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Cisco Duo vs Cisco Secure Firewall comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
7.7
Cisco Duo enhances security and adaptability, reducing costs and downtime, benefiting remote work and boosting employee morale.
Sentiment score
5.8
Cisco Secure Firewall offers ROI through reliability, preventing costly incidents, improving efficiency, and easy integration despite ROI quantification challenges.
I think Cisco Duo offers a good return on investment for startups, newer organizations, or those utilizing cloud-based applications.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.5
Cisco Duo's support is praised for responsiveness and knowledge but critiqued for delays without service agreements and contact difficulties.
Sentiment score
6.4
Cisco Secure Firewall users praise efficient customer service but note occasional inconsistency; direct contracts improve support quality.
However, the response time could be faster.
I find Cisco's technical support to be good but not excellent.
I have to provide many logs, yet problems remain unresolved, often requiring workarounds rather than solutions.
I have been working with them on firewalls, wireless, switching, and routing, and the support is the best.
Obtaining technical support and involving an engineer in a troubleshooting call is a challenge.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.9
Cisco Duo's cloud-based design enables seamless scalability and integration, making it ideal for various organizational sizes and requirements.
Sentiment score
6.6
Cisco Secure Firewall is scalable and flexible for businesses, but costs and hardware vary, requiring careful needs assessment.
I believe Cisco Duo is very scalable because it is cloud-based.
Compared to FortiGate and Palo Alto, it lags in configuration and other aspects.
Scalability presents a challenge.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.5
Cisco Duo is praised for stability, seamless integration, proactive support, with most users rating its reliability highly.
Sentiment score
8.9
Cisco Secure Firewall is praised for stability, reliability, minimal issues, rapid updates for bugs, and exceptional performance under pressure.
Cisco Secure Firewall offers exceptional performance and stability.
 

Room For Improvement

Cisco Duo users seek improvements in telephony, integration, user experience, device management, customization, pricing, licensing, and technical support.
Cisco Secure Firewall users seek improvements in routing support, cost efficiency, UI design, integration, and performance enhancements.
Cisco Duo is a modern product that does not support older applications, lacking backward compatibility.
The integration between Cisco products themselves presents difficulties, such as SD-WAN configuration.
Firepower Management Center is quite out of date compared to other vendors.
Cisco Firewalls require FMC for management.
 

Setup Cost

Cisco Duo provides flexible, user-based pricing suitable for any business, with additional costs for premium support and benefits from initial free trials.
Cisco Secure Firewall is costly but valued for performance, support, and discounts, appealing to security-focused enterprises.
I find the pricing of Cisco Duo to be reasonable.
The setup cost is reasonable, estimated at around six euros per month.
It's considered a premium, but people pay that price for Cisco.
The licensing process for Cisco Secure Firewall is convoluted, involving many steps to request and enter a license key.
 

Valuable Features

Cisco Duo provides seamless integration, robust security, and ease of use, enhancing operational efficiency and user experience for hybrid environments.
Cisco Secure Firewall offers robust security, easy management, and integration with high availability, scalability, and centralized policy creation.
This setup makes it scalable, as the deployment section is in the cloud, allowing the installation of agents according to needs.
The most valuable features of Cisco Secure Firewall include the next-generation firewall and its strong anti-malware capabilities.
It includes features like IPS, malware protection, and other security features.
Cisco Firewall has very good features, like trusted applications and restricted access for users based on keywords.
 

Categories and Ranking

Cisco Duo
Ranking in Cisco Security Portfolio
6th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.9
Number of Reviews
60
Ranking in other categories
Single Sign-On (SSO) (2nd), Authentication Systems (2nd), ZTNA as a Service (6th), Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) (1st)
Cisco Secure Firewall
Ranking in Cisco Security Portfolio
4th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
411
Ranking in other categories
Firewalls (7th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Cisco Security Portfolio category, the mindshare of Cisco Duo is 6.0%, up from 3.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco Secure Firewall is 6.6%, up from 5.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cisco Security Portfolio
 

