We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Firewall and KerioControl based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Firewalls solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."Offers good security and filtering."
"The technical support in our region is excellent."
"The most valuable feature is the FortiManager for centralized management."
"Fortinet FortiGate is a security device. It can optimize security on the networks of a company. It actually protects the company from attacks from outside. With FortiGate, you can categorize the users. You can create a group of users that can access all of the websites for their work. You can limit other users' access."
"Initial setup is easy to configure."
"The solution is stable."
"Fortinet FortiGate is user-friendly and affordable."
"The SD-WAN feature is the most valuable. This feature evolved from link load balancing. It has helped us in terms of our uptime and privatizing applications whenever we experience an outage. The SD-WAN feature has been a plus for us. Two-factor authentication has allowed us to add more users in terms of remote working. We have two-factor authentication for remote workers to authenticate them before they get on the network."
"I like the ASDM for the firewall because it is visual. With the command line, it is harder to visualize what is going on. A picture is worth a thousand words."
"Their performance is most valuable."
"Another benefit has been user integration. We try to integrate our policies so that we can create policies based on active users. We can create policies based on who is accessing a resource instead of just IP addresses and ports."
"It is much better than most of the other firewalls that I have worked with."
"It's a flexible solution and is well-known in the community."
"It is a very user-friendly product."
"It's very scalable. You can go to different models of the ASAs and they scale up to as big as you want to go."
"I have not contacted technical support. There is a lot of information on the internet for troubleshooting. All you need to do is use a search engine and you will find the information you are looking for easily."
"Its support is very good, and it is stable product."
"The solution provides feasibility regarding cyber privacy."
"Technical support is good. They respond right away."
"The user interface and the ease of use are pretty good. Everything fits together so nicely."
"All of the features of Kerio Control are equally good. Most valuable to us are the firewall rules, the intrusion detection system, and IP address features."
"In terms of the comprehensiveness of the security features, it does a great job of laying out what it does. It's fairly easy to edit and research. Some of the features were turned on by our IT company and I was able to easily find other features on my own by searching for videos on the internet. I've been able to block certain websites, and content filter, as well as manage some of our bandwidth because we live stream on Sunday. I'm able to dedicate bandwidth for the encoder that goes to the internet. It always has enough bandwidth, no matter how many people are on the network. That's really helpful."
"Kerio is a lot clearer to set up to do particular things, whereas when I do it on a Cisco or a FortiGate I have to go fight with it per week sometimes to do something I can do in 20 minutes on Kerio."
"The most valuable features of Kerio Control are the IPS and traffic rules. The traffic rules are very user-friendly and the IPS is working well. Additionally, the anti-virus is effective with quick options, such as filtering."
"Some of the web policy reports could be improved."
"Its reporting can be improved. Sometimes, I don't get proper reports."
"The process of configuring firewall rules appears excessively complex."
"MTBF: Hardware failure is more common when compared to SonicWall or Cisco ASA."
"FortiGate is really good. We have been using it for quite some time. Initially, when we started off, we had around 70 plus devices of FortiGate, but then Check Point and Palo Alto took over the place. From the product perspective, there are no issues, but from the account perspective, we have had issues. Fortinet's presence in our company is very less. I don't see any Fortinet account managers talking to us, and that presence has diluted in the last two and a half or three years. We have close to 1,500 firewalls. Out of these, 60% of firewalls are from Palo Alto, and a few firewalls are from Check Point. FortiGate firewalls are very less now. It is not because of the product; it is because of the relationship. I don't think they had a good relationship with us, and there was some kind of disconnect for a very long time. The relationship between their accounts team and my leadership team seems to be the reason for phasing out FortiGate."
"There is a lot of improvement needed with SSL-VPN."
"The solution could be more user friendly."
"Its price could be better."
"If Cisco could stop rebranding, combine all the CLIs/GUIs, and give a consistent experience, this would be great."
"UTM features would be nice or some NextGen features."
"When comparing the graphical interface of this solution to other vendors it is more difficult to configure. There is a higher learning curve for administrators in this solution."
"The configuration in Firepower Management Center is very slow. Deployment takes two to three minutes. You spend a lot of time on modifications. Whereas, in FortiGate, you press a button, and it takes one second."
"The initial setup was a bit complex. It wasn't a major challenge, but due to our requirements and network, it was not very straightforward but still easy enough."
"It is slowly not supported and other vendors are a few years ahead of Cisco in development."
"The integration between the on-prem proxy world and the cloud proxy would benefit us. One single policy setting would make sense."
"With regards to stability, we had a critical bug come out during our evaluation... not good."
"After the takeover by GFI, one of the things that Kerio built was MyKerio environment. This has not been very reliable because I get many messages that MyKerio is not functioning. For some reason, there are things that they changed and it is not very reliable at this moment, instead I have to connect to the firewall to see what is happening."
"The denial of service could also be improved. There recently was a big issue with denial of service attacks and it was a bit laborious."
"If I would suggest anything, it would be to expand on its multifactor authentication to be a little bit more user-friendly. They should do multifactor authentications for the client itself perhaps, rather than served on a webpage, in a page hijack, that might be more user-friendly, but I don't have a lot of complaints about it. It's doing its job. You have to have a certain amount of skills to configure these things anyway, the ones that we use on-site doing point-to-point, and we've been tricked up a few times with their interfaces."
"Kerio Control has just improved on their biggest problem, which was to introduce better support for high-availability requirements in production."
"It has a VPN back to our data center but I don't think it has increased the number of VPN clients extended to those outside our environment"
"They should add wireless features."
"The reporting needs to be improved. It is hard to get a domain."
"I can no longer renew my subscription directly with GFI but we have to go through third-party resellers like CDW. The first time I did it with CDW. I went to CDW and it was almost like they didn't even know anything. They didn't know what package I was supposed to get. Then after I got it, it took almost five days to get everything working."
Cisco Secure Firewall is ranked 4th in Firewalls with 404 reviews while KerioControl is ranked 29th in Firewalls with 54 reviews. Cisco Secure Firewall is rated 8.2, while KerioControl is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Cisco Secure Firewall writes "Highlights and helps us catch Zero-day vulnerabilities traveling across our network". On the other hand, the top reviewer of KerioControl writes "With VPN, any of our guys can log in to the system and effectively be on board; helps with our customers all over the world". Cisco Secure Firewall is most compared with Palo Alto Networks WildFire, Netgate pfSense, Meraki MX, Sophos XG and Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, whereas KerioControl is most compared with Netgate pfSense, OPNsense, Sophos UTM, Sophos XG and Fortinet FortiGate-VM. See our Cisco Secure Firewall vs. KerioControl report.
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