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Cisco Defense Orchestrator vs Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center 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

Cisco Defense Orchestrator
Ranking in Firewall Security Management
14th
Average Rating
8.2
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Cisco Secure Firewall Manag...
Ranking in Firewall Security Management
6th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Firewall Security Management category, the mindshare of Cisco Defense Orchestrator is 1.1%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center is 0.8%, down from 0.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Firewall Security Management
 

Featured Reviews

Vivek Balaji - PeerSpot reviewer
Useful guides, excellent support, integration could improve
Cisco Defense Orchestrator has useful guides for the steps that need to follow by users Cisco Defense Orchestrator can improve by providing more support for third-party security components. I have been using Cisco Defense Orchestrator for approximately eight months. The Cisco Defense…
Awais Ejaz - PeerSpot reviewer
A stable and reasonably priced product that protects organizations from malware
The product must improve its performance. When we push policies from the console, it takes a lot of time. It takes five to seven minutes to push one policy. If someone pushes a wrong policy and there is an outage in the banking system, they would have to wait six to seven minutes to revert it. We have highlighted this issue to Cisco. A year ago, we told Cisco that we need APIs for integration with SOAR for pushing policies. We cannot push policies or run playbooks from SOAR to block any IOCs on the web and email gateway because Cisco doesn’t expose the APIs. It is one thing for which we have been following up with Cisco for the last year, but I don't think they've developed the API integration. Palo Alto and Fortinet provide this feature to their users.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"This product provides excellent centralized device controls and reporting."
"With Cisco Defense Orchestrator, we can manage the complete Cisco Security solution. It provides a simple and centralized way to manage all products."
"For this product, they are very uncharacteristically interested in resolving whatever issue the customer reports. They're really attentive, and they address whatever we bring up as quickly as they can. That's been a very positive aspect of the product."
"Cisco Defense Orchestrator has useful guides for the steps that need to follow by users."
"The most valuable feature is being able to do centralized upgrades on the ASAs. We can select all of those ASAs, and say, "Upgrade these ASAs at this scheduled time." It will copy down the ASA image, ASDM image, and then do the upgrade and failovers, and then put it all back into service as required at a scheduled time. It automates that process for us."
"The ability to see the uptimes on the different VPNs that we have configured for site-to-site."
"The most valuable feature is the automation, as it reduces user intervention and allows us to focus on other tasks."
"If we have a firewall go down, I can hop into CDO, pull the latest configuration off and apply it. That's really good. It helps save time."
"Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center is scalable."
"The most valuable features are the Virtual Private Network and the Electronic Control Lists."
"The technical support team is responsive and supportive."
"The policy management capabilities streamline security tasks by facilitating policy configuration. This ensures the impactful implementation of security policies during product installation, enhancing overall security measures."
"My clients have never contacted me with any issues, so I believe the solution is stable."
"It's a fine solution in terms of scalability."
"The solution is useful and powerful."
"The solution is easy to use."
 

Cons

"There could be some slight improvements to navigation. In some of the navigation you've got to go back to be able to get into where you need to be once you've made a change. If I make a change, I've then got to go back to submit and send the change."
"Cisco Defense Orchestrator should be made more user-friendly overall."
"When logging into the device, we sort of had problems with it staying in sync. If somebody made a change onsite, it wouldn't do an automatic sync. It would have to wait, as you would have to do a manual sync up."
"It would be a better product if it incorporated device control for third-party products easily."
"We had some MX devices that were blocking Windows Update from happening. We found out it was a Meraki issue, but it would have been nice if it had been flagged for us: "Hey, these updates are failing because the MX is blocking it." It wasn't a huge problem, but there was a loss of our time as well as the fact that the updates didn't get pushed out... It would have been nice if CDO had let us know that that was an issue."
"I'd like CDO to be the one-stop-shop where we could do all the configurations easily. It would be nice, for ASA upgrades, if we could do them from a central repository and not have to reach out to Cisco. That would be a definite plus."
"Cisco Defense Orchestrator can improve by providing more support for third-party security components."
"It should have more features to manage FirePOWER appliances."
"The product could be improved by simplifying its user interface and reducing complexity."
"Areas for improvement include pricing points and the range of products available at any given time."
"Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center needs to reduce its price."
"Cisco firewalls use old ESR or a Linux system, and there are problems with encryption. When we switch on encryption, the throughput goes down."
"Improving the product by incorporating SD-WAN functionality would be highly beneficial, especially for remote offices with limited server and Internet availability."
"Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center could improve by being less expensive."
"The IOS and the deploy option could be improved."
"We use the suggested standard policies that come with the equipment. We don't put much effort into customizing these policies, which we know is a risk. We're moving to a more advanced IT area that will change how we manage the firewall policies. Cisco offers many ways to manage the equipment, but our team lacks extensive knowledge. We're moving these responsibilities to a specialized security team."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"If you compare to what is available on the market, they are in the same range with respect to pricing."
"It is covered under the CIsco Enterprise License Agreement (ELA). So, it is licensed and ours."
"I work with a lot of clients, and the price or value of the Cisco Defense Orchestrator can vary from one client to another. If you have a lot of Cisco solutions, the price of the Cisco Defense Orchestrator is justified. Whereas if you have some security components from other vendors, such as Check Point or Palo Alto. This solution would be a pretty expensive proposition considering that they don't integrate with them well."
"It is about a $100 per year for an ASA 5506 firewall, and from there it keeps going up if you have a bigger box. For example, the 5516 is $200 to $300 per year."
"It's around £500 per unit for a three-year license."
"After our free trial was done we got a subscription for three years and it was under $3,000 or so. It's part of the EA we already paid for, so I don't know what it would be if it was a la carte."
"My license offers all the protection, like malware protection, VPN protection, IDS, IPS, and endpoint protection."
"The solution is not expensive."
"The solution’s pricing is reasonable."
"I rate Secure Firewall Management Center eight out of 10 for pricing."
"As for pricing, the tool is expensive for us. I'd rate it eight out of ten on a scale where ten is the most expensive."
"It could be considered relatively cheaper when compared to some other vendors in the market."
"The solution is expensive. We have a multi-license, and we pay extra for support."
"Technical support is an additional annual cost and is not included with the license."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
52%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Legal Firm
3%
Government
21%
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Engineering Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What do you like most about Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center?
The platform has significantly enhanced our organization's operations by providing secure communication channels between different office locations.
What needs improvement with Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center?
I expect more integration with AI. I expect Cisco to be easier for users in India, especially for junior users. For a junior one, it may somehow be complex, especially when configuring something. I...
 

Also Known As

CDO
No data available
 

Interactive Demo

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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Insurance Company of British Columbia, Shawmut
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco Defense Orchestrator vs. Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
838,713 professionals have used our research since 2012.