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Cisco Secure IPS (NGIPS) vs Cisco Sourcefire SNORT comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 19, 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 Secure IPS (NGIPS)
Ranking in Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS)
6th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
69
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Cisco Sourcefire SNORT
Ranking in Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS)
12th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
20
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) category, the mindshare of Cisco Secure IPS (NGIPS) is 3.4%, down from 3.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco Sourcefire SNORT is 2.9%, up from 2.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cisco Secure IPS (NGIPS)3.4%
Cisco Sourcefire SNORT2.9%
Other93.7%
Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS)
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer373227 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Marketing strengths shine but regaining user trust needs significant effort
There are numerous things that could be improved about Cisco Secure IPS (NGIPS) to get it back on track. Sollution for small branches: when we have to connect a lot very small branches (or sometimes only an ATM) we need something small, with LTE and with reasonable price. Cisco response is SDWAN but it is not always the case. Recently Cisco released some small firewalls but I have not tried them yet. Central management with FMC is a very good idea, but sometimes local management or monitoring is helpfull. With Cisco You have to decide: central or local. You cannot have both. Regarding usability, when you commit configuration on Cisco, it sometimes takes very long. Commits also take some time for the competition, but Cisco is definitely lagging behind the rest in this respect. Last but not least, for me as a professional is lack of CLI. With CLI, I can configure every firewall on the market except Cisco. CLI is very important in professional working, and IMHO it was an unwise decision by Cisco to remove it. Graphical interfaces are very nice, but when you've got thousands of objects in a big installation and have to configure many things, CLI is a much faster way to do it.
reviewer2772102 - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud Architect at a consultancy with 1-10 employees
Logging and customizable rules have helped improve threat monitoring and detection
The logging is mainly what I consider one of the best features with Cisco Sourcefire SNORT. Being able to log and store it in a file allows you to push it to a centralized repository. The logging and reporting help improve incident response. You should always be logging threats, any sort of misconfiguration, and anything that could be an issue. It's important to at least log and monitor it. The basic rules provide a good baseline in assessing Cisco Sourcefire SNORT's ability in providing real-time analytics for threat detection, but as a professional, you should look to constantly modify that baseline. They provide extensive customizability so you can define your own rules. The customizability allows it to be adaptable in protecting against diverse network threats to the constant change.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Its ease of use and its ability to block and allow ports in and out of our organization are the most valuable features. It works very well. It gives us all the information that we need."
"Cisco is number one in the technical support. It's good technical support and this is actually a problem when we do the recruitment for some other products. Other products you are on hold forever and the support might be not the best compared to Cisco."
"In general, I have nothing negative to say about this product."
"The most valuable features of Cisco NGIPS are the VPN, IPS, access policy management, EIM, and the ASA model as part of Firepower."
"I like the security solutions from Cisco."
"I think their fingerprints are good in terms of how they whitelist and blacklist."
"The IPS functionality is useful if you have offices all over the place. It's nice to have centralized management instead of going to a separate ASA or FirePOWER device."
"Cisco Secure IPS (NGIPS) is quite powerful for threat detection and includes botnet detection."
"Cisco Sourcefire SNORT is easy to configure and the reporting is great. It's also very user-friendly."
"The URL filtering is very good and you can create a group for customized URLs."
"The solution is rather easy to use."
"The tool's most valuable feature is threat detection, which is important because we have multiple layers not only in Cisco."
"Users have access to intelligent security automation as one of the features, which can easily automate your event impact assessment so your IPS policy tuning can be done as well as your network behavior analysis, and you can do real-time contextual awareness with correlation of events created on your applications, user devices, operating systems, or vulnerabilities, with all of this real-time data captured including your apps and port scans."
"The most valuable feature is the visibility that we have across the virtual environment."
"We primarily use this solution as an intrusion prevention system for external firewalls and deploy the solution on-premises."
"There are a lot of features that I really appreciate with Firepower, which is why I advise most of my customers to go with Firepower."
 

