Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center vs FireMon Security Manager comparison

Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center vs. FireMon Security Manager

Download the complete report

Helped 831,158 peers since 2012

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 Secure Firewall Manag...

Ranking in Firewall Security Management

6th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

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

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 Secure Firewall Management Center is 0.8%, up from 0.8% 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

Featured Reviews

Awais Ejaz

Chief Information Security Officer at Allied Bank Limited

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.

Read full review

Ganesh-Khutwad

Senior Network Specialist at Tech Mahindra Limited

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution has a great UI and a policy deployment mechanism, and all the configuration is easily manageable for the firewalls."

"The solution is useful and powerful."

"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."

"Cisco's support and services are far superior to any other security product in Pakistan."

"The tool's deployment is not complex."

"One of the most valuable features of Cisco Secure Firewalls is their seamless integration with other Cisco products."

"The solution is easy to use."

"The solution is quite scalable."

More Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center pros

"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."

"It gives us the ability to go to one place to look for potential firewall rules that are inappropriate, or which don't meet compliance. Instead of manually searching hundreds of firewalls for a policy, we can go to this one location and find the rules which are now out of compliance."

"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 features are Policy Optimizer and Firewall Manager for different brands of firewall."

"The SQL language is convenient to use. It allows us to process a bunch of criteria very quickly and narrows things down if there is an issue with the firewall. It's easy to do that with SQL queries."

"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."

"The most valuable features are the security assessments and the ability to identify unused rules or objects."

"It is the single place where we go to review all of our firewall changes. The solution makes it easier for us to track all the changes made. It is a central place where we can look at all the firewall rules, because we have three different firewall vendors. It save us time and creates efficiencies by looking at the general picture."

More FireMon Security Manager pros

Cons

"I had a challenging time trying to size the firewall on the cloud. Maybe the information is there, but I couldn't find it easily. Usually, it depends on the cloud provider itself, whether you use AWS or Azure. These guys give you the information, so this part is not as detailed."

"It's not very user-friendly and can be somewhat disorganized."

"Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center needs to reduce its price."

"Due to the lack of enough tutorials available online, I face problems with Cisco."

"The interface is an area that 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."

"The tool is a little bit pricey. I was not involved much with finance, but it appeared to be really expensive."

More Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center cons

"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."

"To my knowledge, there's no cloud component to FireMon whatsoever. We're on the hook for any updates to versioning of the operating system or the application that runs on the operating system. It would be nice if it was a little bit more automated."

"We have had some stability issues that are affecting operations. We rely heavily on this solution and if it isn't working then we have to create rules manually."

"FireMon could be easier to use and flexibility regarding reporting could be improved."

"When it comes to documentation, they need to start putting together a basic command manual. With Cisco, you can look up a command and it gives you examples of three or four different ways that command can be used. It tells you how to put it into the GUI and the CLI. FireMon does need to start doing that."

"The stability has been fairly decent, but there have been a few issues. My coworker has had some issues in the past where he has had to work with support."

"FireMon could be made more user-friendly when it comes to creating filters or conducting traffic analysis."

"It comes as a Linux appliance on a server and we're not a Linux shop, we're more of a Windows shop. It would be great if they could automate or integrate the backups into it and other things through their GUI interface, just to make the management of Linux a little more transparent."

More FireMon Security Manager cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Technical support is an additional annual cost and is not included with the license."

"One of the advantages of Cisco is its range of flexible licensing options."

"Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center has the best price on the market."

"I rate the tool's pricing a four out of ten. The licensing costs are yearly."

"The solution is not expensive."

"The product pricing is reasonable and falls in the mid-range."

"My license offers all the protection, like malware protection, VPN protection, IDS, IPS, and endpoint protection."

"The price of the solution is expensive. We do not have to pay more than the standard licensing fees."

More Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center pricing and cost advice

"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."

"Pricing model seems fair."

"Regarding additional costs, if you want things like Policy Optimizer, extra features, that's extra."

"FireMon is very expensive. I think that they charge a premium. In general, they are very pricey. Compared to their competitors, they cost a little more than the other solutions that we evaluated."

"It's a good value. From a licensing standpoint... it's very simple to understand, and gives us a good bang for the buck."

"We don't license all of the devices in our network, so it does not provide us with a comprehensive visibility of all devices in a hybrid network at this time."

"FireMon is cheaper than AlgoSec."

"Pricing is reasonable."

More FireMon Security Manager pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Firewall Security Management solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

831,158 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Government

19%

Computer Software Company

18%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Engineering Company

Computer Software Company

20%

Financial Services Firm

16%

Manufacturing Company

Energy/Utilities Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center?

The product pricing is reasonable and falls in the mid-range.

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...

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...

AWS Firewall Manager vs Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center

Comparisons

Compared 70% of the time

Palo Alto Networks Panorama vs Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center

Compared 30% of the time

More Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center Competitors

Tufin Orchestration Suite vs FireMon Security Manager

Compared 41% of the time

AlgoSec vs FireMon Security Manager

Compared 37% of the time

Skybox Security Suite vs FireMon Security Manager

Compared 12% of the time

Palo Alto Networks Panorama vs FireMon Security Manager

Compared 5% of the time

RedSeal vs FireMon Security Manager

Compared 3% of the time

More FireMon Security Manager Competitors

Product Reports

Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center

Download Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center product report

Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center report

FireMon Security Manager

Download FireMon Security Manager product report

Learn More

Cisco

FireMon

Overview

The Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center is the administrative nerve center for select Cisco security products running on multiple platforms. It provides unified management of Cisco Secure Firewalls with Firewall Threat Defense (FTD) software for port and protocol control, application control, IPS, URL filtering, and malware protection functions. Firewall Management Center is the centralized event and policy manager for:

● Cisco Secure Firewall with the Firewall Threat Defense (FTD) OS

● Cisco ASA with FirePOWER Services

● Cisco Secure IPS (Firepower Next-Gen IPS / NGIPS)

● Cisco FirePOWER Threat Defense for ISR

● Cisco Malware Defense (AMP)

The increasing complexity of networks, driven by the constant influx of new devices, applications, and cloud services, presents a daunting challenge for managing firewall policies and rules. A typical enterprise environment has millions of rules, and just one simple misconfiguration can lead to devastating consequences like compliance violations, outages, and data breaches.

FireMon’s Security Manager is a purpose-built network security policy management (NSPM) platform that automates the management of firewall and cloud security policies to eliminate policy-related risk, accurately and quickly change rules, and meet internal and external compliance requirements.

Reduce Risk Manage risk with real-time visibility and control
Manage Change Avoid misconfigurations, accelerate business, and improve security
Enforce and Maintain Compliance Avoid violations, avoid risk, and avoid fines

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

Convey, MGM Resorts International, Southwest Airlines, Alkami, Costco, Aetna, IBM, Verizon, Wells Fargo

Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center vs. FireMon Security Manager