Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Cisco Secure Firewall
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
Cisco Secure Firewall delivers comprehensive threat protection for modern, distributed networks. Built to support hybrid workforces and multicloud environments, it enables Zero Trust access, application visibility, and secure remote connectivity. With integration across the Cisco Secure portfolio, including SecureX and Talos threat intelligence, the firewall powers organizations to detect and stop more sophisticated threats. Centralized management simplifies policy enforcement, orchestration,…N/A
Cisco Umbrella
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
Cisco now offers OpenDNS Umbrella Web Filtering. Cisco acquired OpenDNS in August 2015, and rebranded the product as Cisco Umbrella.N/A
Pricing
Cisco Secure FirewallCisco Umbrella
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Cisco Secure FirewallCisco Umbrella
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Cisco Secure FirewallCisco Umbrella
Considered Both Products
Cisco Secure Firewall
Chose Cisco Secure Firewall
The administraion interface of the Cisco secure firewall is a lot more easy to learn than the Palo Alto solution. Also, the dashboard panels offers by Cisco seems a lot more useful and details than the Palo Alto solution.
Chose Cisco Secure Firewall
We use it because it's the best firewall on the market now. And are the best protection and hardware.
Chose Cisco Secure Firewall
Cisco has a more seamless integration with its firewall management center compared to palo alto's panorama which tends to become out of sync with their firewalls. This can cause config differences, duplicate rules, or just the inability to deploy polices due to inconsistencies. …
Chose Cisco Secure Firewall
Cisco Secure Firewall outperforms and the feature set are much better.
Chose Cisco Secure Firewall
We demoed a few Palo Alto firewalls as a comparison to Cisco Secure Firewall. The two are indeed similar, but for our environment, Cisco's solution won out. Palo Alto appeared to potentially be more expensive than Cisco and although it has many similar features, we found that …
Chose Cisco Secure Firewall
Cisco Secure Firewall is not so complicated to configure, especially as a Firewall manager where your main business is to create new rules or create site to site tunnels and so on. You can easily do this on the Cisco Secure Firewall, with CheckPoint this was a bit more …
Chose Cisco Secure Firewall
To have homogeneous hardware and also for the performance and great support.
Chose Cisco Secure Firewall
We found that Cisco compares very favorably to the Palo Alto firewalls, especially with their latest release in the Secure Firewall line. The performance has been phenomenal compared to the earlier Firepower models, which was one of the few advantages I felt Palo Alto still …
Chose Cisco Secure Firewall
Cisco Secure Firewall aka Firepower has a more visibility than the ASA, specially with use of FMC. The Secure Firewall also adds a lot of security features, with IPS, IDS, AVC, Security Intelligence, Identity Mapping and so on.
Chose Cisco Secure Firewall
Price was my reason for selecting Cisco Secure Firewall.
Cisco Umbrella
Chose Cisco Umbrella
Cisco Umbrella better integrated into our Cisco environment.
Features
Cisco Secure FirewallCisco Umbrella
Firewall
Comparison of Firewall features of Product A and Product B
Cisco Secure Firewall
8.0
139 Ratings
8% below category average
Cisco Umbrella
-
Ratings
Identification Technologies8.3123 Ratings00 Ratings
Visualization Tools7.4125 Ratings00 Ratings
Content Inspection8.0122 Ratings00 Ratings
Policy-based Controls8.5130 Ratings00 Ratings
Active Directory and LDAP8.3113 Ratings00 Ratings
Firewall Management Console7.6129 Ratings00 Ratings
Reporting and Logging7.7131 Ratings00 Ratings
VPN8.0116 Ratings00 Ratings
High Availability8.6125 Ratings00 Ratings
Stateful Inspection8.5121 Ratings00 Ratings
Proxy Server7.369 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Cisco Secure FirewallCisco Umbrella
Small Businesses
pfSense
pfSense
Score 8.8 out of 10

No answers on this topic

Medium-sized Companies
Quantum Firewalls and Security Gateways
Quantum Firewalls and Security Gateways
Score 9.3 out of 10