Cons

"Cisco Firepower was unusable for five years. Some people installed it and had many bad experiences with it, so they decided to buy something else."
"The pricing is very expensive. They should make their equipment more affordable."
"The integration can be more secure."
"If there was a software-based solution for scaling up then it would be much better."
"Customer support needs improvement."
"Regarding additional features, they should speed up their technology to the market because, compared with other security vendors, Cisco is a little behind on the Gartner and technical front."
"The product's high price is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"Cisco can do better on their documentation because the product is really hard to understand."
"The pricing needs to be improved. We have lots of low-budget clients around us. Budget constraints are always a deterrent in our market."
"The price of this solution could be improved."
"This solution needs to be more customizable."
"While the alerts they offer are good, it could improve it in the sense that they should be more detailed to make the alerts more useful to us in general. Sometimes the solution will offer up false positives. Due to the fact that the alerts aren't detailed, we have to go dig around to see why is it being blocked. The solution would be infinitely better if there was just a bit more detail in the alert information and logging we receive."
"A lot of Cisco equipment is very good, but in judging the model of this solution that we have, I feel that it is the worst."
"I want to see a better dashboard for the product. The dashboard can be a bit modified or enhanced."
"The cloud can be improved."
"I would like to have analytics included in the suite."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"In our company, we know that the price of Cisco products is high, especially for its switches, routers and IOS. The price of Cisco products may be twice its original price if you plan to extend some of its features."
"Pricing depends on negotiation with the vendor, although I can say that it is moderate."
"We get cut in price since we use other Cisco products. We have the whole bundle of Cisco solutions."
"I would rate the pricing four out of 10."
"The annual licensing tends to be expensive, but in terms of implementing the licenses, it's a very uncomplicated process and as easy as copy-paste in its straightforwardness."
"Cisco NGIPS is an expensive product."
"This is a very affordable product."
"It is highly priced but competitive regarding features and support services."
"We have a three-year license for this solution."
"Licensing for this solution is paid on a yearly basis."
"The cost is per port and can be expensive but it does include training and support for three years."
"I don't know the exact amount, but most of the time when I go to a company with a proposition, they will say, "This thing that you are selling is good, but it's expensive. Why don't you propose something like FortiGate, Check Point, or Palo Alto?" Cisco device are expensive compared to other devices."
"If one is an extremely expensive product, and ten is cheap, I rate the tool's price as a five."
report
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914,322 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Educational Organization
7%
Construction Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business28
Midsize Enterprise17
Large Enterprise26
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise9
Large Enterprise7
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco NGIPS?
I would rate the price for Cisco Secure IPS (NGIPS) as high.
What needs improvement with Cisco NGIPS?
I am aware that we are not measuring some metrics or tracking access through Cisco Secure IPS (NGIPS). In my opinion, Cisco could improve the Web GUI for Cisco Secure IPS (NGIPS).
What is your primary use case for Cisco NGIPS?
Our main use case for Cisco Secure IPS (NGIPS) is in-line traffic control, and we are using IPS in an in-line mode.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco Sourcefire SNORT?
If one is an extremely expensive product, and ten is cheap, I rate the tool's price as a five. There are some other tools in the market that are more expensive than Cisco. There are no additional c...
What needs improvement with Cisco Sourcefire SNORT?
I have not had much experience with the community-driven rule set while utilizing Cisco Sourcefire SNORT. I don't have experience with recognizing zero-day vulnerabilities, but based on my knowledg...
What is your primary use case for Cisco Sourcefire SNORT?
Endpoint protection is the main use case. The main aspect involves specifying different rules, and when network traffic hits these rules, it will try to block the traffic or at least log the traffi...
 

Also Known As

Sourcefire NGIPS, Firepower NGIPS
Sourcefire SNORT
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

American Electric Power, Huntington Bank, Keycorp, Nationwide, Transunion, Marriott, Inova Health, Ford, Thomson Reuters, Dow Chemical, Equifax, Chevron, Walmart, Coca Cola
CareCore, City of Biel, Dimension Data, LightEdge, Lone Star College System, National Rugby League, Port Aventura, Smart City Networks, Telecom Italia, The Department of Education in Western Australia
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco Secure IPS (NGIPS) vs. Cisco Sourcefire SNORT and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
914,322 professionals have used our research since 2012.