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Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software vs. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software

    Score9 out of 10
    N/ACisco 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

    Microsoft Defender for Endpoint

    Score8.8 out of 10
    N/AMicrosoft Defender for Endpoint (formerly Microsoft Defender ATP) is a holistic, cloud delivered endpoint security solution that includes risk-based vulnerability management and assessment, attack surface reduction, behavioral based and cloud-powered next generation protection, endpoint detection and response (EDR), automatic investigation and remediation, managed hunting services, rich APIs, and unified security management.

    $2.50

    per user/per month

    Pricing
    Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) SoftwareMicrosoft Defender for Endpoint
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    Academic
    $2.50
    per user/per month
    Standalone
    $5.20
    per user/per month
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) SoftwareMicrosoft Defender for Endpoint
    Free Trial
    NoYes
    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) SoftwareMicrosoft Defender for Endpoint
    Considered Both Products
    Cisco
    No answer on this topic
    Microsoft
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    87%
    Would buy again
    40 Answers
    96%
    Would buy again
    157 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    95%
    Delivers good value for the price
    42 Answers
    99%
    Delivers good value for the price
    146 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    91%
    Happy with the feature set
    42 Answers
    95%
    Happy with the feature set
    155 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    36 Answers
    97%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    130 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    98%
    Implementation went as expected
    41 Answers
    95%
    Implementation went as expected
    140 Answers
    Features
    Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) SoftwareMicrosoft Defender for Endpoint
    Firewall
    Comparison of Firewall features of Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software and Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
    Feature
    Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software
    8.9
    50 Ratings
    4% above category average
    Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
    -
    Ratings
    Identification Technologies7.932 Ratings00 Ratings
    Visualization Tools7.931 Ratings00 Ratings
    Content Inspection8.433 Ratings00 Ratings
    Policy-based Controls8.446 Ratings00 Ratings
    Active Directory and LDAP8.448 Ratings00 Ratings
    Firewall Management Console9.049 Ratings00 Ratings
    Reporting and Logging8.949 Ratings00 Ratings
    VPN10.049 Ratings00 Ratings
    High Availability9.649 Ratings00 Ratings
    Stateful Inspection10.046 Ratings00 Ratings
    Proxy Server9.032 Ratings00 Ratings
    Endpoint Security
    Comparison of Endpoint Security features of Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software and Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
    Feature
    Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software
    -
    Ratings
    Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
    8.7
    79 Ratings
    2% above category average
    Anti-Exploit Technology00 Ratings9.075 Ratings
    Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)00 Ratings9.179 Ratings
    Centralized Management00 Ratings8.679 Ratings
    Hybrid Deployment Support00 Ratings7.110 Ratings
    Infection Remediation00 Ratings9.077 Ratings
    Vulnerability Management00 Ratings8.774 Ratings
    Malware Detection00 Ratings9.278 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) SoftwareMicrosoft Defender for Endpoint
    Small Businesses
    SonicWall NSA Series
    Score8.3 out of 10
    SentinelOne Singularity
    Score9 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    Barracuda CloudGen Firewall
    Score9.6 out of 10
    BlackBerry Protect (CylancePROTECT)
    Score9.1 out of 10
    Enterprises
    F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM)
    Score8.8 out of 10
    ESET PROTECT
    Score8.8 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) SoftwareMicrosoft Defender for Endpoint
    Likelihood to Recommend
    9.0
    (88 ratings)
    8.9
    (169 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    7.1
    (4 ratings)
    8.4
    (10 ratings)
    Usability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.6
    (40 ratings)
    Availability
    7.5
    (2 ratings)
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    Performance
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    Support Rating
    8.7
    (8 ratings)
    9.0
    (7 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    8.0
    (2 ratings)
    7.3
    (1 ratings)
    Configurability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.2
    (1 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    6.5
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) SoftwareMicrosoft Defender for Endpoint
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    If you have multiple endpoints in your environment, if you're looking to understand what your environment looks like, if you're trying to identify the health of your environment, or identify any risks or vulnerabilities in your environment pertaining to your endpoints and devices.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    • The big thing for us is on endpoint, it kind of integrates with everything else that we already have because we use Microsoft completely. And so that helps us with being able to integrate, and send things over to Azure Sentinel as we need to as well.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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[.]
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    • I'd say building out summaries and log reviews for analysts reviewing incidents. So, pivoting from the alerts themselves to actually getting the detail underneath. Trying to understand what caused an alert, where they went from there, et cetera, et cetera. And then trying to get into deeper log review to take that investigation further can be a pain point.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    Cost add-ons for Security features is nickel and diming the process to keep pace with cybercrime. Limited Education budgets require us to be more pro-active in finding cost-effective measures to protect our devices, staff and students. Defender is a strong, well-featured product that is pricing itself out of the education market
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Usability
    Cisco
    No answers on this topic
    Microsoft
    Because it's hard to find things sometimes. I can find things now because I know where they are. But you have to work with it a little while to figure out how. I'd basically say it was a security tool designed by developers. So you have to get that mindset to find things. So a new hire, a new person in the SOC would have a difficult time. I know that's sitting in here, or that screen is in here somewhere. So it's gotten better.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    Microsoft Defender for Endpoint chugs along just fine no matter what we throw at it and what systems it's running on. It doesn't take up a lot of resources either, so that's welcomed.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Performance
    Cisco
    No answers on this topic
    Microsoft
    Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is easy on memory and resources on clients.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    The first time I tried to onboard my macOS endpoints to MDE I struggled for quite a bit. I had to reach out to Microsoft's MDE support team. The tech was very helpful in walking me through the steps during a screen share session
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    Deployment was handled by our team here and everything went pretty smoothly. We did have a few hiccups in our test group, but that only took a bit to get ironed out.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    Particularly, we're evaluating Symantec Endpoint Protection, the commercial version. We've looked at eSet, a couple of the others, and it's much too heavy or difficult to manage, things like that. Ease of use, ease of integration. It's already there. It's super easy to update it with the regular OS updates and everything. So we can manage it whether we're using SCCM or Intune or Dato, it's very easy to deploy updates and manage things.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Scalability
    Cisco
    No answers on this topic
    Microsoft
    Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is easily scaled from small orgs to giant enterprises.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    • I think the positive impact overall is that we do a lot of sitting in front of assessors- federal assessors, government assessors. And it really comes down to when the assessor has to think about another product that you're bringing in that's not Microsoft, it creates a lot of confusion, more paperwork, more explanation. But the positive impact is that they know it, everybody kind of knows Microsoft. And so when you tell them you have this endpoint for Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, they're like, okay. The questions go away, and it makes the overhead a lot less during an assessment.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots

    Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Screenshots

    Screenshot of blocked activitiesScreenshot of Detects & respondsScreenshot of discovers vulnerabilityScreenshot of Eliminates blind spotsScreenshot of Risk management