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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
7.7
Number of Reviews
54
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the Firewall Security Management category, the mindshare of AlgoSec is 21.9%, up from 20.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of FireMon Security Manager is 16.3%, up from 16.0% 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

"One of the quick wins is to view our device status easily, with out-of-the-box dashboards and charts."
"We are currently in a rule base performance improvement process and AlgoSec is an invaluable tool to accomplish this."
"If you go through that compliance report, it will give you whether your firewall is in compliance or not. It will also give you a recommendation whether you need to change it. The compliance has helped us with customers, e.g., internal audit from the quality team and external auditors."
"This Appliance gives you the full Network MAP, which is obtainable from the Routing table."
"The training provided by AlgoSec helps a lot in the development of employees who work with the tool."
"The most valuable features are the network map, risk analysis, and tickets for firewall changes."
"We can easily and quickly identify all of the rules on the firewall and avoid the individual review and analysis of each rule."
"Being able to analyze the environment and audit firewall configuration is most valuable. We are working here in the oil sector, and it's a critical environment. Every six months we have auditors coming from the main office and doing auditing for security. We are using AlgoSec Analyzer to help us to do the audit before the auditors come to our office and do the auditing of our security devices. So, it's helping us to do good work and analyze all security devices, including firewalls."
"FireMon is nice and provides 360-degree user views."
"It provides us with a single pane of glass for our on-prem environment, to see configuration. We have not implemented into the cloud yet. We can search for an object group and see where it lives on any firewall in the enterprise or find security rules, no matter what firewall they're on."
"The most valuable feature is the reporting capability because everything that we do is a result of our being able to query a report, based on our environment and our PCI compliance efforts."
"The most valuable features are the security assessments and the ability to identify unused rules or objects."
"The most valuable feature of FireMon is its ability to configure multiple devices and consolidate them into a single desktop, which allows us to manage all of our security devices, such as Palo Alto and Zscaler, from one place."
"Its user-friendly interface allows for easy viewing and searching of network policies, including proxies, all on one console."
"When it comes to real-time compliance management, it is very good because it is able to compare changes in the configuration as well as giving us a timestamp. It also sends email alerts to our environment so we know if someone has made a change on the network. It gives us the whole picture of that change. Whether it is a configuration change or just a small comment, it gives us the before and after snapshot."
"Firewall auditing is very important. We also use the solution for rule traffic analysis, traffic flow discovery and hidden/shadow rules within over 100 firewalls spanning five different brands."
 

Cons

"I would like more documents and support for the cloud firewall."
"It needs better API integration with its third-party firewall management."
"Automate the change documentation in MS Word format. Therefore, we can customize it, if needed."
"It would be nice if it was more variable when checking virtual domain baseline in the same way as Fortigate's firewalls do."
"They need to improve the web interface to be a little more interactive and friendly."
"Country-specific regulations should be added when required. Doing this on my own with baseline compliance is quite difficult."
"Our experience with support has been inconsistent. Sometimes, support is fast and clean; other times, not so much. Occasionally, they have taken a while to respond or provided an inadequate workaround instead of a solution."
"I would like for there to be more AI functionalities."
"The cost of the solution is pretty expensive. It would be ideal if they could work on their pricing."
"FireMon could be made more user-friendly when it comes to creating filters or conducting traffic analysis."
"Its reporting can be improved. I am the only one who works a lot with it, and I am having problems in terms of reporting. In the case of Palo Alto, I'm okay with it, but with some of the Cisco devices, such as routers, when I provide the reports to other teams for review, they always say that the hit count is incorrect. So, I was struggling for a long time to work with them. When working with other teams, they have a lot of questions about reporting, such as how it reports, and we are still struggling with that."
"Some of the core functionality in our environment doesn't seem to work. We will get buggy code releases. They need to work on their Q&A of every code release."
"I ran a report and FireMon suggested that certain tools were not used. When I removed them, while it didn't bring our environment down completely, a lot of our environment started malfunctioning. Our backup system did not work, nor did other things that involve internal and external communication. We are not comfortable with what it did."
"We have not used the Policy Planner but even so, we have identified areas of improvement with it during our testing. For example, it could be better when it comes to ease of integration or ease of policy automation. Another problem is that there is a console where it has too many options and is not very straightforward. Essentially, controlling it could be made more seamless."
"FireMon could improve its end-user practices. As an end user, I am just trying to catch up on all the alerts. There are so many, and you still have to go through them and document what was found."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"My advice is that you must do a POC and show value."
"The pricing is good. Though, I would like if pricing could better support small businesses."
"I find the price too expensive. It looks a bit like SAP, so it does have standard functionality out of the box, but you will spend a lot of money if you want to customize it. However, the price is not as extreme as SAP or Oracle, but the actual implementation does turn out to be expensive."
"The licensing is very easy to set up, with flexible licensing methods such as subscription and perpetual."
"Initially, it was more expensive, but we managed to negotiate the price. It's about average now."
"I can’t say that this is a cheap system. It's affordable for large enterprises and, in some cases, for mid-sized companies. For the majority of other companies, this solution is out of their price range."
"Licensing is very easy to set up. The pricing is relative to how you want to expand and harden your network security."
"Cost is based on firewall. There are bundles, e.g., virtual firewalls might make the solution cheaper."
"Pricing model seems fair."
"Pricing is reasonable."
"We pay for it yearly."
"Relative to what it offers, the price is fair."
"Regarding additional costs, if you want things like Policy Optimizer, extra features, that's extra."
"FireMon is cheaper than AlgoSec."
"It's a good value. From a licensing standpoint... it's very simple to understand, and gives us a good bang for the buck."
"The pricing was very good during our initial year, but they increased it this year a little bit. The price is okay. It is not cheap, but it is still average."
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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%
Energy/Utilities Company
5%
Computer Software Company
20%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Energy/Utilities 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 needs improvement with FireMon?
Although configuration is not the most difficult aspect of FireMon, a basic understanding of cloud computing and firewall principles is necessary for successful implementation. Therefore, simplifyi...
What is your primary use case for FireMon?
FireMon Security Manager is a highly intelligent and useful device that consolidates all our security policies, including those for Zscaler proxies, into a single console. This centralized view eli...
 

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.
831,791 professionals have used our research since 2012.