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Cisco Secure IPS (NGIPS) vs Cisco Sourcefire SNORT comparison

 

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)
7th
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 August 2026, in the Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) category, the mindshare of Cisco Secure IPS (NGIPS) is 3.4%, up from 3.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco Sourcefire SNORT is 3.0%, up from 2.6% 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 SNORT3.0%
Other93.6%
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

"The traffic filter of this solution is very valuable to us, and to our clients."
"Cisco NGIPS is a stable tool...The technical support provided by Cisco NGIPS is okay."
"The thing about this solution that I like the most is that it's intuitive."
"The cost is the most valuable feature."
"The best thing about Cisco is their good marketing force; we appreciate doing business with Cisco all the time, and I'd love to sell and install Cisco switches and other things."
"I would say it's a good product if you look at the primary functionality, which is intrusion prevention."
"We like the Cisco product, the concept, and the tech intelligence."
"Cisco has many products that are easily integrated with other services."
"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."
"With Cisco Sourcefire SNORT, we've been able to prevent and detect intrusion in our network and actually decrease our SLA (Service Level Agreement)."
"Cisco Sourcefire SNORT is easy to configure and the reporting is great. It's also very user-friendly."
"If you compare it to other vendors, the technical support from Cisco is excellent."
"The solution is stable."
"The URL filtering is very good and you can create a group for customized URLs."
"I like most of Cisco's features, like malware detection and URL filtering."
"The solution is rather easy to use."
 

Cons

"We would like to see improvements in the dashboard features."
"Some Next-Generation Firewall solutions come with Intrusion Prevention. It would be nice if Cisco NGIPS included that."
"The GUI user interface could be improved and the login is not very user friendly."
"The user interface needs some improvement, it is a little rudimentary and not very intuitive."
"Customer service is lacking, and I would rate it as three out of ten."
"I would rate Cisco Secure IPS (NGIPS) six out of ten. The lack of automation and AI capabilities affects the rating."
"My opinion is that this solution should improve the pricing."
"We have a separate management controller for Cisco NGIPS. If they have not done it already they should integrate Cisco NGIPS with the Cloud Portal."
"With the next release, I would like to see some PBR, so that you can do the configuration with the features."
"Performance needs improvement."
"The pricing needs to be improved."
"The initial setup is a little difficult compared to other products in the market. It depends on the environment. If we are doing any migration, it might take months in a brown-field environment."
"I would like to have analytics included in the suite."
"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."
"The utopia is to see everything from one dashboard, but sometimes that's not very possible."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing could be improved. Our customers have a yearly license."
"The price of the solution is expensive to a degree it cannot be used by small businesses. It is best suited for medium and enterprise businesses."
"We pay for the IPS license to use this solution."
"They are very expensive in some places and not reasonable at times for many customers. I have had customers choose another solution because of the high price."
"Licenses for this product are available for either one, or three year terms."
"It is expensive. It has separate licensing for all the features, and every feature set seems to require another license. Licensing is on a yearly basis. There are no additional costs besides the standard licensing fee."
"Cisco products are not cheap and this solution is no different."
"The cost of the license depends on the level of support that you have with Cisco."
"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."
"Licensing for this solution is paid on a yearly basis."
"We have a three-year license for this solution."
"The cost is per port and can be expensive but it does include training and support for three years."
"If one is an extremely expensive product, and ten is cheap, I rate the tool's price as a five."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Educational Organization
7%
Outsourcing Company
7%
Construction Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business27
Midsize Enterprise17
Large Enterprise27
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: August 2026.
910,350 professionals have used our research since 2012.