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FireMon Security Manager vs RedSeal 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:
 

Categories and Ranking

FireMon Security Manager
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
56
Ranking in other categories
Firewall Security Management (4th)
RedSeal
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
Risk-Based Vulnerability Management (19th)
 

Mindshare comparison

FireMon Security Manager and RedSeal aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. FireMon Security Manager is designed for Firewall Security Management and holds a mindshare of 16.6%, up 16.2% compared to last year.
RedSeal, on the other hand, focuses on Risk-Based Vulnerability Management, holds 0.3% mindshare, up 0.1% since last year.
Firewall Security Management
Risk-Based Vulnerability Management
 

Featured Reviews

Ganesh-Khutwad - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Sajid Mukhtar - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides a graphical overview of our network and is easy to deploy, but needs a user-friendly interface and a feature for compliance audit policy
Sometimes, it required us to refresh the configuration. When we integrated any of the configurations into the device, sometimes, it could not detect the exact picture of that device. So, we had to reset the device to see that if it was giving true-positive results or false-positive results. In some cases, we were not able to get true-positive results. There was some kind of bug in that version. Its interface is not user-friendly and needs to be improved. It takes time to understand the interface and various options. Skybox has quite a user-friendly interface. They could provide a feature for compliance audit policy if it is already not there. A compliance audit policy ensures that all configurations are based on the best practices standards, such as CIS benchmarks standard or other similar standards. It provides visibility about whether your device configuration is based on best practices or not. Usually, such a feature is provided by other solutions such as Meteor or Tenable Nessus.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Vendor agnostic when it comes to integrating with other product."
"Compared to other applications, it is user-friendly. The appearance of the menus and titles is clear and they are easy to follow. Of course, it requires some experience through using it, to go through everything, but it is not very difficult. It is an easy application to use."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is that everything is recorded in the historical logs, including the firewall rules, headcounts, object-level usage, and the rule documentation. The rule certification details are also there, which means that someone can be held accountable for a specific firewall rule."
"What I like about FireMon is the ability to track changes made by network engineers on the network."
"The unused objects is another nice feature, where it digs a little bit deeper into comparing the logs that it sees versus the configurations that it sees... The unused objects feature will go through in a pretty detailed way and show us which ones aren't being used. Or, if they are used, it will show us how often they're used."
"FireMon saves us a lot of time and it's nice because if you're adding a rule that's similar to another rule, it'll tell you so sometimes you can just edit the one and add another source or destination in there without creating a duplicate rule. It enables you to consolidate and have fewer, more meaningful rules. We're saving around 30% of our time."
"In one report, FireMon tells us there are, say, 1,000 rules that can be taken out and it gives us the ability to disable those for a year and to track when we made our changes. After a year, we can go back and eliminate the rules, to bring the configuration down to an almost human-readable level."
"RedSeal integrates the network and gives us a visual or graphical overview of our network. If an organization is geographically dispersed, for instance, with one office in Canada and one office in the Philippines, the whole network, including all devices, is integrated into RedSeal, and you can see from where the traffic is going in and out."
"RedSeal has different modules, such as the Analyzer module, which can be leveraged."
"This is the only solution in the world that gives you a digital resilience score."
"The most valuable features are network mapping and configuration."
 

Cons

"A phone app would be nice. This is the reason why it is not perfect yet."
"We've had recurring issues managing FireMon's internal backups. Sometimes, the space allocated for the backup is full, and there is no process where it deletes files that are older than I certain date. It's just waiting for the storage to get full and then it's cleaned up. It isn't something that creates serious issues for us."
"FireMon could improve its end-user practices. As an end user, I am just trying to catch up on all the alerts. There are so many, and you still have to go through them and document what was found."
"The support response time has room for improvement."
"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."
"I don't like that it comes with bugs, constant issues, and limited functionality."
"The AWS integration is still not mature for us to use. It is just not ready for our use case for AWS connectivity. Therefore, it does not provide us with a single pane of glass for our cloud environments, because we can't manage our cloud environment with the tool."
"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."
"There is room for improvement in integrating the OT security part and the private 5G security part in RedSeal."
"One of the areas of concern is the GUI. It is important to our customers that the GUI looks beautiful. It's a Java Client, so you have a Java dependency."
"Sometimes, it required us to refresh the configuration. When we integrated any of the configurations into the device, sometimes, it could not detect the exact picture of that device. So, we had to reset the device to see that if it was giving true-positive results or false-positive results. In some cases, we were not able to get true-positive results. There was some kind of bug in that version. Its interface is not user-friendly and needs to be improved. It takes time to understand the interface and various options. Skybox has quite a user-friendly interface. They could provide a feature for compliance audit policy if it is already not there. A compliance audit policy ensures that all configurations are based on the best practices standards, such as CIS benchmarks standard or other similar standards. It provides visibility about whether your device configuration is based on best practices or not. Usually, such a feature is provided by other solutions such as Meteor or Tenable Nessus."
"The dashboard should be improved to make correlating data easier to do."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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."
"Regarding additional costs, if you want things like Policy Optimizer, extra features, that's extra."
"It's a good value. From a licensing standpoint... it's very simple to understand, and gives us a good bang for the buck."
"Relative to what it offers, the price is fair."
"Its pricing is good. Compared to others, it is not so expensive."
"Pricing is reasonable."
"Pricing model seems fair."
"The pricing is based on the number of endpoints and devices, and we have seen it range from mid-five figures to low six figures."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
19%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
6%
Government
24%
Computer Software Company
13%
Energy/Utilities Company
7%
Retailer
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for FireMon?
Comparatively, FireMon has a very good price and is below the general competition in cost. I have not seen any additional fees beyond the general contract fees for the usage I have. So, I have not ...
What needs improvement with FireMon?
For one company I work with, I use Fortinet, and FireMon is not able to understand the zones that Fortinet uses. Part of that compliance piece does not provide me with the necessary information. An...
What needs improvement with RedSeal?
There is room for improvement in integrating the OT security part and the private 5G security part in RedSeal.
What is your primary use case for RedSeal?
The primary use cases for RedSeal are lifecycle management, vulnerabilities, and change management. Customers might look up or use these solutions for these areas.
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Convey, MGM Resorts International, Southwest Airlines, Alkami, Costco, Aetna, IBM, Verizon, Wells Fargo
United States Postal Service, Pacific Gas and Electric Co., Interval International
Find out what your peers are saying about AlgoSec, Tufin, Palo Alto Networks and others in Firewall Security Management. Updated: March 2025.
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