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AlgoSec vs FireMon Security Manager comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 4, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

AlgoSec
Ranking in Firewall Security Management
1st
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
182
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
FireMon Security Manager
Ranking in Firewall Security Management
4th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
56
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the Firewall Security Management category, the mindshare of AlgoSec is 22.3%, up from 19.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of FireMon Security Manager is 16.5%, up from 16.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Firewall Security Management
 

Q&A Highlights

it_user1292127 - PeerSpot reviewer
Feb 27, 2020
 

Featured Reviews

Shameerudheen Kp - PeerSpot reviewer
Easy to setup with good auto-implementation and good rule reviews
AlgoSec is slow when it is loaded with too many firewalls and policies. A plan to take care of heavy usage is to be considered. Support of all firewalls and policy features to be enabled. AlgoSec should support in identifying most hit rules and re-ordering existing firewall rules - this is a very key to manage firewall CPU. A clustering of AlgoSec can also be considered. A group of AlgoSec servers managing large client bases geographically or datacenter-wise or function-wise. A head reporting unit and child processing units.
Ganesh-Khutwad - PeerSpot reviewer
Rapid policy insights with robust dashboards and cross-vendor automation
FireMon Security Manager is excellent for real-time compliance management. It allows us to quickly retrieve any policy needed for testing and easily analyze it for loopholes. If a loophole exists, FireMon provides comprehensive details within the policy manager. It alerts us to firewall rule additions or changes that violate compliance policies. It supports various firewall platforms, including Checkpoint, Zscaler, Fortinet, Cisco, and AWS, and provides centralized management for all configured policies through a single console. FireMon Security Manager provides many features, like whether my firewall is compatible with required standards such as NTP and SNMP. Each compliance included in our RFPs is shown in the UI of FireMon. It gives robust and clear dashboards, making it easier to understand risks because the policies have ratings showing usage, and the number of hit attacks. It streamlines our compliance reporting processes by providing comprehensive risk and compliance assessments. It offers a range of features, including verification of firewall compatibility with protocols like NTP and SNMP, and detection of signal charges. FireMon effectively addresses all compliance requirements outlined in our RFPs. For instance, it can determine if firewalls or proxies within a stack are configured in Secure Mode or Active-Active mode. FireMon Security Manager enables us to generate reports on all these aspects, ensuring thorough compliance monitoring and documentation. FireMon Security Manager is robust and can help automate firewall policy changes across large multi-vendor enterprise environments. FireMon Security Manager helps automate firewall policy changes across various environments, including on-premises, cloud, hybrid, SASE, and SD-WAN. It also simplifies cleaning up firewall rules in our environment. The time required to accurately create, approve, and deploy firewall policy rules has been reduced. Tasks that took 30 minutes can now be completed in just five minutes using FireMon. FireMon provides immediate visibility into our policies through a robust and clear dashboard, making it easy to identify errors or misconfigurations based on the policy rating.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Users utilize this tool to make their change requests."
"It has reduced the workload for the firewall team thanks to the API integration with our ticketing system, handling the standard types of requests automatically."
"It helps to perform FW cleanup, regulations requirement, FW migration projects, etc."
"The most valuable feature is the Firewall Analyser, which has a number of fantastic features."
"Breaking down a rule to specify used objects within groups and protocols has proven invaluable for us because we are able to narrow exposure to potential threats, and more generally, areas in which we are exposed."
"Rather than logging in on separate firewalls, AlgoSec enables you to make changes on all firewalls from one pane of glass."
"​The initial setup process is excellent."
"It detects if the requested network and ports are getting blocked by the network or firewalls by a simple query, which helps to identify the network blocking firewalls in the topology."
"The most valuable feature for me is its capability for cleanup and managing the complexity of security products."
"In one report, FireMon tells us there are, say, 1,000 rules that can be taken out and it gives us the ability to disable those for a year and to track when we made our changes. After a year, we can go back and eliminate the rules, to bring the configuration down to an almost human-readable level."
"Compared to other applications, it is user-friendly. The appearance of the menus and titles is clear and they are easy to follow. Of course, it requires some experience through using it, to go through everything, but it is not very difficult. It is an easy application to use."
"The most valuable feature is that everything is recorded in the historical logs, including the firewall rules, headcounts, object-level usage, and the rule documentation. The rule certification details are also there, which means that someone can be held accountable for a specific firewall rule."
"Its user-friendly interface allows for easy viewing and searching of network policies, including proxies, all on one console."
"The unused objects is another nice feature, where it digs a little bit deeper into comparing the logs that it sees versus the configurations that it sees... The unused objects feature will go through in a pretty detailed way and show us which ones aren't being used. Or, if they are used, it will show us how often they're used."
"FireMon decreases errors and misconfigurations by 10% that increase risk in our environment. That has to do a lot with the change reporting that is in place, but also with the built-in controls and custom controls that we have made. Those all decrease the errors that people naturally make on a day-to-day basis for firewall administration."
"For the cleanup of firewall rules, it performs really well for us. We utilize it in our regular rule cleanup tasks, several times a year. FireMon is our primary tool when doing that, either by going through its out-of-the-box compliance rules or using it to search for certain things in our rules that we want to prune from our firewalls."
 

