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 dashboard is the most important thing. It provides good visibility and makes management easy. Firepower also provides us with good application visibility and control."
"VPN load balancing has been particularly essential for my connections to integrate via multiple time zones."
"It is much better than most of the other firewalls that I have worked with."
"The user interface, the UI, is excellent on the solution."
"The most valuable features for my client are the ASDM and monitoring."
"The configuration capabilities and the integration with other tools are the most valuable features. I really like this product. Cisco is one of my favorite brands, and I always think Cisco solutions are very reliable, easy to configure, and very secure."
"The Adversity Malware Protection (AMP) feature is the most valuable. It is also very easy to use. Every technical user can operate this solution without any difficulty. The dashboard of Cisco Firepower has every tool that a security operator needs. You can find every resource that you need to operate through this dashboard."
"It's very scalable. You can go to different models of the ASAs and they scale up to as big as you want to go."
"The solution is scalable."
"Fortinet FortiGate is a security device. It can optimize security on the networks of a company. It actually protects the company from attacks from outside. With FortiGate, you can categorize the users. You can create a group of users that can access all of the websites for their work. You can limit other users' access."
"The multi-tenancy feature is most valuable. It integrates very well with FortiManager and FortiAnalyzer."
"It is a safe product."
"I like how we can achieve total integration."
"The email protection and VPN features are the most valuable."
"The web tutor and automatic rules by schedule are good features."
"The most valuable feature of Fortinet FortiGate is the simple configuration."
"The most valuable features of the product are the VPN and the NextGen firewall features such as application control, URL filtering, etc."
"Setting it up is not as intuitive as other more modern NGFWs."
"Cisco should work on ASDM. One of the biggest drawbacks of Cisco ASA is ASDM GUI. Cisco should improve the ASDM GUI. The configuration through ASDM is really difficult as compared to CLI. Sometimes when you are doing the configuration in ASDM, it suddenly crashes. It also crashes while pushing a policy. Cisco should really work on this."
"We would like to see improvement in recovery. If there is an issue that forces us to do recovery, we have to restart or reboot. In addition, sometimes we have downtime during the maintenance windows. If Cisco could enhance this, so that upgrades would not necessarily require downtime, that would be helpful."
"We found it difficult to publish an antennae sidewalk with the ASDM. I think Cisco should improve this by creating a simpler interface for the firewall."
"The interface for monitoring could be improved to allow better views to make troubleshooting easier."
"The solution's deployment is time-consuming, which should be minimized and made more user-friendly for us."
"I would like to see the inclusion of more advanced antivirus features in the next release of this solution."
"There are mainly two areas of improvement in Fortinet FortiGate— the licensing cost and the timing of upgrading licenses for boxes."
"Improvement is needed in the Web Filter quotas to restrict users with allocated quotas."
"The process of configuring firewall rules appears excessively complex."
"As far as wanting more scalability or things in the network diagram, it's going to cost you."
"Fortinet FortiGate needs to improve the protection, it did not prevent us from being attacked. Additionally, Fortinet FortiGate could provide more features for WAF devices. I should not have to purchase two solutions, it would be a benefit to combine these features into one solution."
"I would like reporting to be improved and should offer a lot more tools to monitor the products."
"The solution could have licensing fees reduced in the future."
"It would be a benefit if Fortinet would release a one-stop solution that is better integrated with other products and an automated emergency response system."
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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