Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software vs. Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software
Score 9.1 out of 10
N/A
Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) software is the core OS for the ASA suite. It provides firewall functionality, as well as integration with context-specific Cisco security modules. It is scaled for enterprise-level traffic and connections.N/A
Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN gives users the ability to manage connectivity across their WAN from a single dashboard that simplifies day to day monitoring and operations. Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN can be cloud-managed or deployed on premise offering comprehensive routing, security and policy control, along with advanced analytics with the flexibility to connect to multiple clouds with greater speed, reliability, and efficiency. According to the vendor, it can be deployed across a small number of…N/A
Pricing
Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) SoftwareCisco Catalyst SD-WAN
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) SoftwareCisco Catalyst SD-WAN
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) SoftwareCisco Catalyst SD-WAN
Considered Both Products
Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software
Chose Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software
The company has been using Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software for more than 10 years, for the support team its operation is simple, so even though Palo Alto has more functions, we would have a certain cost of investment and time in training the entire team, or we …
Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN

No answer on this topic

Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) SoftwareCisco Catalyst SD-WAN
Firewall
Comparison of Firewall features of Product A and Product B
Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software
7.9
49 Ratings
8% below category average
Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN
-
Ratings
Identification Technologies6.932 Ratings00 Ratings
Visualization Tools6.730 Ratings00 Ratings
Content Inspection8.132 Ratings00 Ratings
Policy-based Controls9.045 Ratings00 Ratings
Active Directory and LDAP7.947 Ratings00 Ratings
Firewall Management Console7.747 Ratings00 Ratings
Reporting and Logging5.748 Ratings00 Ratings
VPN9.148 Ratings00 Ratings
High Availability9.147 Ratings00 Ratings
Stateful Inspection9.046 Ratings00 Ratings
Proxy Server8.031 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) SoftwareCisco Catalyst SD-WAN
Small Businesses
pfSense
pfSense
Score 9.6 out of 10