Cons

"Default standard support at Level 1 is to answer by upgrading to the latest released version, if you are not using it yet."
"Further integration with ACI and NSX will be key to our customers' requirements moving forward, as customers adopt new, innovative environments."
"We are still waiting to implement FireFlow, and getting it into place will hopefully speed up our implementation time and help with policy standardization."
"AlgoSec integrates with most of the leading firewall vendors, but one issue is that AlgoSec doesn't support Sophos and Forcepoint. AlgoSec competitors, like FireMon, support Forcepoint."
"The initial setup can be complex for beginners."
"Some of the auditing functionality needs improvement. Our major focus is the firewall validation process and tracking and verifying that changes are implemented correctly. We are actually doing parts of the auditing process manually. And getting any one of the vendors to bring out a good auditing process has been very difficult."
"Priority should be to improve the user interface for the risk and compliance part, making it more responsive and user-friendly."
"In a complex landscape, with several nodes/equipment, it can be somewhat more difficult to properly visualize the network map."
"We have had some stability issues that are affecting operations. We rely heavily on this solution and if it isn't working then we have to create rules manually."
"When it comes to real-time compliance management, something that is missing is alerting on certain, predefined controls. It would be good to have a predefined set of controls which, if not complied with in a newly set up rule, would create an alert for us. That is something that is missing, out-of-the-box."
"The initial setup can take some time, including connecting it and configuring it. It's not something that is easy for anybody to do. There is time and energy required because of the number of systems you have to configure to get it to work properly."
"The training for configuring new users or operators is confusing because the UI is not user-friendly and has room for improvement."
"When it comes to documentation, they need to start putting together a basic command manual. With Cisco, you can look up a command and it gives you examples of three or four different ways that command can be used. It tells you how to put it into the GUI and the CLI. FireMon does need to start doing that."
"We've had recurring issues managing FireMon's internal backups. Sometimes, the space allocated for the backup is full, and there is no process where it deletes files that are older than I certain date. It's just waiting for the storage to get full and then it's cleaned up. It isn't something that creates serious issues for us."
"It comes as a Linux appliance on a server and we're not a Linux shop, we're more of a Windows shop. It would be great if they could automate or integrate the backups into it and other things through their GUI interface, just to make the management of Linux a little more transparent."
"The advanced features are complex in setting up the rules."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost of the tool can be recovered with AlgoSec automations."
"The initial cost was high for us."
"We have had quite a number of our prospective clients have come to us, and say, "Hey guys, we want AlgoSec," but one of their turn-offs has been the pricing. I would like it if AlgoSec would review their pricing and come down on it. The solution is quite amazing and versatile, so we would really appreciate it if the pricing could be reviewed for Nigeria because we definitely would get more sales if that happened."
"I personally feel that the cost is quite expensive. AlgoSec is charging for each function, e.g., Active change, Application ABF license, etc."
"The pricing could be better."
"For cloud environments, it can be expensive. The model adopted to use as licensing for the cloud environment should be reviewed since it sometimes can increase the value of the service/product in an unexpected way. For example, they should instead use the amount of instances, which should just take into consideration the number of Security Groups and ACLs."
"Price is not my concern. If a tool does its job, it is not my concern to obtain a good price for it. If a tool is needed, we are going to buy it."
"Setup cost and pricing were reasonable and the licensing was straightforward."
"It's a good value. From a licensing standpoint... it's very simple to understand, and gives us a good bang for the buck."
"Relative to what it offers, the price is fair."
"Pricing model seems fair."
"We don't license all of the devices in our network, so it does not provide us with a comprehensive visibility of all devices in a hybrid network at this time."
"The pricing is very good, very straightforward. It also came in cheaper than AlgoSec and Tufin."
"FireMon is very expensive. I think that they charge a premium. In general, they are very pricey. Compared to their competitors, they cost a little more than the other solutions that we evaluated."
"Regarding additional costs, if you want things like Policy Optimizer, extra features, that's extra."
"This is an expensive solution. The cost of three modules for three years was approximately one million."
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Answers from the Community

