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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Cisco Secure Firewall

    Score8.4 out of 10
    N/ACisco 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

    Score8.7 out of 10
    N/ACisco 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
    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.
    Incentivized
    Chose Cisco Secure Firewall
    We use it because it's the best firewall on the market now. And are the best protection and hardware.
    Incentivized
    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. …
    Incentivized
    Chose Cisco Secure Firewall
    Cisco Secure Firewall outperforms and the feature set are much better.
    Incentivized
    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 …
    Incentivized
    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 …
    Incentivized
    Chose Cisco Secure Firewall
    NA
    Incentivized
    Chose Cisco Secure Firewall
    To have homogeneous hardware and also for the performance and great support.
    Incentivized
    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 …
    Incentivized
    Chose Cisco Secure Firewall
    and many others
    Incentivized
    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.
    Incentivized
    Chose Cisco Secure Firewall
    Price was my reason for selecting Cisco Secure Firewall.
    Incentivized
    Cisco
    Chose Cisco Umbrella
    Cisco Umbrella better integrated into our Cisco environment.
    Incentivized
    Chose Cisco Umbrella
    I don't think we have used any other products in this.
    Incentivized
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    No answers on this topic
    95%
    Would buy again
    76 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    No answers on this topic
    99%
    Delivers good value for the price
    73 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    No answers on this topic
    96%
    Happy with the feature set
    77 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    No answers on this topic
    95%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    63 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    No answers on this topic
    92%
    Implementation went as expected
    70 Answers
    Features
    Cisco Secure FirewallCisco Umbrella
    Firewall
    Comparison of Firewall features of Cisco Secure Firewall and Cisco Umbrella
    Feature
    Cisco Secure Firewall
    7.9
    79 Ratings
    9% below category average
    Cisco Umbrella
    -
    Ratings
    Identification Technologies8.168 Ratings00 Ratings
    Visualization Tools7.072 Ratings00 Ratings
    Content Inspection8.371 Ratings00 Ratings
    Policy-based Controls8.876 Ratings00 Ratings
    Active Directory and LDAP8.865 Ratings00 Ratings
    Firewall Management Console8.374 Ratings00 Ratings
    Reporting and Logging7.275 Ratings00 Ratings
    VPN7.665 Ratings00 Ratings
    High Availability8.571 Ratings00 Ratings
    Stateful Inspection7.870 Ratings00 Ratings
    Proxy Server6.741 Ratings00 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    Cisco Secure FirewallCisco Umbrella
    Small Businesses
    SonicWall NSA Series
    Score8.4 out of 10
    No answers on this topic
    Medium-sized Companies
    Barracuda CloudGen Firewall
    Score9.4 out of 10
    No answers on this topic
    Enterprises
    Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software
    Score9 out of 10
    No answers on this topic
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Cisco Secure FirewallCisco Umbrella
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.0
    (84 ratings)
    8.4
    (99 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    7.2
    (2 ratings)
    8.0
    (14 ratings)
    Usability
    9.0
    (2 ratings)
    8.0
    (9 ratings)
    Availability
    9.1
    (2 ratings)
    8.7
    (11 ratings)
    Performance
    5.0
    (1 ratings)
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    Support Rating
    7.6
    (35 ratings)
    6.9
    (63 ratings)
    Online Training
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    9.5
    (11 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.5
    (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
    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.
    Incentivized
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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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
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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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
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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
    Incentivized
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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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
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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
    Incentivized
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    Performance
    Cisco
    no slowing down, vpn is working fast
    Incentivized
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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
    Incentivized
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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.
    Incentivized
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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)
    Incentivized
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    In-Person Training
    Cisco
    very good
    Incentivized
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    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)".
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
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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.
    Incentivized
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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.
    Incentivized
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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.
    Incentivized
    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.
    Incentivized
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    Contract Terms and Pricing Model
    Cisco
    was not involved
    Incentivized
    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
    Incentivized
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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
    Incentivized
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    Professional Services
    Cisco
    was not involved
    Incentivized
    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.
    Incentivized
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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.
    Incentivized
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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