We performed a comparison between Check Point NGFW and Cisco Secure Firewall based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Check Point users are happier with its VPN and with its pricing. However, Cisco Secure users are happier with its service and support.
"Security solution with a straightforward and quick setup. It's a stable and scalable product."
"Some of the valuable features are the firewall, IPS, web filter, and gateway capabilities. Additionally, it is easy to use and flexible."
"I have found Fortinet FortiGate to be scalable."
"The FortiGate controls the user's activities and maximizes my bandwidth use overall."
"FortiGate firewalls are user-friendly, and I like the security profiling features."
"The solution has very good threat and content filtering switches."
"The GUI is good."
"The payment function for applications is good."
"The edge security posture has dramatically improved as we can now detect and prevent threats from the public internet."
"We have not had any issues with the firewall."
"Check Point definitely has a great architecture, where you can just enable the software blades and deploy a secure service. Overall, it provides ease of deployment and ease of use."
"One of the most valuable features is the data center object integration with Azure. We are using Azure a lot and there is very nice synchronization between the objects in Azure, and it's very easy to implement rules using this feature."
"The tool provides great security."
"It gives us centralized management for multiple firewalls. For example, if I want to push the same configuration in 10 firewalls, I can push it all at once with the help of the centralized management system."
"Its most significant strength lies in its superior threat detection engines."
"I have not had an infected machine behind the firewall since I first installed and started using NGFW."
"Web filtering is a big improvement for us. The previous version we used, the AC520, did not have that feature included. It was not very easy for us, especially because the environment had to be isolated and we needed to get updates from outside, such as Windows patches. That feature has really helped us when we are going outside to pull those patches."
"The initial setup was not complex."
"It is very stable."
"The most valuable features for my client are the ASDM and monitoring."
"The most valuable features of this solution are advanced malware protection, IPS, and IDS."
"The fact that we can use Firepower Management Center gives us visibility. It allows us to see and manage the traffic that is going through the network."
"Its security and filtering are most valuable. Every layer of data that comes into the organization goes through it. After setting up the criteria, it automatically filters the traffic. We don't have to check it often."
"Cisco ASA NGFW significantly improves our bank. It protects any high-value products that we use from hackers, viruses, malware, and script-bots. It gives us metrics on network traffic as well as what kind of attacks we are getting from the outside."
"The support is the main thing that needs to be improved."
"The updates Fortinet provides are sometimes unstable."
"The cloud management and automation capability could be improved."
"There are SD-WAN network monitoring, SD-WAN features, Industrial Databases, Internet of Things, Detection, etc., however, we do have not licenses for those features. We thought that if you bought a product, you should have all of the features it offers. Why should you need to make so many extra purchases to enable features? They should have one price for the entire offering."
"The pricing could always be better."
"Monitoring and reporting could be better."
"With FortiGate, the main complaint that I have heard is about the technical support."
"It is very expensive, and their support is not very good. I hope that their technical support will be better in the future."
"There are issues with stability while upgrading devices with hotfixes."
"I would like for them to develop the ability to manage a cloud firewall with the same console. That would be very helpful."
"The pricing could be better."
"There is no email security."
"Technical support could be improved."
"It would be great if the access management, the user management features, were improved in terms of the number of users that can be connected, and how users can access the various resources with the help of firewall authentication."
"There needs to be more storage space for reporting."
"Including some sort of menu or grouping for VOIP would help the small business area that has limited support."
"There is huge scope for improvement in URL filtering. The database that they have is not accurate. Their content awareness and categorization for URL filtering are not that great. We faced many challenges with their categorization and content awareness. They should improve these categorization issues."
"UTM features would be nice or some NextGen features."
"Its configuration through GUI as well as CLI can be improved and made easier."
"The product line does not address the SMB market as it is supposed to do. Cisco already has an on-premises sandbox solution."
"The content filtering on an application level is not as good as other solutions such as Palo Alto."
"The user interface is a little clunky and difficult to work with. Some things aren't as easy as they should be."
"Our latest experience with a code upgrade included a number of bugs and issues that we ran into. So more testing with their code, before it hits us, would help."
"The one thing that the ASAs don't have is a central management point. We have a lot of our environments on FTD right now. So, we are using a Firewall Management Center (FMC) to manage all those. The ASAs don't really have that, but they are easy to use if you physically go into them and manage them."
Check Point NGFW is ranked 5th in Firewalls with 277 reviews while Cisco Secure Firewall is ranked 4th in Firewalls with 404 reviews. Check Point NGFW is rated 8.8, while Cisco Secure Firewall is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Check Point NGFW writes "Good antivirus protection and URL filtering with very good user identification capabilities". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Cisco Secure Firewall writes "Highlights and helps us catch Zero-day vulnerabilities traveling across our network". Check Point NGFW is most compared with Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Sophos XG, Netgate pfSense, Azure Firewall and OPNsense, whereas Cisco Secure Firewall is most compared with Palo Alto Networks WildFire, Netgate pfSense, Meraki MX, Sophos XG and OPNsense. See our Check Point NGFW vs. Cisco Secure Firewall report.
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