Cisco offers the Firepower 2100 Series NGFW, designed to allow businesses to gain resiliency through superior security with sustained performance. The Firepower 2100 Series has a dual multicore CPU architecture that optimizes firewall, cryptographic, and threat inspection functions simultaneously, to achieve security doesn’t come at the expense of network performance.
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F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM)
Score 8.6 out of 10
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F5 Networks offers the F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager, a firewall software combining a number of features including DDoS, DNS security, and other protections.
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Pricing
Cisco Firepower 2100 Series
F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM)
Editions & Modules
Firepower 2100
3,000-20,000
per appliance
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Cisco Firepower 2100 Series
F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM)
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Cisco Firepower 2100 Series
F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM)
Features
Cisco Firepower 2100 Series
F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM)
Firewall
Comparison of Firewall features of Product A and Product B
Cisco Firepower 2100 Series
8.5
2 Ratings
2% below category average
F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM)
8.6
2 Ratings
1% below category average
Identification Technologies
9.02 Ratings
8.02 Ratings
Visualization Tools
6.01 Ratings
7.02 Ratings
Content Inspection
9.02 Ratings
9.02 Ratings
Policy-based Controls
9.02 Ratings
8.02 Ratings
Active Directory and LDAP
9.02 Ratings
10.01 Ratings
Firewall Management Console
8.02 Ratings
7.02 Ratings
Reporting and Logging
9.02 Ratings
8.02 Ratings
VPN
10.02 Ratings
10.01 Ratings
High Availability
10.02 Ratings
9.02 Ratings
Stateful Inspection
10.02 Ratings
9.02 Ratings
Proxy Server
5.02 Ratings
10.01 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Cisco Firepower 2100 Series
F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM)
Small Businesses
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Score 8.8 out of 10
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Score 8.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Quantum Firewalls and Security Gateways
Score 9.3 out of 10
Quantum Firewalls and Security Gateways
Score 9.3 out of 10
Enterprises
Palo Alto Networks Virtualized Next-Generation Firewalls - VM Series
Score 9.2 out of 10
Palo Alto Networks Virtualized Next-Generation Firewalls - VM Series
The Cisco [Firepower] 2100 [Series] is an easy sell for anyone looking. You already know Cisco excels in the security department, but now that firepower lives right on the box and inline with the rest of the firewall data flow you can save yourself a lot of time and headaches. Unless you cant quite afford Cisco's 2100 line, there's not much reason to go with the competition.
We were able to eliminate a firewall from our network architecture by integrating the module into our existing F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM). This allowed us to save on tech refresh costs, since the F5 was able to handle the module without much additional strain on the device. However, if a firewall had features that the AFM lacked, then using that firewall in tandem with an F5 would be preferable.
Career-wise very familiar with the ASAs, you know, the previous gen firewalls, Pyxis, ASAs, the CHA. As far as being intuitive, those seem to be far more intuitive to learn and figure out what the features and changes and config management, all that stuff is. With Firepower, it's a learning curve and I feel like I have quite a bit of experience with it, and so does my team, but feels like it's not as intuitive, and trying to make changes just always seems harder for some reason. We've gone to some Cisco security training and all that, but even then it's just harder to work with. The other big thing is, and this is a big gripe of mine, I suppose, that on any other firewall, when we have various different manufacturers, if you make a change, you know, a simple change object, object name gets changed or object is deleted or whatever the simplest of change is, it gets implemented instantly.
With the Firepower system, you have to deploy the change and it'll take about six or seven minutes for the change to actually take, which is insanely different than any other platform where that change is instantaneous. So let's say if I'm making seven different changes for a troubleshooting job I don't know which one of the seven is gonna fix it, I do one by one by one. I'm like, oh, let me try one change, one second, change, third change, four changes. It's going to take seven deploys. And seven deploys mean it's gonna take an hour of just deploy time. So that is a big, big gripe
There are three main problems with this platform: - short EoL time - it is really missery because this platform was overrated from cisco sales and after shor time they accepted on EoL - sometimes problems with upgrades paths, because of strange behaviour between FXOS and ASA image on the top of it - not good performance when comparing to newer 1k platform
F5 Advanced Firewall Manager has been a solid, strong solution to both keep our systems safe and being seamless for our end users. Most of the time, the end-user is not impacted and does not even know F5 Advanced Firewall Manager is running which is exactly what we are looking for.
In the days of purchase of Cisco Firepower 2100 series it was new platform and Cisco aimed their sailsmains to force selling this platfrom. It was one of the first platform with FXOS with full support of ASA images. It was cheper then 4k series and would be better than ASA 5500-x series (but regarding all problems with upgrades and EoL , it is not).
Both F5 [BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager] and Radware require training as they are not easy to use. But Radware uses some configuration that needs deep learning and proper labs. From an admin's perspective, Configuration and management for F5 [BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager are] less. Also, the cost of implementing F5 [BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager] is lesser than that of Radware Alteon.