No answers on this topic

Medium-sized Companies
pfSense
pfSense
Score 9.6 out of 10
Cisco Routers
Cisco Routers
Score 8.7 out of 10
Enterprises
Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewalls - PA Series
Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewalls - PA Series
Score 9.5 out of 10
Cisco Routers
Cisco Routers
Score 8.7 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) SoftwareCisco Catalyst SD-WAN
Likelihood to Recommend
9.1
(87 ratings)
8.9
(105 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
7.1
(4 ratings)
8.3
(3 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
8.7
(22 ratings)
Availability
7.5
(2 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
8.7
(8 ratings)
8.3
(15 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Ease of integration
6.5
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) SoftwareCisco Catalyst SD-WAN
Likelihood to Recommend
Cisco
Cisco ASA's are great for internal network connected access between a firewall and the central management server. And, for complex networks where high security requirements with overly strict compliance are necessary. For networks with limited connectivity to the core or for poor network connectivity these are not the best solution. There are other more stand-alone firewall's that do this better. These firewall's are a little more complex to set up to start with so significant knowledge of these devices is required to set them up and ensure they are best practice installed.
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Cisco
Like a lot of classical Cisco tools, every possible feature and customization is available and presented, which can be overwhelming for a lot of people upfront. In addition, Cisco provides multiple ways to design the SD-WAN which again may cause issues when trying to figure out the "right" way if there is more than one "right" way to do it. Once configured, the product is easy to maintain with point and click upgrades, performance metrics, easy troubleshooting and realtime analytics. While the hardware used for the solution can be a bit pricy, the fully leveraged solution provides customers functionality they generally did not have before.
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Pros
Cisco
  • ASA is our VPN concentrator. The client and server are very stable and very easy to use
  • ASA also offers Intrusion Prevention, to an extent. This is also very useful for an improved security posture for a small company
  • ASA allowed us to scale very quickly. We could onboard clients, partners, and consultants and give them a great onboarding experience as well
  • Administrative costs with ASA are low. It's very easy to administer.
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Cisco
  • We are able to use a multiple different circuits to go into the cloud, so we are not relying on just one particular private wireless. We're relying on wine circuits, ethernet, ethernet out. So it provides us that flexibility where we didn't have that before. Provides security that is very robust and flexible and scalable and it provides us with, the biggest thing is redundancy, where we have backup. For example, we have a Starlink for nuclear power plants. If our main circuits go down, we have that. And without Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN it would be very hard to actually achieve, to accomplish true redundancy. So we're happy with Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN in that regard.
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Cons
Cisco
  • The ASDM software is at times a nightmare to install because of different java versions[.]
  • [The firewall] could do with a power button, just to be able to do a hard reboot when needed[.]
  • It would be nice to manage the firewall via the web on port 443[.]
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Cisco
  • I will say the way we use it now, and I think what happened was the way it was deployed, it was fine, but unfortunately over the course of the years we've gotten a little out of hand with our device templates and feature templates. I think if there's any form of feedback that I would give to Cisco is how do we find ways to improve the environment as it stands so we get to a certain point with the environment and then we don't know how to undo it or fix it or optimize the environment. Because right now we're in a position where we're playing a lot of catch up and clean up and if there was a way or some tool or feature that we can take advantage of that would allow us to optimize that environment where we will kind of corner ourselves into a lot of problems in the future. There's some feature or something that we could take advantage of that will allow us to optimize that environment and not let it get out of control pretty easily. That would be my suggestion.
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Likelihood to Renew
Cisco
To be honest there has been now great products out in the market compared to Cisco ASA. I beleieve Cisco has to do a lot of improvement in this area. The other defeiniete factors is the cost when it comes to renewals which is always a premium on Cisco products
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Cisco
If the product working as expected and ticking all the objectives of Business than why not?
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Usability
Cisco
No answers on this topic
Cisco
No very intuitive for none trained customer, very complicated to assure a day to day operations if you don't have a strong knowledges on network routing OSPF BGP RIP etc... The different platforms and range of furnitures with specific options is very complicated for the integration and consolidation of the solution.
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Reliability and Availability
Cisco
I generally have not noticed the outages, however since it's a machine it can malfunction, we need to implement the firewall infrastructure in such a way that it is highly available with device failure, region failure etc. Else any solution will be having the issues if they are not build with resiliency.
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Cisco
I think if we could afford, we could have HA inplace but we planned out outage and workaround to avoid any outages.
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Performance
Cisco
No answers on this topic
Cisco
It does slow down over the period but it's same with other product. you need to clear/reboot services.
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Support Rating
Cisco
The support is usually very good and gets back to you very quickly. However I had some instances of when two engineers will give me wildly different answers to what I thought was a simple question. Overall however I do rate the support highly and they are generally always very good.
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Cisco
Al ser soluciones integradas del portafolio de soluciones de Cisco, el soporte es transversal a cada uno de los componentes implementados, teniendo el cliente la capacidad de resolver sus inconvenientes bajo una misma infraestructura que está totalmente homologada, satisfacciendo de esta manera, las necesidades del cliente asi como permitiendo, que este se concentre en su negocio. Since the Cisco SD-WAN tools are a part of Cisco’s broader portfolio of solutions, support cross-cuts to each of our deployed components, with our company as the customer having the ability to solve our problems through the same, approved infrastructure. Their support team easily satisfies the customer’s needs so that they continue to focus on business functions.
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Implementation Rating
Cisco
It was quite a good one, how ever requires an expertise to deploy hence the SMB segment would be finding it difficult to implement this product. The one good reason is that there are lot of ASA certified engineers in compared to the other certified engineers. Hence this resembles positively on the deployment as you have quite a lot of experienced engineer on your deployment
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Cisco
I was late to participate but my team was very happy with the outcome.
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Alternatives Considered
Cisco
We were using [pfSense] before in our environment but we regularly facing difficulties over it due to software bugs & downtime. After implementing Cisco ASA, it resolved our availability issue & provides us a reliable solution with the best security features & easy to understand GUI.
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Cisco
We've used the old Cisco SD-WAN, which no longer exists. It was a lot more complex to configure what is now called Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN. So they've definitely come a long way in that it is a lot less complicated to set up and template based.
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Scalability
Cisco
No answers on this topic
Cisco
Really strength in scalability. Only thigs it's depends on some prototype Cisco product which you can't work with other Cisco products.
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Return on Investment
Cisco
  • Most network engineers have worked with ASA, so there is no need for re-training when adding or turning over staff
  • Current configs from older devices plug in easily, and are operational on larger devices if an upgrade is required
  • Many support options available
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Cisco
  • Our branch offices can connect to our enterprise network and the internet quickly and securely, which has helped to increase productivity and reduce downtime.
  • We have been able to reduce our dependence on expensive MPLS connections, and instead utilize a combination of broadband and LTE connections, which are more cost-effective
  • The centralized location improves network visibility and troubleshooting process
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ScreenShots