No answers on this topic

Enterprises
Palo Alto Networks Virtualized Next-Generation Firewalls - VM Series
Palo Alto Networks Virtualized Next-Generation Firewalls - VM Series
Score 9.2 out of 10
Zscaler Internet Access
Zscaler Internet Access
Score 8.8 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Cisco Secure FirewallCisco Umbrella
Likelihood to Recommend
7.9
(144 ratings)
8.8
(110 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.5
(4 ratings)
8.0
(15 ratings)
Usability
6.4
(3 ratings)
7.6
(10 ratings)
Availability
8.7
(4 ratings)
8.7
(11 ratings)
Performance
5.0
(1 ratings)
9.7
(2 ratings)
Support Rating
7.3
(79 ratings)
7.1
(63 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.8
(4 ratings)
9.5
(11 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Ease of integration
7.9
(3 ratings)
9.5
(10 ratings)
Product Scalability
5.0
(1 ratings)
8.0
(2 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
8.1
(3 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
8.1
(3 ratings)
User Testimonials
Cisco Secure FirewallCisco Umbrella
Likelihood to Recommend
Cisco
This security solution is well-suited for a complex environment that requires a scalable and secure solution with granular control. It is also recommended that it be implemented with other Cisco security solutions. Requirements are Security-First. It is less appropriate in a small business scenario where advanced configurations are not required. It should be well-trained on this solution.
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Cisco
It is good for whole network protection, and individual PCs with the client. Provide good reporting on where your network is going on the net. One thing I would like is a longer history with the logs 14 and 30 days are too short some times.
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Pros
Cisco
  • It's good at segregating networks and ensuring that you only give the access that you need to give. Especially with medical devices, you want to only give the access that they need and keep them in their own separate areas so that they can't just communicate with the rest of the network. It's also good at the border for keeping attackers out of the network.
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Cisco
  • So for example, we had the problem in the past. We are connecting users to our own managed data centers. We had seven locations around the world, put them with Cisco, any connect to our on-prem data center and let them out to the internet. So that's causing some high latency bad experiences with teams and so on. And with Umbrella we can directly connect the user to the cloud and to the internet so the users have a good experience with speed with latency and it's much better than back hauling the traffic to their own company and then processing them there.
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Cons
Cisco
  • I wish that the deployment of the updates to the sensors from the FMC was faster.
  • Cisco ASA firewall did a great job of authentication and authorization on the local firewall. FTD does not authorize users well in terms that an AAA must be setup to provide the granular tools that the ASA did.
  • Cisco's method of licensing the firewall can be improved. The FMC and the FTD are licensed through the Cisco software manager and there are instances where the devices are licensed but the firewall still displays and error due to licensing.
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Cisco
  • The smart search feature in Cisco Umbrella is great addition for sure which helps us to identify malicious domain just by searching the URL and there is scoring system of Cisco Umbrella which mark the URL in low, medium and high risk. Sometimes Cisco Umbrella mark well known and good domain as malicious whether sometimes they mark malicious sites/domain as low risk. So, it's something that they should focus on, I think.
  • The live activity search is great for checking internet activities, but the filtering options could be improved. It would be helpful if we could filter by multiple parameters at once like combining username, destination IP and time range.
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Likelihood to Renew
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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Cisco
First off I never give anything a "10" unless it's perfect. LOL - I grade on the curve. I think OpenDNS/Umbrella is a very good product. I think that fact that Cisco absorbed them is one of the proofs of that. I have used the product back when it was free for companies our size. I have not always appreciated the cost - but in the post pandemic cyber chaos, I believe the cost benefit ratio is still very high. I have honestly not looked at other products because Umbrella continues to work to my satisfaction. I consider Umbrella to be one of the key layers in my cyber security strategy.
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Usability
Cisco
i think overall after ALOT of tac cases it works allright now. But still have alot of issues if you use cloud based mangement. fx, if you open 2 windows of access policys, both of the pages, rules starte to jump form side to side. if you then open one more list, its start to jump even faster. if you close the 2 of them, its back to normal. ALSO the extended access lists for VPN, SUCKS. Its the tiniest window when opening the editor, and you are not able to give the rules names, Which means finding and editing rules SUCKS, its a horrible experience, and eveytime we have to we want to yell :P
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Cisco
Better features and easy to manage system with great customer support and overall usability is great as it works for hybrid environment with ease as it is having features for on prem users as wells as cloud users with great customer support and great team of trained engineers to support our opeartions.
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Reliability and Availability
Cisco
would rate Cisco Secure Firewall’s availability a 9 out of 10.
In our production environments at Rackspace, the platform has been consistently reliable. We’ve deployed it in high-availability pairs, and failover works as expected with minimal disruption. Over the past several quarters, we’ve had no major unplanned outages directly attributable to the firewall itself.
