We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Firewall and Meraki MX based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Meraki MX is the winner in this comparison. It is easier to set up and more user-friendly than Cisco ASA Firewall. In addition, Meraki MX is a less expensive solution than Cisco Secure Firewall.
"Overall, the pricing of the solution is very good. The product offers good value."
"The customization potential is quite impressive."
"Good load balancing feature."
"The most valuable features are the enterprise modeling and the simple interface."
"We can use our devices to check all of the perimeters. It secures email websites."
"The user interface is relatively easy. The devices are easy to deploy and figure out when you have experience with other security appliances."
"The most valuable feature is the ease of configuration."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiGate are the APIs. They are the most widely known."
"It has a good security level. It is a next-generation firewall. It can protect from different types of attacks. We have enabled IPS and IDS."
"It's very stable and mature."
"Cisco Secure Firewall is a scalable solution."
"Cisco Secure Firewall is robust and reliable."
"Its VPN and ASN features are very stable."
"It's pretty reliable and allows for isolation capabilities within the network."
"The most important point is the detection engine which is now part of the next-generation firewalls and which is supported by Cisco Talos."
"I work with Cisco and other partners, but the Cisco team is the best team in our country. When I call them, they always help us."
"We work also with domain control (DC) from Microsoft or Amazon. We use a whole virtual appliance with Meraki."
"Meraki makes it easy to be secure and know where the holes are to fix them. We have been fixing anything that we have ever found for 20 years. We keep up-to-date with firmware upgrades. We just try to stay on top of everything for security, like maintaining updates and getting rid of old systems. I feel like we're on top of it."
"The solution's most valuable feature is the Meraki dashboard, which is a single pane of glass."
"To me, the analytics feature is one of the most valuable in Meraki MX. I also find that it has good usability as it's cloud-based. Another valuable feature of Meraki MX is that it's simple to use and it's user-friendly."
"The initial setup for me was straightforward."
"Very easy to use and navigate."
"It prevents us from being hacked and delivers information about who and where the attack came from."
"The solution is easy to set up."
"They need faster serviceability and more security features."
"The solution could be more evenly structured."
"Fortinet needs more memory to save the log files. We need it to save the logs on the hardware and not in the cloud. I know this feature is available in FortiCloud, but if we need this log locally, it is not available."
"I could not configure sFlow from the FortiGate graphical user interface. I realized that the sFlow configuration is available only from the CLI, and discovered that sFlow is not supported on virtual interfaces, such as VDOM links, IPsec, or GRE."
"They've become quite expensive."
"The debugging and troubleshooting has room for improvement."
"Bandwidth usage in reporting could be improved for Fortinet FortiGate."
"The cloud management and automation capability could be improved."
"The Firepower FTD code is missing some old ASA firewalls codes. It's a small thing. But Firepower software isn't missing things that are essential, anymore."
"Cisco's inspection visibility could be better."
"It is surprising that you need to have a virtual appliance for the Firepower Management Center. It is not good if you have to setup a VMware server just for it."
"The artificial intelligence and machine learning (behavioral based threat detection), which I can this will be coming out in another year, these are what we need now."
"The initial setup could be simplified, as it can be complex for new users."
"My team tells me that other solutions such as Fortinet and Palo Alto are easier to implement."
"I needed to be well-versed with all the command lines for Cisco ASA in order to fully utilize it. I missed this info and wasted some operational costs."
"The inclusion of an autofill feature would improve the ease of commands."
"Meraki has some hidden features and information that is only privy to their engineers. If that information became available to us, then it would improve our ease of management, and we would be able to make certain adjustments instead of having to go to them."
"The IPS, the Intrusion Prevention System, can be improved."
"When we do API integrations with Meraki, they have always been hard as well as tedious to build. The data that we want out of the API integrations has been only recently available. Six months ago, it was hard to get someone to build something correctly or useful with Meraki APIs. Recently, they have made more data available on the API, but it is just a start. They need to do more."
"The configuration options for firewall and IPS have limitations."
"Right now, you can postpone the update but eventually, if you don't do the update, it will install the updates automatically for you and that's something that is not working for me."
"We can’t access GUI management and CLI opening features when the Internet is unavailable."
"It can be hard to get a hold of the solution’s technical support team."
"Meraki tech support staff have a lot more visibility into your network than you do, which is frustrating at times. I understand the approach is to keep the dashboard easier to understand. This will frustrate more advanced users at times."
Cisco Secure Firewall is ranked 4th in Firewalls with 404 reviews while Meraki MX is ranked 2nd in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 58 reviews. Cisco Secure Firewall is rated 8.2, while Meraki MX is rated 8.2. 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 Meraki MX writes "Cost-effective, simplified, easy to manage, and reliable with advanced security features and granular visibility". Cisco Secure Firewall is most compared with Palo Alto Networks WildFire, Netgate pfSense, Sophos XG, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls and Juniper SRX Series Firewall, whereas Meraki MX is most compared with Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Sophos XG, SonicWall TZ, Netgate pfSense and SonicWall NSa. See our Cisco Secure Firewall vs. Meraki MX report.
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Meraki is designed for zero deployments and no in-house firewall specialist personnel. Best to secure Networks like remote offices, branches or home offices. Also to protect Internet Access (your computer accesses the internet).
Cisco ASA is more of a professional firewall, not only protecting internet access but also providing security for publishing services like web servers, data centers, central services. They will need a specialist to install and support them. Therefore offer much more sophisticated protection features.
So you can't really compare these solutions, as they are targeting different markets.
You might compare Cisco to Sophos, but again, these are different protection solutions, one for network protection, the other for client protection. If you look only at the firewall part, you miss a lot in the total protection approach with Sophos.
Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) software is the operating software for the Cisco ASA suite. It supports network security and firewall options. We researched both Meraki and ASA. We liked that ASA provides a solid VPN setup and integrates with other Cisco security offerings.
Cisco ASA is great for routing and accessing remote office locations via the remote VPN. We also liked the high availability and customizable nating (Network Access Translation). It is very reliable and easy to use. You can easily configure a site-to-site VPN to connect multiple sites. The support is great - they respond 24/7/365 and there is a lot of documentation available.
The downside is that ASAs are aging. Therefore, Cisco ASAs are best suited to small businesses. If you need something affordable that gets the job done, ASA is a good option.
We chose Cisco Meraki, because, in our opinion, it is a step forward from ASA. The level of security and intrusion detection is great, and because it is cloud-based, it is easy to change the configuration without downtime. Logging is very comprehensive, and management is very simple.
The best feature is content filtering with granular control. Cisco Meraki offers advanced malware protection, including traffic shaping. Another feature we really like is that you can pre-configure devices before they arrive at the installation.
It doesn’t work with DMVPN, which is a downside. Another feature that could use some improvement is reporting, which is not real-time. The price can get expensive but if you can afford it, a full-stack Cisco Meraki system does a great job keeping your network secure.
Conclusions:
If you want a robust but basic firewall, ASA is your best choice. Cisco Meraki is a better choice if you are looking for a next-generation firewall with advanced security features and easy management.