Cisco Firepower 4100 Series vs. Untangle NG Firewall

When we are asked by local partners which security equipment we use we always recommend our Cisco security products. The Firepower firewall is no exception and we can easily recommend this to others who need a fast, secure, and well built system that integrates well with all your existing hardware and software.

Incentivized

Untangle is very strong in the "traditional" sense of security. That means an edge appliance that either works with an existing router or is the router itself (recommended). This approach has also been adapted well to cloud environments in order to protect virtual servers and VDI workstations. As mentioned earlier, many schools are using cloud-based filtering for their 1:1 solutions for their students. This is an area where Untangle is unable to serve. Some have used an instance of Untangle in the cloud with VPN to serve their remote needs, but it is not the same as solutions that are designed for cloud-based filtering of devices without VPN.

Incentivized

• VPN Site to Site
• High Availability / Failover
• Ldap mapping to vpn connections

Incentivized

• Web Filtering is strong, and can also do application fingerprinting to allow Facebook, but not Facebook games. Secondly, a separate partition called a "rack" can be set up to give one subnet or group of users different web filtering policies than another. For example, teachers would get more freedom to browse the web than students at a school.
• Built-in SD-WAN connectivity as part of your license. IPSEC tunnel creation is also amazingly easy.
• Will install on any x86 hardware created in the last 5-10 years. Ram and processor requirements per user are very low.
• Reporting is phenomenal, however you can get death by details very easily.

Incentivized

• The failover process is clunky. When out Fortigate firewalls failed over, we lost 1 ping. When our Firepowers failover, whether it is on purpose or not, we experience a 2.5 minute complete outage.
• Cisco could stand to improve their support documentation. I have found it difficult to find good directions for configuring these, especially when it comes to NAT and IPSEC tunnels.

• The full suite can be expensive for business but will be powerful enough.
• The full suite for home or small office isn't that bad of a price but may be out of reach for most home users but remember the basics are FREE so anyone can get started with it.
• I would like to see it promoted for mid to large businesses as I think it can handle it.

Incentivized

Service renewal is in Feb 2021. We will be renewing!

In general, the Cisco Firepower 4100 Series works well, great performance, support a high volume of traffic, configuration, users, the device is powerful and once you have something configured you can be sure that it will rarely fail but for day to day troubleshooting or modifications needed can be a little complicated due to you have to deploy every change you make in the device and is not as fast as other devices, in general a deploy takes 5 minutes.

Incentivized

I haven't used them much, but they did answer my question quickly.

Incentivized

Cisco Firepower 4100 Series deployment is straightforward and easy to implement. It is also can support high availability and able to achieve redundancy. Besides, firmware upgrade is quite simple and the process does not take much effort as the upgrade will be automatically done by itself. Cisco Firepower 4100 Series is also very cost effective compared with other similar ranges of firewalls.

NG Firewall was much more friendly in terms of layout and ease of use, the apps section is familiar to anyone and the config while in a sort of odd order is very clearly laid out. I also appreciate Untangle's endless educational videos and the support can't be beat. Overall it was more of a complete package

Incentivized

• Positive impact would be our increased security network wide.
• Another positive would be the increased processing power, saving us time and [from] needing more equipment.
• A negative impact would be the increased need for having to learn a new interface.

Incentivized

• The positive is the savings in time the IT department has recouped by not having to continuously clean and maintain end point computers. Not to mention helping end user use their time more wisely by not wasting time on non-work related web activities.
• The only negative is complaints from end users about the restrictions.

Incentivized