AlgoSec vs Cisco Defense Orchestrator comparison

AlgoSec and Cisco are both solutions in the Firewall Security Management category. AlgoSec is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.9, while Cisco is ranked #14 with an average rating of 8.0. AlgoSec holds a 22.7% mindshare in Firewall Security Management, compared to Cisco’s 1.0% mindshare. Additionally, 96% of AlgoSec users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Cisco users who would recommend it.

AlgoSec

Read 183 AlgoSec reviews

9,347 Views
4,113 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

Cisco Defense Orchestrator

Read 15 Cisco Defense Orchestrator reviews

706 Views
234 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

AlgoSec

Cisco Defense Orchestrator

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 4, 2024

AlgoSec and Cisco Defense Orchestrator compete in network security management, with Cisco Defense Orchestrator holding the upper hand due to its robust features and perceived value for the price.

Features: AlgoSec offers comprehensive policy analysis, risk management, and compliance assurance capabilities. Cisco Defense Orchestrator provides powerful automation, multi-vendor support, and streamlined policy change management, making it suitable for complex network environments with better integration and scalability.

Room for Improvement: AlgoSec could benefit from enhancements in automation and scalability to better serve large enterprises. Improving user interface and integration capabilities would also enhance its appeal. Cisco Defense Orchestrator could improve customer support response times, offer more flexible pricing options, and increase compatibility with various network components.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: AlgoSec features a flexible deployment model with strong customer support, ideal for smaller networks. Cisco Defense Orchestrator's cloud-based model simplifies deployment for large-scale operations but faces challenges with support response times.

Pricing and ROI: AlgoSec is recognized for its competitive setup cost and cost-effective policy management, delivering a good ROI. Cisco Defense Orchestrator may have higher initial costs but justifies them with significant ROI through enhanced security features and operational efficiencies, especially valuable for large enterprises.

To learn more, read our detailed AlgoSec vs. Cisco Defense Orchestrator Report (Updated: March 2025).

Buyer's Guide

AlgoSec vs. Cisco Defense Orchestrator

March 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

AlgoSec

Ranking in Firewall Security Management

1st

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

183

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Cisco Defense Orchestrator

Ranking in Firewall Security Management

14th

Average Rating

8.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Firewall Security Management category, the mindshare of AlgoSec is 22.7%, up from 20.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco Defense Orchestrator is 1.0%, down from 1.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Firewall Security Management

Featured Reviews

Shameerudheen Kp

Manager, MS Operations at NTT Security

Easy to setup with good auto-implementation and good rule reviews

AlgoSec is slow when it is loaded with too many firewalls and policies. A plan to take care of heavy usage is to be considered. Support of all firewalls and policy features to be enabled. AlgoSec should support in identifying most hit rules and re-ordering existing firewall rules - this is a very key to manage firewall CPU. A clustering of AlgoSec can also be considered. A group of AlgoSec servers managing large client bases geographically or datacenter-wise or function-wise. A head reporting unit and child processing units.

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Vivek Balaji

Technical Director - Cyber Security at a comms service provider with 1-10 employees

Useful guides, excellent support, integration could improve

Cisco Defense Orchestrator has useful guides for the steps that need to follow by users Cisco Defense Orchestrator can improve by providing more support for third-party security components. I have been using Cisco Defense Orchestrator for approximately eight months. The Cisco Defense…

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The features that I like are the monitoring and the alerts. It provides real-time monitoring, or at least close to real-time. I think that is important. I like its way of organizing, also. It is pretty clear. I also like their reporting structure - the way we can use AlgoSec to clear a rule base, like covering and hiding rules."

"There are some legacy customers still using AlgoSec. The benefit is the ease in management of firewalls and rules."

"I rate the scalability at nine out of ten, demonstrating a robust ability to expand and cater to large enterprises."

"We have reduced the attack surface of risky rules, improved our compliance scores, and streamlined our firewall change flow all thanks to AlgoSec Firewall Analyzer."

"One of the quick wins is to view our device status easily, with out-of-the-box dashboards and charts."

"I like the traffic simulation too and queries. I'm not sure other solutions provide that. You can also use it to get a network topology and network map of your environment and see what's happening."

