Cisco Secure Firewall vs. Palo Alto Panorama

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
Palo Alto Panorama
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
According to the information provided by the vendor, Palo Alto Panorama is a network security management solution that intends to simplify and enhance cybersecurity processes for businesses. The product's primary objective is to offer various features, including unified policy management, centralized visibility, automated threat response, simplified configuration, unrivaled scalability, and rapid security adoption. It claims to assist organizations in efficiently managing their firewalls and…
$9,500
Pricing
Cisco Secure FirewallPalo Alto Panorama
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
25 Devices
$9,500.00
100 Devices
$23,750.00
1000 Devices
$71,250.00
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Cisco Secure FirewallPalo Alto Panorama
Free Trial
YesNo
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 Secure FirewallPalo Alto Panorama
Considered Both Products
Cisco Secure Firewall
Chose Cisco Secure Firewall
Snort is an excellent tool for signature-based intrusion detection. Cisco Firepower NGFW (formerly Sourcefire) uses Snort under the hood. This makes it a potent detection tool with almost no false positives. When it comes to Comparison, it is at par with Palo Alto Panorama in …
Chose Cisco Secure Firewall
I'm still evaluating new data center build out with Palo Alto, Cisco Secure Firewall or other.
Chose Cisco Secure Firewall
Feature parity is there, and performance is just as good if not better.
Chose Cisco Secure Firewall
We are using both Panorama and FMC as well.
Different firewalls for different networks but we managing both in the same time.
Both working well, can manage the firewalls from it, Logging working great in both.
Chose Cisco Secure Firewall
Anyconnect VPN is still very popular among health care industry.
Palo Alto Panorama
Chose Palo Alto Panorama
Palo Alto Networks Panorama is far superior to Cisco FirePower in terms of threat detection. Other than that it is very fast and easy to use. When it comes to deep packet inspection, Panorama shows all the relevant details needed, while Sourcefire pulls up a lot of details that …
Features
Cisco Secure FirewallPalo Alto Panorama
Firewall
Comparison of Firewall features of Product A and Product B
Cisco Secure Firewall
8.0
140 Ratings
8% below category average
Palo Alto Panorama
-
Ratings
Identification Technologies8.2124 Ratings00 Ratings
Visualization Tools7.3126 Ratings00 Ratings
Content Inspection8.0123 Ratings00 Ratings
Policy-based Controls8.4131 Ratings00 Ratings
Active Directory and LDAP8.2114 Ratings00 Ratings
Firewall Management Console7.6129 Ratings00 Ratings
Reporting and Logging7.7132 Ratings00 Ratings
VPN8.1117 Ratings00 Ratings
High Availability8.5126 Ratings00 Ratings
Stateful Inspection8.5122 Ratings00 Ratings
Proxy Server7.370 Ratings00 Ratings
Firewall Security Management
Comparison of Firewall Security Management features of Product A and Product B
Cisco Secure Firewall
-
Ratings
Palo Alto Panorama
8.0
14 Ratings
1% above category average
Policy planning and rule management00 Ratings9.014 Ratings
Automated Policy Orchestration00 Ratings8.013 Ratings
Device Discovery00 Ratings8.011 Ratings
Policy Compliance Auditing00 Ratings8.013 Ratings
Attack Path Simulation Testing00 Ratings8.96 Ratings
Anomalous Event or Behavior Deviation00 Ratings6.013 Ratings
Vulnerability Scans00 Ratings7.06 Ratings
Firewall Rule Cleanup00 Ratings9.513 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Cisco Secure FirewallPalo Alto Panorama
Small Businesses
pfSense
pfSense
Score 9.0 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
FireMon
FireMon
Score 7.9 out of 10
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
ServiceNow IT Operations Management
ServiceNow IT Operations Management
Score 8.8 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Cisco Secure FirewallPalo Alto Panorama
Likelihood to Recommend
7.8
(135 ratings)
9.5
(13 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.7
(3 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(2 ratings)
8.2
(2 ratings)
Availability
9.1
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
5.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
7.3
(77 ratings)
8.2
(4 ratings)
Implementation Rating
9.0
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
8.2
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
5.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Cisco Secure FirewallPalo Alto Panorama
Likelihood to Recommend
Cisco
The software offers advanced firewall solutions from Web threats management to behavioural analytics and comprehensive application security. Cisco Secure firewall software is incredibly easy to deploy and implement. Customer support services providers are concise and very responsive. Integration and customization of the software are exceptional. The product boasts impressive capabilities, enabling it to stop threats and manage all security flaws in real time.
