We compared Cisco Secure Firewall and Azure Firewall based on our users' reviews across several parameters.
Cisco Secure Firewall is regarded highly for its strong security features, user-friendly interface, and seamless integration within Cisco's security ecosystem. Customers appreciate the value they receive for the price paid and the efficient deployment process. Azure Firewall is praised for its competitive pricing, centralized network security management, and high performance in managing traffic. Users find the setup process straightforward, although some face challenges with customization and integration with other services. Both products receive positive feedback on customer service and support.
Features: Cisco Secure Firewall stands out for its robust intrusion detection and prevention system, seamless integration with Cisco's security ecosystem, and powerful threat intelligence capabilities. On the other hand, Azure Firewall is commended for its centralized network security management, seamless integration with Azure services, and high performance in handling large traffic volumes.
Pricing and ROI: Cisco Secure Firewall's setup cost is praised for its straightforwardness, offering users value for money. In comparison, Azure Firewall's competitive pricing and reasonable setup cost are highlighted, with flexible licensing options catering to diverse organizational needs. Cisco Secure Firewall offers a higher ROI with its strong security features and user-friendly interface. Azure Firewall, although cost-effective, lags in advanced security measures and comprehensive features.
Room for Improvement: Cisco Secure Firewall offers enhanced user-friendliness, efficient traffic handling, improved visibility, better integration with security solutions, regular updates, enhanced reporting, and scalability. Azure Firewall needs improvement in setup difficulty, protocol support, rule customization, logging, and integration with Azure services.
Deployment and customer support: Users found Cisco Secure Firewall to have a quicker setup process, emphasizing efficient deployment. Azure Firewall was noted for a longer implementation phase, causing frustration among users and highlighting the delay in establishing the new tech solution. Cisco Secure Firewall boasts efficient and reliable customer service, with users praising the support team's helpfulness and responsiveness. Azure Firewall customers appreciate the team's efficiency and effectiveness in addressing issues.
The summary above is based on 123 interviews we conducted recently with Cisco Secure Firewall and Azure Firewall users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.
"FortiGate is very simple to manage and easy to use."
"Easy to use support and licensing portal as well as activation process."
"Fortinet FortiGate's most valuable features are ease of use, flexibility, and most of the configuration we can be done using the GUI. When we compare Fortinet FortiGate with other solutions the firewall policy are very easy to understand."
"Whenever I need something, Fortinet improves and updates the software for me."
"The customization potential is quite impressive."
"The web filtering feature and the intrusion protection system are the most valuable. It is a resilient appliance. I never had an issue with it in terms of any security breaches."
"Its stability is the most valuable."
"It is a good source for firewall protection."
"It's helped us improve our security posture."
"The feature that I have found the most valuable is the control over the network permissions and the network."
"One of the notable advantages of Azure Firewall is its user-friendly interface, which closely resembles or shares similarities with other Azure components."
"The solution has many useful features. For example, the solution allows users to create virtual IP addresses."
"I like its order management feature. It doesn't have the kind of threat intelligence that Palo Alto has, but the order management makes it much simpler to know the difference."
"I can easily configure it."
"The firewall policy control, URL content control, and antivirus are all the most valuable aspects. Threat prevention is as well quite good."
"It is easy for me to protect certain ports or even the IP addresses, as well as do whitelisting, blacklisting, and the FQDN when we want virtual machines connected and to protect certain websites."
"IPS and Snort are very important because they also differentiate Cisco from other vendors and competitors."
"The most valuable features are the IPsec VPN and web filtering."
"One of the most valuable features of Firepower 7.0 is the "live log" type feature called Unified Event Viewer. That view has been really good in helping me get to data faster, decreasing the amount of time it takes to find information, and allowing me to fix problems faster. I've found that to be incredibly valuable because it's a lot easier to get to some points of data now."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is its ability to integrate vertically."
"If you compare the ASA and the FirePOWER, the best feature with FirePOWER is easy to use GUI. It has most of the same functionality in the Next-Generation FirePOWER, such as IPS, IPS policies, security intelligence, and integration and identification of all the devices or hardware you have in your network. Additionally, this solution is user-friendly."
"An eight because it's a good security solution. It's more mature than its competitors."
"Provides good integrations and reporting."
"To be honest, all of the features that are provided, all the other vendor will also have. One feature we did find valuable was the CLI, it is more accurate. Additionally, I was happy with the customization, dashboards, access lists and interface."
"Fortinet FortiGate could improve by having better visibility. Palo Alto has better visibility."
"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."
"I would like to see better pricing in the next release, as well as a simplification of the installation."
"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."
"Fortinet FortiGate can be integrated with different platforms. They have integrations in place, but I can't say they're 100%."
"Fortinet should focus on enhancing the capabilities of FortiGate by consolidating its various products, such as FortiGate Cloud, FortiManager, and FortiAnalyzer."
"A couple of things I've seen that need improvement, especially in terms of a hard coding. The driver-level active moment really is out-of-the-box and we have to have contact the customer support and sometimes it is difficult to resolve."
"They have to just improve its performance when we enable all UTM features. When you enable all the features, the performance of FortiGate, as well as of Sophos and SonicWall, goes down."
"There is room for further integration of AI into the system."
"The solution doesn't offer the same capabilities of Fortinet. It should offer intrusion prevention and advance filtering. These are two very useful features offered on Fortinet that Azure lacks."
"Right now, with Azure Firewall, we cannot have a normal inbound traffic flow. For inbound, Microsoft suggests using application gateways, so the options are very limited. I cannot use this firewall as an intermediate firewall because of the limitations, and I cannot point routing to another firewall. So if I want to use back-to-back firewall architecture in my environment, I cannot use Azure Firewall for that type of configuration either."
"Azure Firewall should have a free trial version for new users so that they can evaluate it before deploying it."
"It has fewer features than you can get from other firewalls, like anti-spam and anti-phishing. Those kinds of things are not included. It only includes IDS and IDB."
"Currently, it only supports IP addresses, so you have to be specific about the IPs that are in your environment."
"Azure should be able to work better as a balancer also, instead of just being a firewall. It should have a wider mandate."
"The tool needs to improve the onboarding and transition process for on-prem users."
"The IPS module is combined with the main operating system."
"It is confusing to have two management interfaces, e.g., ASDM and Firepower Management Center."
"The artificial intelligence and machine learning (behavioral based threat detection), which I can this will be coming out in another year, these are what we need now."
"One thing that Cisco could improve is the GUI. The graphic user interface should be more user-friendly."
"MSSP oriented interface: I would like a single console which would allow me to manage settings creating consistency across all customers."
"Cisco should redo their website so it's actually usable in a faster way."
"The scalability has room for improvement."
"Integration aspects and traffic shaping need improvement."
Azure Firewall is ranked 21st in Firewalls with 33 reviews while Cisco Secure Firewall is ranked 4th in Firewalls with 404 reviews. Azure Firewall is rated 7.2, while Cisco Secure Firewall is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Azure Firewall writes "Easy to use and configure but could be more robust". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Cisco Secure Firewall writes "Highlights and helps us catch Zero-day vulnerabilities traveling across our network". Azure Firewall is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate-VM, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Palo Alto Networks VM-Series and Netgate pfSense, whereas Cisco Secure Firewall is most compared with Palo Alto Networks WildFire, Netgate pfSense, Meraki MX, Sophos XG and WatchGuard Firebox. See our Azure Firewall vs. Cisco Secure Firewall report.
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