"The most valuable feature of AlgoSec is integration because it needs the be integrated with vendors' firewalls and other security products. AlgoSec has intelligent policy tuners."

"The technical services personnel are very confident and provide good assistance."

More AlgoSec pros

"When we're looking to the policies, it identifies the shadow rules. It notifies us about anything that will supersede other rules."

"The initial setup was straightforward. We spun up the VM onsite. We generated the key that it needed to talk to the Cloud Orchestrator. After that, as I started adding devices, it was relatively quick and easy."

"I like the upgrade feature. That is pretty valuable to me because I have dual ASAs and when I go through CDO it does it for me pretty well. It's all done in the back-end and I don't really have to be involved. I just initiate, pick the image, and I pick when I want it done and it just does it, whether I have a single ASA or have a dual ASA."

"We have quite a few Active Stone by pairs. If they fail over... I'll see that there's a change on it and I'll have a look. The only change on it is that now this one is the standby, it took over the active role. I can go into that firewall and find out what happened... and troubleshoot based on that. That's pretty cool too."

"There are a lot of templates that are already built-in. They give you quick-to-create and quick-to-apply policies that are typically a little more complicated for people."

"If we have a firewall go down, I can hop into CDO, pull the latest configuration off and apply it. That's really good. It helps save time."

"If our server is blocked, this solution shows us why it is blocked and allows us to update the network routing."

"This product provides excellent centralized device controls and reporting."

More Cisco Defense Orchestrator pros

Cons

"There is no visibility for the changes made to the NAT rule policies."

"The interface is more on the complex side."

"It would be very helpful to have a direct link to the relevant firewall policy embedded within reports when there are warnings or risks indicated."

"One specific area that could benefit from improvement is the rule analysis feature, particularly in terms of defining objects within a new rule. Currently, the process seems to be more focused on network-level analysis rather than on objects, which sometimes requires us to perform multiple iterations to achieve optimal results."

"The customization of dashboards should be simplified and more user-friendly."

"There are sometimes issues with the Risky Rules reports where the number of hits is registering zero, but we know that this is incorrect because we have checked the rules and see that they are indeed registering traffic."

"We are still waiting to implement FireFlow, and getting it into place will hopefully speed up our implementation time and help with policy standardization."

"The simulation can be improved."

More AlgoSec cons

"CDO doesn't have a report, an official report that I can check daily. It has another module called FTD, but it doesn't have that specifically for ASA. In the reporting, there are a lot of things that aren't there. There is also room for improvement in the daily monitoring."

"The main thing that would useful for us would the logging and monitoring. I have to check it out, to get the beta, because I don't have access to them... I wanted CDO to be a central place so where I could do everything but right now I don't think that's possible. I really don't want to go back and forth between this and FMC. Maybe the logging portion, when I look at it, will give me some similarities."

"There could be some slight improvements to navigation. In some of the navigation you've got to go back to be able to get into where you need to be once you've made a change. If I make a change, I've then got to go back to submit and send the change."

"We had some MX devices that were blocking Windows Update from happening. We found out it was a Meraki issue, but it would have been nice if it had been flagged for us: "Hey, these updates are failing because the MX is blocking it." It wasn't a huge problem, but there was a loss of our time as well as the fact that the updates didn't get pushed out... It would have been nice if CDO had let us know that that was an issue."

"Cisco Defense Orchestrator should be made more user-friendly overall. Currently, to use it effectively, one must be specific with the rule set that needs to be set up."

"When logging into the device, we sort of had problems with it staying in sync. If somebody made a change onsite, it wouldn't do an automatic sync. It would have to wait, as you would have to do a manual sync up."

"Cisco Defense Orchestrator should be made more user-friendly overall."

"I'd like CDO to be the one-stop-shop where we could do all the configurations easily. It would be nice, for ASA upgrades, if we could do them from a central repository and not have to reach out to Cisco. That would be a definite plus."

More Cisco Defense Orchestrator cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Pricing is easy to grasp."

"Use the entire suite for its best benefits."

