Cisco Firepower 2100 Series Reviews and Ratings

Rating: 7.6 out of 10

Score

7.6 out of 10

Reviews

3 Reviews

Firepower 2100 - slowly dying but still usable

Rating: 5 out of 10

Incentivized

November 10, 2025

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Cisco Firepower 2100 series - specifically Cisco Firepower 2130 in my organization is used as a main VPN concentrator. Main business problems the product addresses are connecting remote access users to our data center and out of band networks where services usually seat. The platform is suitable directly for deployments in bigger data centers or DMZs.

Pros

Advanced threat protection
Secure VPN connectivity
Visibility and control (if connected to FMC)
Regulatory compliacnce with ISO 27001, NIS2, etc.

Cons

performance and scalability
slow policy deployment times
not all configurations are supported via FMC - you have to use flexconfigs
when using flexconfigs, it is little bit confusing

Likelihood to Recommend

The Firepower 2100 sersies are suited well if you need next generation firewall for very specific usage, with one or two "roles" - for example use it as VPN concentrator, or for network segmentation. But it is not that suitable in environment, where you need lots of new functions, because it is on its end of live way - and so you have to think about changing it soon.

Verified User

Technician in Information Technology (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

Cisco Review

Rating: 6 out of 10

Incentivized

August 26, 2023

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

A firewall. So ultimately it's just preventing and allowing access as needed.

Pros

For us, to power the whole system does scaling quite a bit. So we can definitely have a lot of room to grow if needed. The device can support a lot of way more than we need right now, but in the future, if we need more it seems to be a big pro of that. Also the support of Cisco, knowing that it's backed by Cisco definitely is good. You guys are the largest players in the market

Cons

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

Likelihood to Recommend

Definitely scalable networks, it's very well suited. I'd say multiple branches and multiple data centers, it definitely talks to each other very well. So that's a big, big positive of it

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

Want a safe and secure network, Cisco will be there for you!

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

January 16, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

The Cisco Firepower 2100 [Series] is an amazing all in one Firewall solution for enterprise level business. We have replaced our existing ASA as our main company firewall with the Firepower 2100 series and it solves many of our previous problems with the ASA. The biggest which was having to manage Source Fire (Firepower) on its own outside of the firewall interface. Now it all lives in one box and makes life so much easier.

Pros

Nice HTML5 web interface instead of the old java client
Many added features over the ASA
Firepower built in and faster than before

Cons

Cisco patches bugs quickly but patches are slow to install and reboot
Smart licensing is getting better but still can be troublesome
Some weird visual interface glitches that require clicking the same options a few extra times

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology (501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

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Cisco Review

Rating: 6 out of 10

Incentivized

August 26, 2023

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

A firewall. So ultimately it's just preventing and allowing access as needed.

Pros

For us, to power the whole system does scaling quite a bit. So we can definitely have a lot of room to grow if needed. The device can support a lot of way more than we need right now, but in the future, if we need more it seems to be a big pro of that. Also the support of Cisco, knowing that it's backed by Cisco definitely is good. You guys are the largest players in the market

Cons

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

Likelihood to Recommend

Definitely scalable networks, it's very well suited. I'd say multiple branches and multiple data centers, it definitely talks to each other very well. So that's a big, big positive of it

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience