What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall?

Pricing is high.

The product is expensive.

Cisco Secure Firewall is a moderately priced solution. We have to pay a yearly licensing fee for the solution.

I rate the product's price a seven on a scale of one to ten, where one is expensive, and ten is cheap. If we compare Cisco with other OEMs available in the market, Cisco needs to work on price improvement. Nowadays, there is a lot of competition in the market with newer solutions, like Fortinet, gaining popularity, amongst a few other names like Cyberoam, a product from a local Indian vendor. Palo Alto has also gained a lot of market share in recent years.

We're a Cisco partner, so we get 80% off. That's a big discount and companies are always looking at ways to save money these days.

It's pretty competitive. If they could make it cheaper, it would be great. You always want cheaper, but relative to the performance capabilities of the firewall and relative to what you get, it's fair. It's not the cheapest in the world, but you get an excellent product for that price. The onus is on us as a customer to look at what we're buying and establish not just the price but the value. You need to look at what you're getting for your dollars there. Cisco has a very good proposition there. Its licensing is pretty good. It's not very complex. There are not a million different SKUs. I had a Palo Alto deployment where the customer had asked for a license for integration with their Cortex XDR, and they didn't include it. It was eight more SKUs and eighty thousand dollars more. It was a real disaster, and it can put a customer off from using Palo Alto. Cisco's licensing model is easy to understand whether it's apps or VPN. The way that they handle the subscriptions is very easy to understand. It's very fair.

The licensing is not so bad. The solution’s pricing could be lower. It's not horrible, though.

Although I am not directly involved in dealing with the pricing aspect of the Cisco Secure Firewall, I know that the licensing has improved over the years.

The pricing and licensing structure of the firewall is fair and reasonable.

With the bundling mode with Duo licensing, it's now better. It's better to have one simplified global licensing mode, and this is what Cisco has done with bundling. The next-generation firewalls include a set of features such as filtering, emails, and IPS. This combination offers the best way for customers to manage their operating expenses.

The price is good.

The licensing is not good, it's confusing. I'm an engineer so I don't care about the actual price that much but the licensing part is confusing.

The prices of Cisco Secure Firewall are competitive, especially for us as Cisco partners. We purchase the products directly from Cisco as a gold partner, which allows us to obtain better pricing than we would get from normal distributors or the local market.

The enterprise agreement that we have has helped with the pricing because it allows us to consume licensing in more of a consumption model versus a per-user type model. That has helped us a lot.

Cisco was never a cheap solution. Compared to other vendors, it's more or less at the same level, except maybe Fortinet which is fairly cheap. In terms of licensing, we still have issues with the subscription model. Many of our customers are used to buying a solution and owning it. It takes time to convince people to go for the subscription model. That's still an issue for us.

Acquiring licensing for Cisco Secure Firewall can be a bit cumbersome, therefore a more straightforward licensing process would be preferable. The licensing process can be frustrating, as it requires selecting between on-box or per-client options and other related considerations. Simplifying this process would be beneficial.

You get what you pay for. It's always priced based on what you get and what it can handle. It's acceptable.

The licensing models that are available for Cisco Secure Firewall are okay. You have nearly every option that you need. You can pick filtering, advanced malware protection, or all the available features. It's sufficient. In terms of pricing, there are, for sure, some cheaper vendors, but overall, it's nearly the same. It has a fair price.

The licensing is not as complicated as that for some other Cisco products. There are a couple of tiers of licensing, but the price point is a little too high for the market. There are other vendors that come in lower and offer more for fewer licensing options. They may offer URL filtering or malware filtering with a single license rather than requiring two or three licenses. I think Cisco could do a bit more in this area.

Licensing is quite difficult to get your head around. My biggest challenge is to understand the details, the inner relations. Luckily, to some extent, we have enterprise agreements, but licensing for me is a real black box.

In the past, I encountered several difficulties and misunderstandings with Cisco licensing, but now the situation has improved. The Cisco Smart Software portal is an excellent resource for keeping track of, upgrading, and researching information related to Smart Licensing and other relevant topics. It is extremely helpful. Unfortunately, since it is not my money and there is only one vendor, I am unable to provide any comments on the prices. Nevertheless, the system, along with its provision through the Cisco Smart Software portal, as well as the traditional license and subscription models, are excellent and highly beneficial.