Read full review
Palo Alto Networks
I think Palo Alto Panorama is suited for administrators of all levels because certain things can be locked down to certain permission levels. But there are executive dashboards all the way down to the weeds for the highest of administrators. This truly is a single pane of glass tool because you never have to go into the individual firewalls for anything.
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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.
Read full review
Palo Alto Networks
  • If you need to push a setting or config to multiple firewalls Panorama can do that flawlessly.
  • Panorama has its logging centralized and this makes it easy to locate and reviews logs compared to having to get logs from each device.
  • I love how the interface matches the interface on the firewall. This makes the learning curve less steep.
  • Adding new firewalls to Panorama is super easy and not complex. Panorama can push a lot of the config and settings so you don't have to manually do it.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
Palo Alto Networks
  • The ability to push out OS updates could be improved in Panorama. It has the abilities, but the use is not intuitive, to the point that we generally connect directly to the firewalls to download the OS updates directly.
  • Scheduling. It would be nice to be able to schedule jobs to run at certain times. Pushing out updates, like OS updates mentioned above, can require significant bandwidth. So being able to schedule that work for hours that would not directly affect the users would be a welcome addition.
  • The list of devices in the Templates tabs should be sorted the same way that he devices are grouped in the Device Group tab, rather than just alphabetical. If there was a way to chose the order of the devices, maybe by tag, that would work as well.
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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.
Read full review
Palo Alto Networks
Panorama has given us much more than we expected and the support for the product, by Palo Alto Networks has been great. We would like to see some improvements that I mentioned in another review, like scheduling changes, but overall Panorama has provided a very capable product and we are very happy with it.
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Usability
Cisco
The platform is powerful and feature-rich, especially when paired with tools like Firepower Management Center (FMC) and SecureX. The policy structure is logical, and the visibility into traffic flows, threat activity, and rule hits is quite strong once you're familiar with the interface
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Palo Alto Networks
It is a solid product, it allows me to connect multiple devices and to manage my cloud, on prem and vmware firewalling devices. I can assign roles with the required visibility depending on the users. I can also consolidate all my logs into it to have a single pane of visibility.
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Reliability and Availability
Cisco
As for the availability, in general we did not experience any issues with it, neither in situations where there's only one physical device implemented nor when there's and High Availability pair. Failover works like a charm, no complaints here, it works as it should and so far it has been highly reliable.
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Palo Alto Networks
No answers on this topic
Performance
Cisco
no slowing down, vpn is working fast
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Palo Alto Networks
No answers on this topic
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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Palo Alto Networks
Palo Alto has a very nice customer support. People are very nice and were quick to reply, whenever we had an issue with the subscription or the blacklist tool. There is also a great deal of information on their website that covers each and every detail about the uses and the threat signatures. The community keeps on updating their information very frequently. Small issues are easily solved from the documentation, and for other issues, the customer support service is always present. However, on Fridays it becomes a little delayed as per my observation.
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In-Person Training
Cisco
very good
Read full review
Palo Alto Networks
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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Palo Alto Networks
No answers on this topic
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.
Read full review
Palo Alto Networks
No answers on this topic
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
Palo Alto Networks
Palo Alto Panorama and Junos Space Security Director have many similar features but Palo Alto Panorama excels in almost all of them. The monitoring tools in Palo Alto Panorama are easy to use and give more in-depth insight into what is going on in your network. Palo Alto's security is ranked much higher and the Web Application Security is also superior to that of the Junos counterpart.
Read full review
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
Cisco
was not involved
Read full review
Palo Alto Networks
No answers on this topic
Scalability
Cisco
you can choose up to 50 devices i think thats enough for our organization
Read full review
Palo Alto Networks
No answers on this topic
Professional Services
Cisco
was not involved
Read full review
Palo Alto Networks
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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Palo Alto Networks
  • At a previous company, I deployed Palo Alto firewalls to a data center, and 12 branch locations. This allowed us to replace MPLS links with IPSec tunnels between the sites. This resulted in significantly more throughput and soft savings of increased productivity. However, the estimated net of $220,000 in hard savings over five years is what is most impressive. I could not have effectively managed all those devices without Palo Alto Panorama.
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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