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FireMon Security Manager vs Skybox Security Suite comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 25, 2025

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
Ranking in Firewall Security Management
4th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
56
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Skybox Security Suite
Ranking in Firewall Security Management
7th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
35
Ranking in other categories
Vulnerability Management (44th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the Firewall Security Management category, the mindshare of FireMon Security Manager is 16.5%, up from 16.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Skybox Security Suite is 10.9%, up from 10.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Firewall Security 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.
NenadMijatovic - PeerSpot reviewer
Efficient in vulnerability management, stable and easy to use
Vulnerability management is the most valuable feature because it lets you focus on the most critical vulnerabilities. That's the important thing. Here in Serbia, there are not so many companies that have too many firewalls inside one company. So, they usually don't buy this model for Firewall Assurance unless there is some compliance. So you can prove that your firewalls are compliant. So, that model is not so important here in Serbia. It's for bigger companies. So, they usually buy network assurance to build the model of the network and vulnerability management to focus on the most important vulnerabilities. Moreover, Skybox can collect data for many vendors. From the endpoint protection vendors to the network equipment vendors to other security vendors. So, it supports more than one hundred vendors to collect data from them.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"FireMon decreases errors and misconfigurations by 10% that increase risk in our environment. That has to do a lot with the change reporting that is in place, but also with the built-in controls and custom controls that we have made. Those all decrease the errors that people naturally make on a day-to-day basis for firewall administration."
"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."
"Policy test, access path analysis, and change reports."
"FireMon is nice and provides 360-degree user views."
"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."
"The firewall assessment feature is great."
"Overall, I would rate this solution a nine out of ten."
"It gives us the ability to go to one place to look for potential firewall rules that are inappropriate, or which don't meet compliance. Instead of manually searching hundreds of firewalls for a policy, we can go to this one location and find the rules which are now out of compliance."
"The most impressive feature is optimization and clean-up."
"We are currently working on rule review and compliance. The logging features are good."
"Security review is the most important feature, because it offers a single pane of glass to analyze multiple firewalls."
"This type of tool does a great job of reaching into those other devices producing risk recommendations, compliance recommendations, and a single plane of glass to do your queries, so you can find where these rules might exist."
"The revalidation and policy recertifications are most valuable."
"It's very supportive and very user-friendly."
"The most valuable features are Firewall Assurance and Vulnerability Control."
"Correlates logs and threats and prioritizes; provides network maps;p provides change result context and resulting vulnerability."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"The training for configuring new users or operators is confusing because the UI is not user-friendly and has room for improvement."
"I think that having a more open system and providing documentation for it would be helpful for users like us. We are pretty adept and can navigate through the Linux software that the on-premises FireMon is based on. It would help us in the long run."
"Sometimes, there is a problem related to the sizing itself. If we have many devices added or if the firewall complexity is huge, we might experience some lag in processing. It may relate to the hardware specifications."
"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."
"The support response time has room for improvement."
"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."
"They are not satisfied with the complexity of the solution and the price."
"The setup documentation needs a lot of improvement."
"If anything could be improved it would be staying on top of the collector scripts, but I understand that's a very tough challenge."
"The solution needs improvement in firewall configuration checks. I would also like to see more configuration checks for Forcepoint and for other non-supported firewalls."
"The cloud site could be better. They should provide some use cases to help users."
"The stability is something that is questionable. I don't know whether it is because of the kind of infrastructure we have or because of the product in itself. We're running it on a virtual machine right now. Maybe once a month, or once in every 45 days, it requires a restart because the application fails to connect. So I have to restart the whole Skybox Manager itself, the Skybox server itself, and then connect to it from our Skybox Manager."
"Skybox should improve their UX features by making them easier to use."
"The solution was quite technical. It would be easier to manage if the solution was more specific about aspects of the solution and provided more advisory around how to use it effectively. It would help users a lot if they were more clear about everything."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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."
"Regarding additional costs, if you want things like Policy Optimizer, extra features, that's extra."
"This is an expensive solution. The cost of three modules for three years was approximately one million."
"Pricing is reasonable."
"Its pricing is good. Compared to others, it is not so expensive."
"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 price of the Skybox Security Suite can be expensive."
"The licensing fee is paid yearly and is approximately $100,000."
"I rate the pricing two on a scale of one to ten, where one is very expensive, and ten is cost-effective."
"I think the price is fair."
"The pricing is high, and the licensing model needs more flexibility."
"Fully understand the total cost of ownership. They have gone to a new model where you have to replace the hardware every X amount of years at a very substantial cost and fully understand your intended number of nodes. To operate a firewall, you have to pay two licenses, a firewall node and a network node. If you are a reasonable-sized organization, this gets expensive very quickly."
"The product's pricing is excellent value. In terms of licensing, make sure you understand your network components, all your hops through your network, thoroughly, before you decide on the total cost. If you want to do point-to-point flow analysis and such, you need to have the configuration of all the devices in between point A and point B. A lot of people don't realize all their network components until they start using this product."
"With licensing, the number of network nodes becomes very expensive to the point where you have to rationalize if the tools are warranted anymore."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
19%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
6%
Computer Software Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
6%
 

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 do you like most about Skybox Security Suite?
Overall, the tool has helped us reduce risks. If any step is missing, it's easier for my team or engineers to identify it. The tool provides accurate recommendations based on the data. Its integrat...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Skybox Security Suite?
Skybox Security Suite has indeed helped us reduce costs. The prices of AlgoSec and Skybox Security Suite are approximately 50 percent different. The tool may require special vendor support from abr...
What needs improvement with Skybox Security Suite?
There is room for improvement in the product's user interface. It could be more user-friendly.
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Convey, MGM Resorts International, Southwest Airlines, Alkami, Costco, Aetna, IBM, Verizon, Wells Fargo
ADP, Blue Cross Blue Shield, BT, USAID, Delta Dental, EDF Energy, EMC, HSBC, Johnson & Johnson
Find out what your peers are saying about FireMon Security Manager vs. Skybox Security Suite and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
842,296 professionals have used our research since 2012.