We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Firewall and Zscaler Internet Access based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Firewalls solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."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."
"It is a one box solution, which covers most of the edge device’s requirements."
"We have been able to offer several services to customers in a single box."
"The most valuable feature is the policy routing and application control."
"Their interface is very easy to use, it is without bugs."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiGate are the ease of use and there are several operating systems that can include the hardware capacities. In the newer releases, the resources were more useful because they were included in the operating system."
"There are great templates, so you don't have to customize them if you don't want to. You do have the option to custom create some folders and some reports, however, with what is there, you don't really need to go through extra effort, as they already give you a lot of predefined views of reports and so forth."
"We can detect any attack of viruses or malware at the first point of contact."
"Cisco Secure Firewall is reliable, which is why we opted for it during the pandemic for our remote users."
"Easy to deploy in a working environment between servers and users."
"Being able to determine our active users vs inactive users has led us to increased productivity through visibility. Also, if an issue was happening with our throughput, then we wouldn't know without research. Now, notifications are more proactively happening."
"I like the firewall features, Snort, and the Intrusion Prevention System (IPS)."
"The interface is user-friendly."
"It's quite a capable box for UTM."
"We moved from a legacy firewall to the ASA with FirePOWER, increasing our Internet Edge defense dramatically."
"Cisco ASA Firewall is a well known product. They're always updating it, and you know what they're doing and that it works."
"The solution has reduced cyberattacks."
"We enjoy all of the proxy capabilities and the capability to integrate into the SIEM/SOC solution."
"The solution replaces multiple vendor technologies with one which makes it worth the cost."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to drop packets."
"Zscaler Internet Access's roaming user feature is most valuable and is much better compared to other secure web gateways."
"Zscaler excels in security protection and the cloud is always up-to-date. It does not matter if you are a small or big organisation, you will receive the same security quality."
"The most valuable features I found in Zscaler Internet Access are the restriction of users for a particular URL, the security feature related to stopping DDoS, and the VPN."
"Overall, we're very happy with our product."
"The performance and speed are aspects of the solution that could always be improved upon."
"The scalability could be better."
"Some of the software stability could improve."
"The solution could be more evenly structured."
"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."
"Lacks training for new features."
"The price of FortiGate should be reduced because there are some other leading products that are cheaper."
"Web security solutions can be improved."
"One feature I would like to see, that Firepower doesn't have, is email security. Perhaps in the future, Cisco will integrate Cisco Umbrella with Firepower. I don't see why we should have to pay for two separate products when both could be integrated in one box."
"One feature lacking is superior anti-virus protection, which must be added."
"Migration with other appliances is not easy. It has to be done manually, and this takes a long time."
"I would like it to be easier to work with and have a better user interface. It is not straightforward. You need to know the Cisco command-line interface."
"The SSL VPN is, and always has been, painful to configure and the Java plugin does not guarantee a uniform deployment."
"Some individuals find the setup and configuration challenging."
"We cannot have virtual domains, which we can create with FortiGate. This is something they should add in the future. Additionally, there is a connection limit and the FMC could improve."
"In general, they can make it easier to manage the solutions. They can make it easier in terms of administration and provide a single tool for different firewalling solutions. They have different tools to manage different firewalls, such as Firepower or ASA. Sometimes, both are on the same thing. You have ASA with Firepower modules, so you manage some of the things via HTML, and then you manage some of the things via another management tool. It's not seamless."
"They should enhance the audit reporting feature."
"The main issue with Zscaler Internet Access is proxy IP detection, which sometimes makes sites inaccessible."
"One thing that they could improve is the ability to import rules from other platforms."
"Zscaler does not provide dedicated IPs to each customer. Hence, they share a pool of IPs provided by Zscaler. There is a chance of blacklisting these IPs. I also do not like the multi-management portal."
"In terms of usage, here in the GCC, it's still growing a growing market, so the combination of DLP, data leak prevention, to a certain extent is fine. But what it requires is user-based access or role-based access. The solution needs to grow into that, which definitely takes time. There's not an easy way to integrate it, when you have a cloud-based solution."
"If they can also integrate with the multi-factor authentication to prompt users to do another, second-factor authentication, that would be ideal."
"The tool should improve the predefined dictionaries."
"An improvement would be if they could provide an out-of-the-box experience, like 20 to 30 features all ready to go. In comparison, LogRhythm offers out-of-the-box features. With Zscaler Internet Access, there is firewall IPS, multiple security services, filtering, DLP, and CASB browser isolation. These are things that all users are going to be using. However, when an administrator or architect would start building this, I would definitely need to engage professional services to help clients do it."
Cisco Secure Firewall is ranked 4th in Firewalls with 404 reviews while Zscaler Internet Access is ranked 2nd in Secure Web Gateways (SWG) with 46 reviews. Cisco Secure Firewall is rated 8.2, while Zscaler Internet Access is rated 8.2. 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 Zscaler Internet Access writes "Provides integrated CASB and file sandboxing but could be less expensive ". Cisco Secure Firewall is most compared with Palo Alto Networks WildFire, Netgate pfSense, Meraki MX, Sophos XG and Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, whereas Zscaler Internet Access is most compared with Cisco Umbrella, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, Netskope , Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks and Appgate SDP. See our Cisco Secure Firewall vs. Zscaler Internet Access report.
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