Cisco Firepower 1000 Series vs. Cisco Secure Firewall

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Cisco Firepower 1000 Series
Score 7.4 out of 10
N/A
The Cisco Firepower® 1000 Series for small to medium-size businesses and branch offices is a family of four threat-focused Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW) security platforms designed to deliver business resiliency through superior threat defense. The vendor provides that they offers exceptional sustained performance when advanced threat functions are enabled. The 1000 Series’ throughput range addresses use cases from the small office, home office, remote branch office to the Internet edge. The…N/A
Cisco Secure Firewall
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
Cisco Secure Firewall (formerly Cisco Firepower NGFW) is a firewall product that integrates with other Cisco security offerings. It provides Advanced Malware protection, including sandboxing environments and DDoS mitigation. Cisco also offers a Next Generation Intrusion Prevention System, which provides security across cloud environments using techniques like internal network segmentation. The firewall can be managed locally, remotely, and via the cloud. The product is scalable to the scope of…N/A
Pricing
Cisco Firepower 1000 SeriesCisco Secure Firewall
Editions & Modules
Firepower 1000
1,000-5,000
per appliance
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Cisco Firepower 1000 SeriesCisco Secure Firewall
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 Firepower 1000 SeriesCisco Secure Firewall
Features
Cisco Firepower 1000 SeriesCisco Secure Firewall
Firewall
Comparison of Firewall features of Product A and Product B
Cisco Firepower 1000 Series
8.4
33 Ratings
3% below category average
Cisco Secure Firewall
7.7
81 Ratings
12% below category average
Identification Technologies8.031 Ratings7.968 Ratings
Visualization Tools7.230 Ratings6.973 Ratings
Content Inspection8.330 Ratings7.872 Ratings
Policy-based Controls8.733 Ratings8.478 Ratings
Active Directory and LDAP8.529 Ratings8.065 Ratings
Firewall Management Console7.232 Ratings7.576 Ratings
Reporting and Logging8.333 Ratings7.477 Ratings
VPN9.228 Ratings7.966 Ratings
High Availability9.232 Ratings8.373 Ratings
Stateful Inspection8.928 Ratings8.372 Ratings
Proxy Server00 Ratings6.942 Ratings
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Cisco Firepower 1000 SeriesCisco Secure Firewall
Small Businesses
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Score 9.4 out of 10
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Score 9.4 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
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Score 9.6 out of 10
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Score 9.6 out of 10
Enterprises
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Score 9.6 out of 10
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Score 9.6 out of 10
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User Ratings
Cisco Firepower 1000 SeriesCisco Secure Firewall
Likelihood to Recommend
8.2
(34 ratings)
7.8
(88 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
7.0
(2 ratings)
7.0
(2 ratings)
Usability
8.0
(5 ratings)
9.0
(2 ratings)
Availability
8.1
(2 ratings)
9.2
(2 ratings)
Performance
8.3
(29 ratings)
5.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
8.6
(34 ratings)
7.3
(37 ratings)
Implementation Rating
9.0
(1 ratings)
8.9
(2 ratings)
Ease of integration
8.1
(2 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
5.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
Cisco Firepower 1000 SeriesCisco Secure Firewall
Likelihood to Recommend
Cisco
I think it is well suited for smaller companies or (as in our case) extension to a central system with higher performance. My personal guess is, that it can be quite annoying with those delays in bigger environments, when 20 or more devices needed to be managed. From the point of security, support and updates it works quite good and seem to have no downsides.
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Cisco
Well suited any edge kind of protection, which is obviously, again, what firewalls really used for. Less suited if you need more detailed protection, more granular, shall I say it's a better word, more granular protection. The ability to filter not just on IPS and ports, but a much deeper look at the packets and do that.
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Pros
Cisco
  • My organization is all Cisco and wants to stay in the Cisco life cycle, Firepower 1000 series is great for small to medium-size office.
  • Very robust enterprise-grade security solution with updated threat features to handle any current and upcoming threats. The solution is backed by Cisco to ensure constant security updates. Integrated AnyConnect remote client VPN is a big plus to allow for secure remote workers access. Easier to set up a site to site VPN due to the large user base and case studies published on integrating to other manufacturer solutions.
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Cisco
  • It's been a big change for us because like I said, we've been using it about a year, I think. And we went from ASAs to this, so it was a big changeover from being able to do everything in CLI honestly, it's a bit clunky and more time consuming to have to configure things through the Gooey, which has been a pain point for us. But we've tried to automate as much as we can. What it does well is the analysis. The event, not event viewer, but unified event, that's what it is. Handy tool. Also the tunnel troubleshooting the site to site tunnel monitoring or troubleshooting, I can't remember what it's called. It's pretty good too. It's nice how it has some predefined commands in there. I'd say those are probably the things we like about it the most.
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Cons
Cisco
  • ACLS in gui are PIA cant see object details
  • Objects in ACLs dont show IP addresses
  • Have to renames every object to name+ip to make acl GUI useable
  • Speed to data can use improvement.
  • Health warnings should allow you to resolve you have to dig n search in some cases.
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Cisco
  • I have one argument, failover scenario. It's not quite easy. Failover scenario of firewalls. It's sometimes not quite easy to know the issue. But if we open a tech case, a technical case to Cisco, Cisco will help us, it's a little bit con, but we are happy with this product.
