We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Firewall and Palo Alto Networks K2-Series based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Firewalls solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."Overall, the pricing of the solution is very good. The product offers good value."
"Unified Threat Management (UTM) features."
"I really like the captive portal feature for our guest network. It has nice VLAN features in terms of separating our network. The anti-virus is also good."
"The solution is easy to configure and maintain remotely."
"It has improved our organization with control data."
"The SD-WAN feature is the most valuable. This feature evolved from link load balancing. It has helped us in terms of our uptime and privatizing applications whenever we experience an outage. The SD-WAN feature has been a plus for us. Two-factor authentication has allowed us to add more users in terms of remote working. We have two-factor authentication for remote workers to authenticate them before they get on the network."
"The most valuable feature is the policy routing and application control."
"FortiGate has a strong security topic which allows all of the Fortinet devices to communicate and share information which makes their security more powerful."
"The stability is very good; there's no vagueness. Either it works or it doesn't, and it's also very easy to find out why."
"The TAC is always very helpful. We pay for Tier 1 support, so we get whatever we need from them. They always give us a solution. If they can't give us an answer that day, they get back to us within at least 24 hours with a solution or fix. I have never had a problem with the TAC. I would rate them as 10 out of 10."
"Previously, our customers had to always utilize hand-to-hand delivery. Now, they are able to move completely to a secure digital method. They use a strictly dark fiber optics connection from a central location to the endpoint."
"We feel that we can trust the security, and our assets and business are well protected. We need to have trust in it, but we also see that it works. We have a security company that has tested that it works."
"When I was managing these firewalls, I found them easy to understand, easy to deploy, and easy to maintain as compared to some of the other firewalls I have been involved with earlier. The opinion of my coworkers is that it's easy and quick to establish new zones, expand, and maintain."
"We get the Security Intelligence Feeds refreshed every hour from Talos, which from my understanding is that they're the largest intelligence Security Intelligence Group outside of the government."
"The integration of network and workload micro-segmentation helps a lot to provide unified segmentation policies across east-west and north-south traffic. One concrete example is with Cisco ACI for the data center. Not only are we doing what is called a service graph on the ACI to make sure that we can filter traffic east-west between two endpoints in the same network, but when we go north-south or east-west, we can then leverage what we have on the network with SGTs on Cisco ISE. Once you build your matrix, it is very easy to filter in and out on east-west or north-south traffic."
"The Inline Mode configuration works really well, and ASA works very impressively."
"Palo Alto firewalls are scalable enough. We have about 110 employees in our company, and we are about to expand to 130."
"The most valuable feature of Palo Alto Networks K2-Series is the configuration, it is very clear."
"Palo Alto has a unique solution for DNS security, which is very good."
"The most valuable feature of Palo Alto Networks K2-Series is its management abilities. Additionally, the updates are very good."
"Palo Alto has an approach that makes the configuration easier not only for the customers but also for the IT help for the customers."
"I like the tool's WildFire feature."
"The scalability of the product is quite high."
"K2-Series' best features include its scalability, which is the best on the market."
"They sometimes hide some features and if you want to enable them, you have to go in the CLI, enable the feature and configure it through the CLI. Customers, typically, like everything to be done by the GUI."
"Fortinet FortiGate could improve the user interface. There should be more functionality and options through the GUI."
"I would like to see better pricing in the next release, as well as a simplification of the installation."
"There is one big configuration file with no separations for the unique VDOMs. Maybe they could separate individual VDOM configuration files with the root VDOM configuration file referencing the individual VDOM config files."
"Vulnerability scanning could be improved."
"For the migration, everyone has a firewall in use and I am selling Fortinet. Typically, I am replacing another firewall. Previously, there was a tool available to convert configurations from one firewall, such as Palo Alto, to Fortinet, but this tool is no longer free. If it could be made free again, it would be very beneficial."
"The support system could be improved."
"The firmware needs improvement because there are bugs when a new release comes through. Sometimes, the configuration changes, and it's a bit harder to see where the fail is. The first time that you have the firmware, it tends to have some issues, and it's better to wait a bit to update the equipment."
"Most of the time, when I try to run Java, it is not compatible with ASA's current operating systems."
"The ability to better integrate with other tools would be an improvement."
"The relatively new Firepower Threat Defense image (mix of ASA and Sourcefire network security) fills a lot of gaps and features that were missing on ASA."
"The only con that I have really seen with it is the reporting structure. FirePOWER is good. It has been a great help because, before that, it was not good at all."
"Multiple WAN connections: Even though you can implement more than one interface to outside connections, it is lacking on load balances, etc."
"Some of the features, like the stability, need to be improved."
"The service could use a little more web filtering. If I compare it to Cyberoam, Cyberoam has more the web filtering, so if you want to block a website, it's easier in other solutions than in Cisco."
"Cisco ASA Firewall could improve by adding more advanced features such as web filtering, which is available in the next-generation firewalls. However, the Cisco ASA Firewall I am using could be old and these features have been updated."
"It is recommended that the Palo Alto Networks K2-Series be implemented step by step for the Panorama. Sometimes we can't overwrite the configurations because it fails."
"The scalability of Palo Alto Networks K2-Series is good. It is good for larger environments over smaller ones."
"We had some issues with upgrading in the past. They could make the process easier."
"There are a lot of bugs in this solution."
"The technical support, and how they provide it to the client, needs to be improved."
"Palo Alto has many other products. It would be nice for these products to be centralized under one tool"
"If we have issues, they take anywhere from two days to a week to respond. I even wrote to their CEO because there was no response. When it comes to support, this is the worst company."
"I would like to see the threat intelligence capability integrated with other vendors such as Cisco and Forcepoint."
Cisco Secure Firewall is ranked 4th in Firewalls with 404 reviews while Palo Alto Networks K2-Series is ranked 28th in Firewalls with 29 reviews. Cisco Secure Firewall is rated 8.2, while Palo Alto Networks K2-Series is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Cisco Secure Firewall writes "Highlights and helps us catch Zero-day vulnerabilities traveling across our network". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Palo Alto Networks K2-Series writes "Easy to implement and manage, and the documentation is good". Cisco Secure Firewall is most compared with Palo Alto Networks WildFire, Netgate pfSense, Meraki MX, Sophos XG and Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, whereas Palo Alto Networks K2-Series is most compared with Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls. See our Cisco Secure Firewall vs. Palo Alto Networks K2-Series report.
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