Cisco Firepower 4100 Series vs. CrowdSec

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

Since I've only used CrowdSec in a homelab/small-medium sized business setup, that's really the only market I can safely recommend it and say it's well suited for, because I don't know how much it would cost to run it in an enterprise environment. I've heard some pricing and how they plan on rolling out a subscription model, but it's still in talks. Either way, if you have publicly exposed web applications hosted locally or on a virtual private server, then CrowdSec should be part of every virtual machine and/or network. Even with the lmited number of filter you get out of the free subscription, it provides a nice layer of constantly updated data,

Incentivized

• Policy management in the GUI. I'm old-school, and still create ACLs in the CLI, but using the GUI for this is very nice.
• Event monitoring and reporting is great, and you can get very granular when it comes to what information you are viewing.
• I really like the troubleshooting features that are built in, especially the packet tracer and the ability to generate and download a troubleshooting package to review or send to TAC.

• Provides great integrations with tools you already use, such as fail2ban, Cloudflare, WordPress, NGINX, Linux Firewalls, etc.
• Lightweight agents can run on individual servers and report to a main security engine so that if there's an attack on one server and a block is implemented, the entire network can be protected
• There are a lot of ways to receive alerts and store logs
• CrowdSec Central API is a nice way to manage everything externally

Incentivized

• When deployed as Firepower Threat Defense, configurations cannot be made within the device itself.
• Troubleshooting can be difficult if the Cisco Firepower 4100 Series firewall is managed by the Cisco Firepower Management Center.
• There are two operating systems in Cisco Firepower 4100 Series, firmware upgrade process will take a long time.

• Getting CrowdSec to run on OPNsense can be a challenge, but that's also a limitation of the OS
• You can only subscribe to a couple of feeds before paying an unknown amount of money that's part of their "Enterprise" package. So, there could be better transparency.

Incentivized

It not easy to understand the different features it offers. Sometimes you need to spend a couple of minutes to implement a change or even open a ticket with cisco tac to figure it out. Once support is on the phone with you they know how to resolve problems. But it's not an intuitive tool

Incentivized

We switch to Palo Alto due the amount of tickets open with Cisco Firepower 4100 Series. It was taking a great amount of time for our engineers to fix problems. But it was a great tool when it was working as we were expecting. The fact it has a lot of instability on the releases was the deciding factor.

Incentivized

• Quickly respond to incidents using vpn remote access
• VPN L2L used to establish connections with global providers
• Up to 2000+ vpn access without having performance issues
• Granular access with policy groups based on the AD user

Incentivized

• It flat-out blocks malicious IPs from accessing any PC on my network.
• It's free-tier makes this a no brainer to implement

Incentivized