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Likelihood to Renew
Cisco
It is quite good, robust and reliable but not always so easy to manage and configure. The tools could be improved and the price is not low for an entry level firewall
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Cisco
It works really well. We can do most anything we want or need to with it, and you don’t have to have a doctorate or multiple certs to necessarily figure it out. The thing that would probably have to happen to make us switch would be if we just got priced out - Cisco’s more powerful and higher bandwidth models cost a pretty penny.
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Usability
Cisco
Firepowers are secure, reliable, central management and configuration is easy and they fit in well with our existing Cisco infrastructure. Good feature set and support. Good management and control with chassis manager and central control with additional Firepower Management Centre.
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Cisco
Solution is highly effective, offers a lot of features with constant improvements and additions of new features over time. It's relatively easy to get familiar with the system, especially if transitioning from adaptive security appliances. If this is not the case, as for learnability there's a learning curve but once learned it is relatively easy to remember the details about the system even after a period of non-use
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Reliability and Availability
Cisco
Has not let me down yet.
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Cisco
We have had really good success with Cisco Secure Firewall when it comes to availability. Even when we’ve had temporary issues with one appliance or the other, or with the Firewall Management Center, it has stayed up and defended our network diligently. We even had an issue where the licensing got disabled for multiple days, and it kept spinning like a top
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Performance
Cisco
Great performance even on the lower end model of the series. You can push a lot of traffic through these devices without much performance impact. If you decide you want to inspect encrypted traffic however, you may take a big hit on the cpu and memory of the box, but they still manage to keep up even with all the bells and whistles turned on.
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Cisco
no slowing down, vpn is working fast
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Support Rating
Cisco
I have had troubles with Firepower Management Center and the FTD's in the past. Sticking to a Gold Star image and upgrading when the "bugs" are fixed is great. That still doesn't mean you are left vulnerable though. The extra features are just not enabled yet. Great product and calling support is readily available for any issue.
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Cisco
Cisco support is not at all suitable for this product, at least. It takes a long for them to help us with our server issues. A lot of the time, the customer support person keeps on redirecting calls to another person. They need to be well versed with the terminologies of the product they are supporting us with. Support needs a lot of improvement. Cisco Fire Linux OS, the operating system behind Cisco Firepower NGFW (formerly Sourcefire), also doesn't receive regular patches. In short, average customer service.
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In-Person Training
Cisco
No answers on this topic
Cisco
very good
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Online Training
Cisco
No answers on this topic
Cisco
was a good training but questions was answered not so good. Training was "Fundamentals of Cisco Firewall Threat Defense and Intrusion Prevention (SFWIPF)".
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Implementation Rating
Cisco
Utilize the new FMC cloud which is available in Cisco Defense Orchestrator.
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Cisco
In the beginning transition from Adaptive Security Appliance to Cisco Secure Firewall did not look like the best choice. Solution was new, there were a lot of bugs and unsupported features and the actual execution in the form of configuration via Firepower Management Center was extremely slow. Compare configuring a feature via CLI on ASA in a manner of seconds (copy/paste) to deployment via FMC to Secure Firewall which took approx. 10 mins (no exaggeration). Today, situation is a bit different, overall solution looks much more stable and faster then it was but there's still room for improvement.
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Alternatives Considered
Cisco
Cisco Meraki MX is much more simple to configure it if you compare to Cisco Firepower 1000, but it is more limited to pur some complex configurations. The Cisco Firepower 1000 Series is typically deployed as a physical appliance, while the Meraki MX can be deployed as a physical or virtual appliance.The Firepower 1000 Series has a more complex user interface, with a steeper learning curve, but offers more customization and configuration options. The Meraki MX has a simpler, more intuitive interface,
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Cisco
I think the Cisco product is probably pretty much equal now. I would love to say that Cisco is way more advanced or whatever, but Palo Alto, they just focus solely really on firewalls. And before Cisco came out with the FTD, the ASAs would only do layer four. So that's one of the reasons why that we purchased the Palo Alto is because they would do layer seven. And when we went to the FTDs, since they do layer seven as well, we just wanted to have different layers of security with our firewalls. So we just put the Palo Altos behind the Ciscos in case that there was anything that the Ciscos didn't catch, the Palo Altos would.
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Contract Terms and Pricing Model
Cisco
No answers on this topic
Cisco
was not involved
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Scalability
Cisco
No answers on this topic
Cisco
you can choose up to 50 devices i think thats enough for our organization
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Professional Services
Cisco
No answers on this topic
Cisco
was not involved
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Return on Investment
Cisco
  • We have seen improved throughput on our internet.
  • It took several attempts with Cisco engineers to configure the device; it requires a deep set of knowledge to set up in a more complicated environment.
  • This will allow us to move forward with a more stable and configurable environment with security available we didn't have before.
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Cisco
  • Some patching for zero day exploits have resulted in bugs causing downtime, meaning decision between vuln patching or risk of downtime needs to be discussed.
  • Peace of mind that the device will receive continued upgrades and with a quick turnaround.
  • Ability to use TAC for issues.
  • Ease of hiring candidates with experience in product line.
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