Featured Reviews

RyanDeppe - PeerSpot reviewer
Helps reduce the risk of a breach and is easy to deploy and onboard
For our customers, Duo Security is a significant advantage because it provides them with a straightforward method to implement MFA across their entire environment. Moreover, once we delve into the more advanced features of Duo Security, it enables us as a partner to engage in ongoing discussions regarding security strategies with our customers. Initially, we may only introduce them to MFA during the onboarding process. However, as their security strategy evolves, we can leverage Duo to perform additional tasks such as risk-based assessments and deployments, thereby assisting in the development of their security measures. Duo Security helps secure our infrastructure. It serves as our gateway layer of protection, allowing us to understand who is logging in and why. We conduct risk-based assessments on each user to determine whether their actions are appropriate or not. Duo Security is not a comprehensive security solution, but it is undoubtedly a crucial component, a critical layer of security. This aspect resonates with our customers consistently. Their ability to reduce the risk of a breach is of utmost importance. It serves as the primary line of defense. Currently, credential gathering and leaks are widespread in the market. By implementing an MFA solution like Duo Security, we can effectively prevent these issues. When we put a stop to credential harvesting, it becomes much harder for attackers to infiltrate and navigate our network. Therefore, Duo Security acts as an excellent first line of defense. User authentication and device verification are the methods through which we envision our customers navigating in order to prevent identity-based attacks. Initially, when we employ Duo Security, it is a straightforward implementation of multi-factor authentication. As we progress, we enhance security measures by incorporating device risk assessment and potentially even regional assessment. This includes considerations such as whether the login is being attempted from a specific IP address. These gradual enhancements contribute to the establishment of an additional layer of protection. Thus, it is not necessary to implement a completely disruptive strategy right from the start. Instead, it is possible to gradually adopt and integrate this approach, following a crawl, walk, or run methodology. The Duo Security self-service portal helps free up our customers' IT staff time, allowing them to focus on other projects. As a Cisco partner, we have received feedback from our customers that the portal is highly interactive, enabling them to easily navigate and resolve issues. After setting up their Duo environment, we rarely receive callbacks for assistance, as the portal is intuitive and empowers users to handle everything they need on their own. The appealing aspect of Duo Security is its ability to establish trust for every access request, regardless of its origin. It is a cloud-based solution with excellent API integrations. It doesn't matter where or how a user logs in; Duo will be there to protect the user, whether it's through MFA, risk assessment, or similar methods. It is extremely beneficial to our customers that Duo Security considers all resources as external. Our customers frequently inquire about a zero-trust model, and this is a key component of it. Unfortunately, I would love to say that there is a simple solution for zero trust where we can just deploy this solution and be done with it. But that's not the case. It requires a layered approach, and that's what we convey to our customers. Duo Security is definitely a part of that. Duo Security has helped improve our customers' cybersecurity resilience. Internally, it protects our users from accessing sales operations-based environments. Additionally, our customers use it regularly to protect business-critical applications.
Maharajan S - PeerSpot reviewer
Enhances security with precise access control but has integration challenges
Overall, I would rate the product six out of ten. Because of the support and cost, I moved away from Cisco, but otherwise, it is a good product. Recommendation depends on the requirement. If lacking a proper team and being dependent on the OEM and partner, Cisco is not suitable. However, if the team is qualified with Cisco-certified people and the requirement is a big network, it can be considered. In today's hybrid work world, having an expanded gateway is more typical than having a single one. Thus, Cisco is unlikely to be recommended for a hybrid requirement unless in-house skills align. Otherwise, depending on partners and Cisco, it can be a risk. I rate the overall solution six out of ten.
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Comparison Review

it_user206346 - PeerSpot reviewer
Mar 11, 2015
Cisco ASA vs. Palo Alto Networks
Cisco ASA vs. Palo Alto: Management Goodies You often have comparisons of both firewalls concerning security components. Of course, a firewall must block attacks, scan for viruses, build VPNs, etc. However, in this post I am discussing the advantages and disadvantages from both vendors concerning…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
24%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
6%
Educational Organization
41%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
4%
Government
4%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

How does Duo Security compare with Microsoft Authenticator?
We switched to Duo Security for identity verification. We’d been using a competitor but got the chance to evaluate Duo for 30 days, and we could not be happier. Duo Security is easy to configure a...
What do you like most about Duo Security?
They are users who, as mentioned before, utilize RDPAP and MDPAP. It includes functionalities related to finance, specifically in single sign-on.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Duo Security?
The setup cost is reasonable, estimated at around six euros per month.
Which is the better NGFW: Fortinet Fortigate or Cisco Firepower?
When you compare these firewalls you can identify them with different features, advantages, practices and usage at large. In my opinion, Fortinet would be the best option and l use Fortinet too...
Which is better - Fortinet FortiGate or Cisco ASA Firewall?
One of our favorite things about Fortinet Fortigate is that you can deploy on the cloud or on premises. Fortinet Fortigate is very stable, reliable, and consistent. We like that we can manage the e...
How does Cisco's ASA firewall compare with the Firepower NGFW?
It is easy to integrate Cisco ASA with other Cisco products and also other NAC solutions. When you understand the Cisco ecosystem, it is very simple to handle. This solution has traffic inspection ...
 

Also Known As

Duo Security
Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Firewall, Cisco ASA NGFW, Adaptive Security Appliance, Cisco Sourcefire Firewalls, Cisco ASAv, Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
There are more than one million Adaptive Security Appliances deployed globally. Top customers include First American Financial Corp., Genzyme, Frankfurt Airport, Hansgrohe SE, Rio Olympics, The French Laundry, Rackspace, and City of Tomorrow.
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco Duo vs. Cisco Secure Firewall and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
849,190 professionals have used our research since 2012.