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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 16.4%, up 16.2% compared to last year.
RedSeal, on the other hand, focuses on Risk-Based Vulnerability Management, holds 0.2% 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

"The most valuable features are the security assessments and the ability to identify unused rules or objects."
"For the cleanup of firewall rules, it performs really well for us. We utilize it in our regular rule cleanup tasks, several times a year. FireMon is our primary tool when doing that, either by going through its out-of-the-box compliance rules or using it to search for certain things in our rules that we want to prune from our firewalls."
"The most valuable features are Policy Optimizer and Firewall Manager for different brands of firewall."
"The firewall assessment feature is great."
"The automation that the platform provides to create tickets reduces human error and more generally, reduces the operational overhead."
"It is a good product. Previously, we were using only spreadsheets to compare the usage, but now with FireMon, we are able to clean up or review the policies to some extent. It is still a work in progress, but we are at a good stage now."
"What I like about FireMon is the ability to track changes made by network engineers on the network."
"The technical support is very good. They've always been helpful."
"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."
"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."
"The most valuable features are network mapping and configuration."
 

Cons

"We're working on implementing FireMon with our ticketing system service now. Having that would be an improvement."
"Policy Planner requirements section is good, but could use some improvement to allow flexibility to enter different types of requests (modifying an existing policy, object or service group, for example) in a structured task format that can be auto-verified."
"When it comes to identifying risk in our environment and prioritizing fixes, it is really about the different priorities within the organization. FireMon is not so smart that it can tell what's important to us. It's up to us to figure that out."
"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."
"The current health and monitoring of the devices is atrocious... Imagine you have a list of 200 devices, and you can grade each of those devices as either green, yellow, or red. However, there might be three different reasons for you to go to red, or eight different reasons to go to yellow, and all of those things could be combined... Out of all those categories, I only find one or two of them that are, perhaps, pertinent."
"A feature that could be improved is support for more devices, not just the firewall."
"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."
"One area for 7.x customers that needs improvement is the migration. It is an involved process so get ready to spend some time getting your environment back to the way it was."
"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."
"There is room for improvement in integrating the OT security part and the private 5G security part in RedSeal."
"The dashboard should be improved to make correlating data easier to do."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is very good, very straightforward. It also came in cheaper than AlgoSec and Tufin."
"Pricing model seems fair."
"This is an expensive solution. The cost of three modules for three years was approximately one million."
"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."
"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."
"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 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
20%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
6%
Government
21%
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
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 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...
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: January 2025.
838,713 professionals have used our research since 2012.