We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Firewall vs Palo Alto Network Wildfire based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Based on the parameters we compared, with all other factors being more or less equal, Cisco Secure Firewall comes in a bit ahead of Palo Alto simply because of their stronger support.
"The stability of the solution is excellent, as it is with other Fortinet products."
"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 most valuable feature is the VDOM, which allows the customer to have multiple firewalls in a single campus."
"FortiGate firewalls are user-friendly, and I like the security profiling features."
"Fortinet FortiGate's ease of management is the most valuable feature."
"The security on offer is very good."
"FortiGate has a strong security topic which allows all of the Fortinet devices to communicate and share information which makes their security more powerful."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiGate are it is one of the most mature firewalls in the UTM bundle."
"The most valuable feature must be AnyConnect. We have quite a few customers who use it. It is easy to use and the stablest thing that we have. We have experienced some issues on all our VPN clients, but AnyConnect has been the stablest one."
"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."
"The feature that I found most valuable is the overall stability of the product."
"A stable and solid solution for protection from external threats and for VPN connections."
"If we look at the Cisco ASA without Firepower, then one of the most valuable features is the URL filtering."
"It just works for us."
"The GUI is among the most valuable features,"
"Stability is perfect. I haven't had any problems."
"They have many different options with Palo Alto WildFire and the set-up is quick. If you have all the details in hand, it does not take more than 15 minutes to deploy a firewall."
"Intuitive threat prevention and analysis solution, with a machine learning feature. Scalable, stable, and protects against zero-day threats."
"WildFire has been instrumental in blocking a number of new threats, before common desktop anti-virus tools were able to detect them."
"It is stable and pretty much scalable."
"The solution is completely integrated with all the other Palo Alto products. I think that it is the best part for endpoint protection. The firewall features include URL and DNS filtering, threat protection, and antivirus."
"It is the best device in comparison to other network products in the marketplace."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is how it keeps up-to-date with viruses."
"What I like about Palo Alto is that it is a complete product, with everything in it."
"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."
"To the best of my knowledge, Fortinet does not have a CASB solution and Fortinet does not have a Zero trust solution."
"Vulnerability scanning could be improved."
"There were quite a few problems with the stability of the system."
"I would like some automated custom reporting."
"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."
"Technical support could be better. You don't always get the level of help you need right away."
"Fortinet FortiGate could improve by having better visibility. Palo Alto has better visibility."
"They could improve by having more skilled, high-level engineers that are available around the clock. I know that's an easy thing to say and a hard thing to do."
"When we talk about data centers, we are talking about 100 gig capacity or 400 gig capacity. When it comes to active-active solution clustering and resilience and performance, Cisco should look into these a little bit more."
"The graphical interface could be improved. From what I have seen, Fortinet, for example, has a nicer GUI."
"Firepower's user experience should be a little bit better."
"Comparing Cisco solution to others, it is expensive, it would be better for it to be cheaper."
"The initial setup was a bit complex. It wasn't a major challenge, but due to our requirements and network, it was not very straightforward but still easy enough."
"Implementations require the use of a console. It would help if the console was embedded."
"The solution has not had any layer upgrades. It does not have layer five and upwards, it only has up to layer four. This has caused some problems for us."
"The initial setup was a little bit complex, mainly due to the GUI console and management challenges."
"There are certain changes that I was expecting in the previous version, and I hope that they are soon fixed. All of the problems that I have faced so far have been resolved."
"The data analytical system for deployment needs to improve."
"The technical support response needs improvement."
"The product's false positive logs could be more user-friendly to understand. They could provide examples of precious cases to learn."
"It would be nice if there was an easier way to install and deploy it, such as through the inclusion of wizards."
"The price could be better."
"In terms of what I'd like to see in the next release of Palo Alto Networks WildFire, each release is based on malware that has been identified. The key problem is an average of six months from the time malware is written to the time it's discovered and a signature is created for it. The only advice that I can give is for them to shorten that timeframe. I don't know how they would do it, but if they shorten that, for example, cut it in half, they'll make themselves more famous."
Cisco Secure Firewall is ranked 4th in Firewalls with 404 reviews while Palo Alto Networks WildFire is ranked 3rd in Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) with 58 reviews. Cisco Secure Firewall is rated 8.2, while Palo Alto Networks WildFire 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 Palo Alto Networks WildFire writes "Good technical support and provides automatic analysis that saves us time in filtering email". Cisco Secure Firewall is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Meraki MX, Sophos XG, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls and Juniper SRX Series Firewall, whereas Palo Alto Networks WildFire is most compared with Juniper SRX Series Firewall, Proofpoint Email Protection, Fortinet FortiSandbox, Check Point SandBlast Network and Zscaler Internet Access.
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