Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
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
Cisco Umbrella
Score 8.6 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
NoYes
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
Cisco Secure Firewall is not so complicated
Better overview
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

No answer on this topic

Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Cisco Secure FirewallCisco Umbrella
Firewall
Comparison of Firewall features of Product A and Product B
Cisco Secure Firewall
7.7
79 Ratings
10% below category average
Cisco Umbrella
-
Ratings
Identification Technologies7.968 Ratings00 Ratings
Visualization Tools6.772 Ratings00 Ratings
Content Inspection7.771 Ratings00 Ratings
Policy-based Controls8.476 Ratings00 Ratings
Active Directory and LDAP7.965 Ratings00 Ratings
Firewall Management Console7.774 Ratings00 Ratings
Reporting and Logging7.275 Ratings00 Ratings
VPN7.865 Ratings00 Ratings
High Availability8.171 Ratings00 Ratings
Stateful Inspection8.170 Ratings00 Ratings
Proxy Server7.041 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Cisco Secure FirewallCisco Umbrella
Small Businesses
pfSense
pfSense
Score 9.6 out of 10

No answers on this topic

Medium-sized Companies
pfSense
pfSense
Score 9.6 out of 10

No answers on this topic

Enterprises
Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewalls - PA Series
Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewalls - PA Series
Score 9.5 out of 10
Zscaler Internet Access
Zscaler Internet Access
Score 8.9 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Cisco Secure FirewallCisco Umbrella
Likelihood to Recommend
7.9
(84 ratings)
8.3
(99 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
6.8
(2 ratings)
8.0
(14 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(2 ratings)
8.0
(9 ratings)
Availability
9.3
(2 ratings)
9.0
(11 ratings)
Performance
5.0
(1 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
7.4
(35 ratings)
7.9
(63 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.0
(1 ratings)
9.3
(11 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
9.3
(10 ratings)
Product Scalability
5.0
(1 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
Cisco Secure FirewallCisco Umbrella
Likelihood to Recommend
Cisco
Well, I mean it is really meant for the edge. I think maybe some of the smaller models you could maybe use at your, if you have remote workers where you wanted to protect their environment more than in their home network or whatever, but for us, we've always use the enterprise versions.
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Cisco
Cisco Umbrella most of the time actively blocks high malicious domain by itself which we found very effective to save our employees from phishing campaigns. Another great use of Cisco Umbrella is the web content filtering feature helps by setting up custom rules and block access to non-work-related or potentially harmful sites/URL/domains. So, I think Cisco Umbrella suits pretty well if anyone is trying to protect their organizations from one of the biggest cyber threat these days which is phishing.
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Pros
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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Cisco
  • I just did, which is the multi-organizational component that allows me to have a federal model where I can dictate very high-level policies. And that is also true in case of an incident or a new malware or a new IP address that is coming out. Or a great example is in 2022 the all-Ukraine deal was growing up in Europe and from a top level we made a decision we were going to block all Russian domains and Ukrainian as well while we were at it and we just pushed it to all the companies in two seconds after then changing control of course. And that was quite valuable. That gives us a lot of freedom and ability. The fact that the product also allows me to have the segmentation permits me to follow the virus regulations in the countries. So for example, in Germany, there are a lot of stricter rules on what you can and not do in monitoring an employee from a work council and union perspective, and therefore we have a special setup for them specifically and also where the logs are stored in the region. My American team has the same thing, but in that case, the storage of those logs is stored in the US and that gives us great flexibility for sure. Then okay, there is some businesses that are also using it to police employees, meaning I don't want 'em see 'em job search websites or I don't want them to be looking at travel planning their vacation during business hours or I don't want my blue-collar workers to do anything other those 10 applications on the internet, on the web. So we are able to do that. It's not the part that is more fun because of a lot of HR involvement, but we use it also that way.
Read full review
Cons
Cisco
  • Sometimes it's the limitation of the throughput or limitation of the firewall. One DDoS attack they have the bandwidth capacity is very little. And then once there is DDoS attack. Many not only the firewall can protect that they need to take action further at the Upstreaming Provider, that side with the bigger pipe bandwidth for protecting the attack. Not only the firewall can prevent,. Yes. So sometimes firewalls still have the limitation and then need to do any additional monitoring or something. But we can do that with the ideas and IPS, but required to have the bigger pipe to protect DDos Attack, for example the bandwidth from the upstream network as well. I mean when many DDos Attack comes with big bandwidth, not only firewall can protect, but also the blackholing the traffic from upstream providers who has bigger bandwidth DDos mitigation services.
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Cisco
  • Very clunky implementation of bypass users
  • Not a very intuitive system when you want to whitelist sites
  • Accounts department has complained that the purchasing system is difficult, because it is a manual process. They have to ask for quotes each time we add new seats.
  • I've had several issues with the roaming agent which has quite a few bugs
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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
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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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
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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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 answers on this topic
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
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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Cisco
We have not had a chance to use Cisco support frequently, but when we needed to troubleshoot some issues that we were having with the agent installation, the support was very responsive and the solution that they offered worked. The only reason I give it one less point is that the turnaround time for non-critical issues is very long.
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Online Training
Cisco
No answers on this topic
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
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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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
We use the FMC as a virtual machine, it combines administration, monitoring and can be used perfectly for error analysis. There are restrictions due to administration without the FMC, so we decided on the FMC as the central administration.
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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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Scalability
Cisco
No answers on this topic
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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Return on Investment
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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Cisco
  • Cisco Umbrella has been an excellent investment for us. The extra protection it provides in a very simple way has been well worth the costs.
  • Cisco Umbrella is very easy to setup and manage and can do most of the things we need with little daily interaction so we are free to work on other systems that need more attention.
  • Utilizing the Cisco Umbrella reporting features, we can determine what systems might need additional attention. If we see systems attempting certain types of access, we quickly know there is likely something on the device that probably needs removed.
  • Specific Cisco Umbrella reports can help us determine if we need to do user education and develop cyber habits.
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