the full package that we were looking for."
"Manageability of Cisco ASA. It has a GUI interface, unlike the most of Cisco IOS. For beginners they can "sneak in" and apply the command and see the actual commands that the GUI launches. In addition, Cisco has the reputation regarding security."
"GitDM, like FortiGate VM, provides similar features to FortiGate appliances or cloud solutions. However, FortiGate VM is more suitable for heavy traffic and inspection compared to GitDM. Unfortunately, FortiGate VM lacks a dedicated SPU for inspection, and all features rely on CPU and RAM."
"The product's initial setup phase was easy."
"It's a relatively simple product that is easy to use. It's not overly complex."
"An enhanced security solution for any kind of alert that we have configured."
"This product is affordable and it's a good, high-performance appliance."
"The interface is decent."
"We work in the archiving domain where a secure environment is very important. We have some special requirements regarding the security of infrastructure."
"It's a very simple solution to manage."
"Quality control on their firmware versions needs improvement. When they introduce new firmware, there tend to be bugs."
"NGN, reporting and controls."
"Some of the features in the graphical user interface do not work, which requires that we used the command-line-interface."
"If they could extend their fabric towards other vendor environments for integration, that would be great."
"They should make the rule sets more understandable for the end user. When you're trying to explain to somebody how a computer network is secured, sometimes it's difficult for an end user or customer to understand. If there was a way to make the terminology more accessible to the end user, the set up could be easier. They should translate the technical jargon to an easily relatable and understandable conversation for the end user, the customer, that would be brilliant. Particularly in an environment where the IT structure is audited regularly, there's always pressure from the auditor to up the standards and up the security and you get your USCERT's that come out and there's a warning about this and the customer will want to lock out so much and when you apply it they run into issue where they can't search the internet or print to their remote office. Of course they can't print to your remote office, they just locked it up. They should make the language more understandable for the customer. If there's a product out there that made the jargon understandable to John Q. Public, I would buy that."
"The debugging and troubleshooting has room for improvement."
"Fortinet FortiGate could improve by having better visibility. Palo Alto has better visibility."
"It should have a better pricing plan. It is too expensive. It should also have a more granular view of the attack. I don't have FortiAnalyzer, and it is difficult for me to have a complete view when there is an attack on my server."
"Intrusion prevention, we currently need to apply deep bracket inspection manually to use web filtering."
"We are Cisco partners, and when we recommend Cisco FirePower to customers, they always think that FirePower is bad. For a single installation of FirePower, if I have to write about 18 tickets to Cisco, it's a big problem. There was an issue was related to Azure. We had Active Directory in Azure. The clients had to connect to FirePower through Azure. We had a lot of group policies. After two group policies, we had to make groups in Azure, and they had to sign in and sign back. It was a triple-layer authentication, and there was a big problem, so we didn't use it."
"If the implementation was easier, it would be a lot better for us."
"They need a user-friendly interface that we could easily configure."
"In NGFW, Cisco should be aligned with the new technology and inspection intelligence because Cisco is far behind in this pipeline."
"Also, they have a Firepower source file that I can work on the ASA device and on Firepower devices. A problem here lies in the way that you manage these devices. Some devices do not support the FMC, and some devices have to be managed through ASDM, and others have to be managed through FMC."
"This product is managed using the Firepower Management Center (FMC), but it would be better if it also supported the command-line interface (CLI)."
"The annual subscription cost is a bit high. They should try to make it comparable to other offerings. We have a number of Chinese products here in Pakistan, which are already, very cheap and have less annual maintenance costs compared to Cisco."
"The biggest area for improvement is storage configuration. It could be smoother."
"Capacity-wise, I think the solution's log storage area is something that needs to be increased since, by default, it stores logs for only seven days."
"Improvements are needed for the responsive UI and JIT traffic reporting."
"The block, the clarity, the quarantine command, is not very user-friendly. You would have to do everything through the command line and I would have preferred if it wasn't a CLI."
"The reporting is not as good as it is with other firewalls and it should be improved."
"The solution can improve by adding separate interfaces for proxy and flow-based usage."
"There should be more options to use lower-end models in a high availability configuration."
"There should be a bit more automation."
Cisco Secure Firewall is ranked 4th in Firewalls with 404 reviews while Fortinet FortiGate-VM is ranked 9th in Firewalls with 113 reviews. Cisco Secure Firewall is rated 8.2, while Fortinet FortiGate-VM 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-VM writes "An easy-to-manage and configure tool that provides ample documentation to help with the setup phase". 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-VM is most compared with Azure Firewall, Palo Alto Networks VM-Series, Fortinet FortiOS, OPNsense and Zyxel Unified Security Gateway. See our Cisco Secure Firewall vs. Fortinet FortiGate-VM report.
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