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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
14
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
7.0
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the Firewall Security Management category, the mindshare of Cisco Defense Orchestrator is 1.2%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center is 0.8%, up 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

"There are a lot of templates that are already built-in. They give you quick-to-create and quick-to-apply policies that are typically a little more complicated for people."
"The most valuable feature is the Intrusion prevention."
"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."
"We have quite a few Active Stone by pairs. If they fail over... I'll see that there's a change on it and I'll have a look. The only change on it is that now this one is the standby, it took over the active role. I can go into that firewall and find out what happened... and troubleshoot based on that. That's pretty cool too."
"I like the upgrade feature. That is pretty valuable to me because I have dual ASAs and when I go through CDO it does it for me pretty well. It's all done in the back-end and I don't really have to be involved. I just initiate, pick the image, and I pick when I want it done and it just does it, whether I have a single ASA or have a dual ASA."
"The bulk changes feature is definitely the most valuable."
"The ability to do operations on multiple firewalls at once is valuable because it saves time and mental effort. The solution's ability to make bulk changes makes it very convenient to manage things at once on multiple targets."
"With Cisco Defense Orchestrator, we can manage the complete Cisco Security solution. It provides a simple and centralized way to manage all products."
"One of the most valuable features of Cisco Secure Firewalls is their seamless integration with other Cisco products."
"Malware detection, URL filtering, and antivirus are the most beneficial features for our security management. The platform has three main components: filters, hardware, and antivirus. We use the standard approach for automation and integration. The person in charge of management follows the rules and policies of the equipment and handles operations. However, we haven't set up any notifications, so it's mostly manual."
"The most valuable aspects are the antivirus and URL filtering."
"Scalability is not an issue as long as you are able to buy additional licenses. Ten percent of our customers use Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center, and we have large accounts with 50% of their end users behind this firewall."
"The most valuable feature of the Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center is the UTM."
"My clients have never contacted me with any issues, so I believe the solution is stable."
"Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center is scalable."
"The applied policy inside the firewall is good."
 

Cons

"Cisco Defense Orchestrator can improve by providing more support for third-party security components."
"It would be a better product if it incorporated device control for third-party products easily."
"CDO doesn't have a report, an official report that I can check daily. It has another module called FTD, but it doesn't have that specifically for ASA. In the reporting, there are a lot of things that aren't there. There is also room for improvement in the daily monitoring."
"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."
"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."
"The main thing that would useful for us would the logging and monitoring. I have to check it out, to get the beta, because I don't have access to them... I wanted CDO to be a central place so where I could do everything but right now I don't think that's possible. I really don't want to go back and forth between this and FMC. Maybe the logging portion, when I look at it, will give me some similarities."
"I've found dozens of bugs over the year we've been using it. The more I use it for different things, the more problems I find... Most of the problems have to do with the user interface. A lot of thought and work has gone into the back-end component to make the product do what it's intended to do, but the way it is presented for use hasn't gotten nearly as much thought to make it smart and bug-free."
"They can centralize all products and provide a correlation about an incident and the response. They can also provide an on-premises solution. Currently, Cisco Defense Orchestrator is just for cloud deployments, not for on-premises deployments. Customers have to manage it on the cloud. We are based in Vietnam, and most of the customers here prefer to have on-premises deployments. Customers, especially from banking and government sectors, do not prefer to do anything on the cloud. Some of the small enterprises use the cloud."
"The interface is an area that could be improved."
"The first version had a lot of bugs, but the recent versions have sorted them out."
"The performance of the Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center could be improved."
"The solution could improve the number of ports available and load balancing."
"Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center's logging functionality could be improved."
"Cisco Firepower has been effective in solving various problems, but it could be improved by making it simpler and more user-friendly like Fortinet."
"Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center needs to reduce its price."
"Due to the lack of enough tutorials available online, I face problems with Cisco."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 is covered under the CIsco Enterprise License Agreement (ELA). So, it is licensed and ours."
"If you compare to what is available on the market, they are in the same range with respect to pricing."
"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."
"It's around £500 per unit for a three-year license."
"It is rather expensive."
"Technical support is an additional annual cost and is not included with the license."
"My license offers all the protection, like malware protection, VPN protection, IDS, IPS, and endpoint protection."
"The product pricing is reasonable and falls in the mid-range."
"Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center has the best price on the market."
"It could be considered relatively cheaper when compared to some other vendors in the market."
"One of the advantages of Cisco is its range of flexible licensing options."
"The solution’s pricing is reasonable."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
51%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Legal Firm
4%
Government
19%
Computer Software Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Engineering Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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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?
We encountered challenges, particularly when building use cases for this firewall, as it requires specific OS versions and firmware upgrades, which can lead to increased downtime. It adds an admini...
 

Also Known As

CDO
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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.
831,265 professionals have used our research since 2012.