We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Firewall and Zscaler Internet Access 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."Consolidated our network environment at all locations, but mainly at our datacenter."
"The technical support in our region is excellent."
"Fortinet FortiGate's reliability is valuable."
"It is a one box solution, which covers most of the edge device’s requirements."
"The most valuable features are the enterprise modeling and the simple interface."
"The most valuable feature is the policy routing and application control."
"The most valuable feature is the ease of configuration."
"The initial setup of Fortinet FortiGate was straightforward."
"Cisco Secure Firewall made it easier so that more than one person can handle things. We are able to have a bigger team that can handle simple tasks and have a smaller team focus on the deep-dive needs."
"It's a flexible solution and is well-known in the community."
"Cisco offers a great educational series to train users on their devices."
"Once you add Firepower onto to it and you start enabling some of its features, you get some IDS/IPS involved with it and you can even do web filtering."
"I have found the stability of this solution really good. This is why I use it."
"There are no issues that we are aware of. It does its job silently in the background."
"I like the ASDM for the firewall because it is visual. With the command line, it is harder to visualize what is going on. A picture is worth a thousand words."
"They are easy to maintain."
"We use ZIA for outbound internet connectivity. The internet traffic of on-prem users will be directed to the ZIA cloud for security checks and web filtering."
"All internet access flows through the Zscaler proxy, regardless of whether people are in office or remote. I have greater control site access and I minimize the number of compromises that we experience to almost none."
"We enjoy all of the proxy capabilities and the capability to integrate into the SIEM/SOC solution."
"For our needs, the cloud-native proxy architecture is a very good solution. We are moving away from on-prem appliances and moving more toward cloud-based solutions. Zscaler is a good fit for our strategy. This architecture helps with cyber threats because we inspect most of the traffic and we can see that a lot of threats are stopped directly in the secure web gateway."
"The policies are very intuitive and easy to configure, with very little possibility of messing things up."
"Tech support is good."
"The most valuable feature is bandwidth control."
"The solution replaces multiple vendor technologies with one which makes it worth the cost."
"I would prefer to have more detailed logs within the FortiGate products themselves rather than relying on a separate tool."
"There are a lot of bugs I have found in the solution and it is difficult to upgrade. These areas need improvement."
"The solution lacks multi-language support."
"I need user-behavior analytics, to find threat scenarios from inside the organization, insider attacks. That would be very helpful for us. In addition, I would like next-generation features for small and medium businesses. These businesses require UTM, all in one product. Fortinet must include it."
"Cisco Meraki products are rising very quickly in the cloud and the connected era. Meraki products offer much better ROI, upgradability, and manageability."
"You do need some IT knowledge in order to effectively work with the solution."
"I have to say that the initial setup was complex. The deployment took a few days to get set up. Initially, we were using an IPVanish. We switched to this tool since we thought it would be easier. But it turns out it wasn't easier to set up and run."
"Fortinet FortiGate could improve by having more capabilities for troubleshooting VPN connections. For example, I do get some feedback about the current status, but I could use some history and logging of important events. The information is logged in our Syslog server, but I could use that information from the device. If they could provide a GUI to have some more insight on what's going with my VPN would be useful."
"It is expensive."
"With the new FTD, there is a little bit of a learning curve."
"Some of the features, like the stability, need to be improved."
"It doesn't have Layer 7 security."
"The IPS module is combined with the main operating system."
"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."
"In terms of what could be improved, I would say the UTM part should be more integrated for one price, because if you buy ASA from Cisco, you need to buy another contract service from Cisco as a filter for the dictionary of attacks. In Fortinet, you buy a firewall and you have it all."
"It would be great if some of the load times were faster."
"Zscaler Internet Access could improve by adding a VPN feature."
"When you have appliances, SSL inspection is always a headache due to poor performance and/or lack of ciphers implemented. "
"Zscaler should provide adjacent services, which would be complementary to their current offering that could to be more pragmatic for a customer. For example, if you take Akamai, you get multiple sets of services, all depending on the customer and the strategy and the complexity and the problems. In some areas, they are more varied in terms of coverage."
"Sometimes it's not easy to use during large deployments of workstations."
"I would like to see more training and video documentation."
"The OS capabilities and WSL support could be improved."
"Zscaler Internet Access's troubleshooting is very limited, and their textbook logs need to be more informative."
"In terms of user experience, it could be better."
Cisco Secure Firewall is ranked 4th in Firewalls with 404 reviews while Zscaler Internet Access is ranked 2nd in Secure Web Gateways (SWG) with 46 reviews. Cisco Secure Firewall is rated 8.2, while Zscaler Internet Access 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 Zscaler Internet Access writes "Provides integrated CASB and file sandboxing but could be less expensive ". Cisco Secure Firewall is most compared with Palo Alto Networks WildFire, Netgate pfSense, Meraki MX, Sophos XG and Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, whereas Zscaler Internet Access is most compared with Cisco Umbrella, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, Netskope , Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks and Appgate SDP. See our Cisco Secure Firewall vs. Zscaler Internet Access report.
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