it_user1292127 - PeerSpot reviewer
Feb 27, 2020
Feb 27, 2020
Well before both the products have their own pros and cons. But the criteria you mention, I would say you can go with AlgoSec with the following reasons: 1. It's less expensive compared to FireMon. 2. Need very less amount of resources as compare to FireMon who need a huge amount of resources with their basic level VM as well. 3. Easy to manage and configure. 4. I found AlgoSec bette...
2 out of 4 answers
CG
Feb 24, 2020
Unfortunately we chose Tufin over both those products, sorry I cannot give you a comparison on either. For us, Tufin simplifies the needs we have for Risks/Cleanup/Violations in our FW policies. We also leverage compliance policy for best practices. You can also take advantage of the reporting functionally which suites your environment or infrastructure such as: - New Revision - Advance Change - FW Modul Change - Object Change - Expired Rules - Rule and Object Usage - Policy Analysis - Security Risk - Rule Documentation.
Sunil Kumar. - PeerSpot reviewer
Feb 25, 2020
Well before both the products have their own pros and cons. But the criteria you mention, I would say you can go with AlgoSec with the following reasons: 1. It's less expensive compared to FireMon. 2. Need very less amount of resources as compare to FireMon who need a huge amount of resources with their basic level VM as well. 3. Easy to manage and configure. 4. I found AlgoSec better than FireMon in terms of reporting. But the biggest drawback with AlgoSec is their tech support which takes a huge amount of time to respond and investigate the issue. And in the end, they will always provide you one solution which is a known bug in the product and they will release an HA for that.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
20%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Retailer
5%
Computer Software Company
20%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about AlgoSec?
AlgoSec's ability to integrate with various security and networking solutions enhances its overall value.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AlgoSec?
I am into operations and not aware of cost or pricing.
What needs improvement with AlgoSec?
AlgoSec is slow when it is loaded with too many firewalls and policies. A plan to take care of heavy usage is to be considered. Support of all firewalls and policy features to be enabled. AlgoSec s...
What do you like most about FireMon?
I like the Security Manager console where we can see any changes that have been made or pull the results of an assessment and control the policies that we implement.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for FireMon?
Comparatively, FireMon has a very good price and is below the general competition in cost. I have not seen any additional fees beyond the general contract fees for the usage I have. So, I have not ...
What needs improvement with FireMon?
For one company I work with, I use Fortinet, and FireMon is not able to understand the zones that Fortinet uses. Part of that compliance piece does not provide me with the necessary information. An...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Maersk, Delta Airlines, Chevron, General Motors, T-Mobile, Chevron, AT&T, BP, Bell Canada, HCA Healthcare, Morgan Stanley, Unilever, Nationwide Insurance Enterprise, US Bank, Microsoft 
Convey, MGM Resorts International, Southwest Airlines, Alkami, Costco, Aetna, IBM, Verizon, Wells Fargo
Find out what your peers are saying about AlgoSec vs. FireMon Security Manager and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
839,319 professionals have used our research since 2012.