I am not aware of the pricing. It's an all-in-one contract.

I don't manage licensing. I can't speak to the actual cost of the product.

The licensing scheme is completely confusing, and they need to streamline it. They have classic licensing and a new type of licensing now. Also, the licensing for the actual firewall is separate from the one for TAC support.

Firepower is a little bit expensive, although there are no additional costs beyond the standard ones.

Pricing for Cisco is expensive. There are additional costs for the licensing part, support, and even the hardware part. The device cost is very high. I would be very happy with an improvement on the price.

The solution offers mid-range pricing. We can get a cheaper product like Fortinet, and we can get a costlier product like Palo Alto, and these are all in the same category. There's only one license based on the support. Cisco Firepower is priced on the support of the product that we require: with SSL and without SSL. Currently, we are not doing any SSL inspection. We have an ATP report firewall.

Firepower has a very high cost and you have to pay for the standby as well, meaning that the cost is doubled. When you compare Fortinet, it is a single cost only, so Fortinet is cheaper.

With any vendor, prices are often a little bit negotiable. There are things like discounted rates. There's a list price and then, as a partner, we get a discounted rate based on how much product we're purchasing and our relationship with the vendor. But on the list-price side of things, there are three big licenses on an FTD [Firepower Threat Defense] box. There are the malware license, the threat license, and the URL filtering license. You can license them in one-year, three-year, and five-year increments. Each license will enable different features on the box. The malware license will enable AMP filtering or AMP detection. The threat detection enables use of the IPS solution, which is really Snort's bread and butter. And the URL filtering enables filtering based on URL categories. Sometimes we use URL filtering and sometimes we don't. It depends on the customer and on whether they have a different URL filtering strategy, like Umbrella. The two big ones that we sell are malware and threat detection, with threat detection probably being the license we sell the most. SMARTnet, the technical support component, covers the box. When you purchase the hardware, you buy it with SMARTnet. Licenses cover features, SMARTnet covers support.

Pricing is the same as other competitors. It is comparable. The licensing has gotten better. It has been easier with Smart Licensing. There are additional costs, but that depends on the feature sets that you get. However, that is the same with any firewall vendor at this point.

Its price is in the middle range. Both Firepower and FortiGate are not cheap. Palo Alto and Check Point are the cheapest ones. I don't remember any costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

When we are fighting against other competitors for customers, whether it is a small or big business, we feel very comfortable with the price that Firepower has today.

Its pricing is good and competitive. There is a maintenance cost. It includes SecureX that makes it cost-effective as compared to the other solutions where you have to pay for XDR and SOAR capabilities.

This solution is expensive and other solutions, such as FortiGate, are cheaper.

For us, the pricing was more economical than other products we used. There were no extra costs.

I like the Smart Licensing, because it is more dynamic and easier to keep track of where you are at. If we have a high availability firewall pair and they are deployed in active/standby rather than active/active, I would expect that we would only pay for one set of licenses because you are using only one firewall at any one time. The other is there just for resiliency. The licensing, from a Firepower perspective, still requires you to have two licenses, even if the firewalls are in active/standby, which means that you pay for the two licenses, even though you might only be using one firewall any one time. This is probably not the best way to do it and doesn't represent the best value for money. This could be looked at to see if it could be done in a fairer way. For example, you can only deploy MX firewalls in active/standby. There are no other options. You only need one license for those firewalls because you can only use one at a time. This seems quite fair. They may need to look again at this from a Firepower perspective.

I know that licensing for some of the advanced solutions, like Intrusion Prevention and Secure Malware Analytics, are nominal costs.

The price for Firepower is more expensive than FortiGate. The licensing is very complex. We usually ask for help from Solutel because of its complexity. I have a Cisco account where I can download the VPN client, then connect. Instead, I create an issue with Solutel, then Solutel solves the case. Our license for Firepower is their best license.

With any solution from anybody, I always think that licensing is a little high — but it's comparable to other companies. It definitely competes with the other vendors in the market.

The cost of the solution is quite high. It's very expensive compared to other options. For example, Fortinet is much more reasonably priced.

People have said that Palo Alto is a less expensive solution than Cisco, but in my experience, at least from today, Cisco is cheaper than Palo Alto.

