We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Firewall and KerioControl 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."Unified Threat Management (UTM) features."
"The main benefit is the grouping of our security monitoring."
"The application control features, such as Facebook blocking and Spotify blocking, are the most valuable."
"I like that you are able to manage FortiGate from the FortiManager to create a more centralized environment."
"The management console is pretty simple, so anyone who understands networking can initially deploy the solution."
"FortiGate is on the cheaper end, and it offers good value."
"I'm pretty happy with its reliability. It is also very scalable."
"It is a one box solution, which covers most of the edge device’s requirements."
"It provides security for our company and users."
"Once configured to suit your needs, these firewalls are rock solid appliances."
"Everything is all documented in the file or in the command line script that gets uploaded to the device. It gives us great visibility."
"Since the product is stable, we do not have to spend additional money to buy other firewalls. Once deployed, we can use the product for a long time. Thus, it is cost effective."
"The most valuable features of this solution are advanced malware protection, IPS, and IDS."
"AnyConnect has been very helpful, along with the ability to use LDAP for authentication."
"We have multiple secure internal networks linked with our plants. We are from a oil company, so we have multiple plant areas which need to have restricted network access. Therefore, we are using it for restricting access to the plant area."
"The solution is pretty easy to deploy."
"It helps us better control internal and external communications."
"Its support is very good, and it is stable product."
"The flexibility of the system, the capacity to provide the right level of security, and the ability to be integrated into different kinds of infrastructures are the most valuable features."
"It is very comprehensive and simple. It has all the active protections. It's updated. We love that you can set how often it is updated so you can work what is right for you. A large company with a lot of bandwidth can update the virus definitions and security definitions hourly, if they want. A smaller site that's remote, where maybe updating the definitions will eat into the bandwidth, we can schedule those more to go later at night. It's very flexible and works for us in all types of situations. This is great because then we don't have to learn seven different products to be able to work with seven different scenarios."
"The most valuable feature is to provide users with the ability to log in to the portal page, keep track of their data usage and perform bandwidth management."
"The product is affordable."
"We also like the security. We can control what sites users can go to and we can make sure that where they're going is appropriate and that it's work-related."
"The initial setup is a breeze."
"It is stable, but its stability can be improved."
"The command line is complicated, and the interface could be better."
"I would like reporting to be improved and should offer a lot more tools to monitor the products."
"There are some tiny bugs that sometimes affect the operations. In the past revision of it, there was a bug. Because of the bug, we had to downgrade the version. It happened only with the last revision."
"It is quite new for us, and we need to go more in-depth into the monitoring tools. It provides different features that we need to do what we want. So far, it is okay for us. In terms of improvement, in the future, they can provide a faster implementation of features. Some of the features are first available in other solutions. Fortinet sometimes takes a little bit longer than other solutions, such as Check Point, to implement new features."
"I would suggest that Fortinet add sandboxing to their solution."
"I would like some automated custom reporting."
"There are some problems that support cannot give you a logical reason as to why it happened. For example, I had a case where I was dealing with a WhatsApp application that was giving issues. Technical support gave more than one reason it could be giving issues, but none of them solved the problem. Eventually I solved the problem, but it was far from the solutions that support had given."
"One area that could be improved is its logging functionality. Your logs are usually displayed on the screen, but if you want to go back one or two days, then you need another solution in place because those logs are overwritten within minutes."
"It would be great to have all the data correlated to have an overview and one point of administration."
"It is not the newest, cutting-edge technology"
"If Cisco could stop rebranding, combine all the CLIs/GUIs, and give a consistent experience, this would be great."
"I would like it to have faster deployment times. A typical deployment could take two to three minutes. Sometimes, it depends on the situation. It is better than it was in the past, but it could always use improvement."
"Web filtering needs improvement because sometimes the URL is miscategorized."
"Multiple WAN connections: Even though you can implement more than one interface to outside connections, it is lacking on load balances, etc."
"Most of the features don't work well, and some features are missing as well."
"The denial of service could also be improved. There recently was a big issue with denial of service attacks and it was a bit laborious."
"I would like to see them develop a bit more flexibility creating VLANs."
"The trial duration of the product should be extended."
"I have had a few issues with HTTPS decryption. The solution also does not show the actual user's Internet usage."
"I would like to be able to inspect https packets for the purpose of virus scanning."
"I would like to see a little improvement in their technical support when you have a problem. I may be a little jaded because I came from Kerio when we could call and get a person on the phone who worked on the product. Every tech had their own demo setup. They had instant messaging capability with the developers. If we found a problem, then we could get a result for it quickly. Now, the product seems to be 24 hours. They have also gone to the model that if you need quicker support, then they now charge you additional for the exact same level of support that they used to give. I am assuming it's the exact same level of support that they say it is. I'm not paying extra for it. That's the biggest flaw with the product."
"I can no longer renew my subscription directly with GFI but we have to go through third-party resellers like CDW. The first time I did it with CDW. I went to CDW and it was almost like they didn't even know anything. They didn't know what package I was supposed to get. Then after I got it, it took almost five days to get everything working."
"One of the problems we do have causes problems with the VPN. The software slows the throughput down too much. You could have a one-gigabit connection from the internet, and it slows it down to the area of upload and download is extremely slow. There's too much content filtering at that point."
Cisco Secure Firewall is ranked 4th in Firewalls with 404 reviews while KerioControl is ranked 29th in Firewalls with 54 reviews. Cisco Secure Firewall is rated 8.2, while KerioControl is rated 8.0. 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 KerioControl writes "With VPN, any of our guys can log in to the system and effectively be on board; helps with our customers all over the world". Cisco Secure Firewall is most compared with Palo Alto Networks WildFire, Netgate pfSense, Meraki MX, Sophos XG and Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, whereas KerioControl is most compared with Netgate pfSense, OPNsense, Sophos UTM, Sophos XG and Fortinet FortiGate-VM. See our Cisco Secure Firewall vs. KerioControl report.
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