The software has been stable
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Cisco
Cisco umbrella services in the cloud are always available. However, the weakness is the VM installed in the data center that are the first resolvers. If the VMs become unavailable for any reason or the vSphere goes down, then all DNS is affected
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Performance
Cisco
no slowing down, vpn is working fast
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Cisco
our experience with cisco products has always been awesome and same is the case with cisco umbrella .Under umbrella cisco provides flexible and scalable software solution to use across different dept and sites . These softwares are very user friendly ,pages load quickly as these applications are designed for minimum latency and reports are also provided quickely
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Support Rating
Cisco
Firewall support is professional just like any other technology Cisco sells. From answering simple questions to bringing out outages affecting a large population of our workforce, Cisco support is always courteous, professional, and communicates with our team to keep our request on their radar. Some of the brightest people I've met are from Cisco support both in IQ and EQ which shows the talent Cisco is able to onboard to their team.
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Cisco
Whilst the support is good once you get through to them, it's email only and the response is slow. This is a issue, because its a core system that needs to work. We have had issues in the past where several of our companies have gone down due to Umbrella and support is nowhere to be seen. It is very difficult to know whether Umbrella is having service issues, since they do not regularly update customers on the status of their services, such as is seen by providers such as Microsoft (status.umbrella.com just seems to show up all of the time, I'm not sure it's even updated)
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In-Person Training
Cisco
very good
Read full review
Cisco
No answers on this topic
Online Training
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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Cisco
Quite easy to understand training modules prepared by knowledgeable trainers. Training modules have included all the desired features of these softwares and the content delivery is very good from the respective module trainers and it explains in details the features and apart from that further training material support is also provided if needed.
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Implementation Rating
Cisco
Our initial implementation was aided by Cisco's professional services and was excellent. The engineer was very knowledgeable and helped us work through issues while building out our new internet security edge Part of this involved tools to migrate the firewall configuration from old to new.
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Cisco
At the time we were forced to move from Cloud Web Security to Cisco Umbrella, Cisco Umbrella was far from being a direct replacement. It was frustrating and difficult to migrate due to the lack of functionality. This has since been addressed, however we now have legacy rulesets that were built as bandaids that cannot be removed. Hopefully the migration to Secure Access will address this.
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Alternatives Considered
Cisco
Cisco Secure Firewall works better with the Cisco ecosystem when we can utilize it and feels beefy enough when we utilize it in the data center. The Fortinet we have found are great, small cost boxes for remote offices with a better UI then Cisco Secure Firewalls. The feature set included with the firewalls feels similar from a security point of view.
Read full review
Cisco
Different products in different spaces. The Z3 was more of a VPN endpoint so that users didn't have to worry about a client. If they are at home, they are on their corporate network and able to access resources. Cisco Umbrella can be used then to serve corporate DNS across the VPN tunnel to the Z3 device and extend the capabilities of Cisco Umbrella.
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Contract Terms and Pricing Model
Cisco
was not involved
Read full review
Cisco
No answers on this topic
Scalability
Cisco
you can choose up to 50 devices i think thats enough for our organization
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Cisco
Cisco umbrella provides fleaxible and scalable software solutions which are easy deploy across multiple departments and sites wherever needed and this softwares are very easy to use and provides the best interface along with cisco support for other devices apart from cisco infrastructure but still there is scope for improvement on the inclusion of latest features
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Professional Services
Cisco
was not involved
Read full review
Cisco
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
Cisco
  • Positive impact. Cisco is a big player in IT environment. It is future stuff, everything, what you learn today, maybe something can be tomorrow. And yes, it's quite important to learn the new stuff every day. And yes, that's it. Yes, I'm happy with Cisco.
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Cisco
  • So it's always very hard to calculate return on investment, especially on security and especially in a physical product. So it's not like I'm going to be selling a lot more plastic or a lot more aviation fuel because I implemented Cisco Umbrella. What I know is that definitely, the return on investment is on the ability of the business to continue to run and give the assurance that our users are safe.
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ScreenShots

Cisco Secure Firewall Screenshots

Screenshot of Cisco Secure 1200 Series Firewall FamilyScreenshot of Cisco Secure 4200 SeriesScreenshot of Cisco Secure 4200 SeriesScreenshot of Cisco Secure Firewall 1200 Stack FamilyScreenshot of Cisco Secure Firewall 200 SeriesScreenshot of Cisco Secure Firewall 200 Series