The price is comparable.

The price of Firepower is not bad compared to other products.

The solution was chosen because of its price compared to other similar solutions.

For me, personally, as an individual, Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall is expensive. But it should be affordable for enterprises and educational institutions.

I don't have any knowledge as to what the product costs. It's not part of the business I deal with. Palo Alto, it's my understanding, is a little more expensive, however, it depends on the users and on the design. It always depends on the contract

This product is expensive.

You do need to pay for the software license. In general, it's a moderately expensive solution. It's not the cheapest on the market.

This product requires licenses for advanced features including Snort, IPS, and malware detection.

Cisco falls somewhere in the middle in terms of pricing, it's not very expensive and it's not very cheap. There is an additional accessory fee associated with Cisco but normally they have a separate subscription cost for different types of security to protect the firewall. There are separate bundles available inside the pricing and that's probably true for all of the firewalls.

Cisco, as we all know, is expensive, but for the money you are paying, you know that you are also getting top-notch documentation as well as support if needed. In some cases, this may save you a lot of money or stress, which is why everyone who uses Cisco solutions loves them.

In my country, deployment may be charged from USD 1K to USD 10K depending on setup cost. There are different types of licenses: * Threat * URL * Anti-malware I would suggest going with an all-in-one bundle. You will end up saving money. Also, Cisco has a better discount on a 3YR subscription plan. Discuss this with your Cisco AM.

Cisco pricing is premium. However, they gave us a 50 to 60 percent discount. There are additional implementation and validation costs.

Be careful

The one-time cost is affordable, but the maintenance cost and the Smart Net costs need to be reduced. They're too high. A company like ours, that has about 80 firewalls, has to multiple the maintenance cost per device by 80. Cisco should find a way to provide some kind of enterprise support. We don't want to buy support per unit of equipment. It would be easier for everybody.

Cisco changed its price model with the new FTD line, where the appliances are a bit cheaper but the licensing is a bit more expensive. But that's not only Cisco, a lot of suppliers are doing that. I don't remember a lot of the licensing for Fortinet and Check Point, but Cisco's pricing is high, at times, for what they provide.

Our subscription costs, just for the firewalls, is between $400,000 and $500,000 a year. In addition, there is Smart Net, but the subscription base is the most substantial. In an environment like ours where you're only looking at a little over 1,000 users, when you start figuring out it all, it's basically $400 a user per year to license our Cisco firewalls. Cisco is very good. From everything I've seen, I truly believe that they lead the industry in all of this, but you do pay for it.

We're going to get to a point, not this year and not the coming year, probably going into 2021, where we're going to want to replace the ASA appliances with either virtuals or actual physicals. But the Firepower series of appliances is not cheap. I just got a quote recently for six firewalls that was in the range of over half-a-million dollars. That's what could push us to look to other vendors, if the price tag is just so up there. I'm using these words "fictitiously," but if it's going to be outlandish, as a customer, we would have to do our due diligence and look at other solutions at that point. In addition to that cost, there are licensing fees for some of the individual things like AMP, the IPS/IDS piece. It depends on what you want to use, such as the SSL piece and the VPN piece, which we don't use.

The price of this solution is not good or bad. It is ok.

The pricing is overrated. Prices for Cisco equipment are always a little bit higher than other vendors. Customers are always complaining about the high prices of Cisco equipment, so it would be very good if these prices can be lowered down, but that's how it is. Cisco equipment usually has higher prices than its competitors.

We normally license on a yearly basis. The hardware procurement cost should be considered. If you're virtual maybe that cost is eradicated and just the licensing cost is applied. If you have hardware the cost must be covered by you. All the shipping charges will be paid by you also. I don't think there are any other hidden charges though.

The license in my country is available to subscribe for three years or one year. We wanted to go with the solutions for embedding a two-year subscription, but this was not possible. The Cisco licensing agreement in Bangladesh is different than the one in India and in Dubai. It is not a problem, but if you want to subscribe to the yearly subscription, the original cost is really high. Also, if you go for an anti-virus, you pay for an additional yearly subscription. When we push customers to implement Cisco solutions, they can manage the subscription cost of Cisco internally to access these important solutions long term. Our clients have been able to secure surprisingly efficient service with the Cisco Firepower NGFW firewall solution.