"The licensing scheme should be done in a simpler way. For example, if we delete a firewall and want to add a new one, then the license doesn't get freed up automatically. You have to request a new license to customer support and install it. If you are testing new implementations, this can be cumbersome."

"The pricing for this solution is not cheap, but we get good value for what we pay."

"It has improved our performance in operations, projects, and security."

"Licensing is offered as a subscription and as a perpetual model."

"For cloud environments, it can be expensive. The model adopted to use as licensing for the cloud environment should be reviewed since it sometimes can increase the value of the service/product in an unexpected way. For example, they should instead use the amount of instances, which should just take into consideration the number of Security Groups and ACLs."

"The price is within the standard of security products."

More AlgoSec pricing and cost advice

"If you compare to what is available on the market, they are in the same range with respect to pricing."

"It is covered under the CIsco Enterprise License Agreement (ELA). So, it is licensed and ours."

"I work with a lot of clients, and the price or value of the Cisco Defense Orchestrator can vary from one client to another. If you have a lot of Cisco solutions, the price of the Cisco Defense Orchestrator is justified. Whereas if you have some security components from other vendors, such as Check Point or Palo Alto. This solution would be a pretty expensive proposition considering that they don't integrate with them well."

"After our free trial was done we got a subscription for three years and it was under $3,000 or so. It's part of the EA we already paid for, so I don't know what it would be if it was a la carte."

"It's around £500 per unit for a three-year license."

"It is about a $100 per year for an ASA 5506 firewall, and from there it keeps going up if you have a bigger box. For example, the 5516 is $200 to $300 per year."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

20%

Financial Services Firm

18%

Manufacturing Company

Retailer

Computer Software Company

51%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

Legal Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about AlgoSec?

AlgoSec's ability to integrate with various security and networking solutions enhances its overall value.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AlgoSec?

I am into operations and not aware of cost or pricing.

See all answers

What needs improvement with AlgoSec?

See all answers

What needs improvement with Cisco Defense Orchestrator?

Cisco Defense Orchestrator should be made more user-friendly overall. Currently, to use it effectively, one must be specific with the rule set that needs to be set up. Additionally, I suggest impro...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Cisco Defense Orchestrator?

Our primary use case for Cisco Defense Orchestrator is the automation of playbooks. We primarily use it for this purpose to streamline processes.

See all answers

What advice do you have for others considering Cisco Defense Orchestrator?

Those who want to use Cisco Defense Orchestrator should build their own use case and see if it fits their environment. The most significant benefit for us is the response time because it automates ...

See all answers

Comparisons

Tufin Orchestration Suite vs AlgoSec

Compared 34% of the time

FireMon Security Manager vs AlgoSec

Compared 26% of the time

Skybox Security Suite vs AlgoSec

Compared 18% of the time

Palo Alto Networks Panorama vs AlgoSec

Compared 6% of the time

AWS Firewall Manager vs AlgoSec

Compared 1% of the time

More AlgoSec Competitors

Tufin Orchestration Suite vs Cisco Defense Orchestrator

Compared 36% of the time

Palo Alto Networks Panorama vs Cisco Defense Orchestrator

Compared 36% of the time

More Cisco Defense Orchestrator Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

AlgoSec

March 2025

Download AlgoSec product report

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Defense Orchestrator

March 2025

Download Cisco Defense Orchestrator product report

Also Known As

No data available

CDO

Interactive Demo

Demo not available

AlgoSec

Cisco

Overview

AlgoSec enhances application delivery speed and security by automating connectivity and policy management across hybrid networks.

With 20 years of experience, AlgoSec is trusted by over 2200 organizations for securing critical workloads. Its Horizon platform leverages AI to discover and manage business applications, offering comprehensive visibility into security and compliance issues across hybrid environments. Intelligent change automation improves both agility and security, ensuring conformity to internet security standards and regulatory requirements.

What key features does AlgoSec offer?

Firewall Analyzer: Optimizes firewall rules, managing risk and compliance effectively.
FireFlow: Automates change management processes, reducing manual errors and boosting efficiency.
Traffic Simulation: Assists in troubleshooting by simulating traffic scenarios.
Vendor Compatibility: Works with multi-vendor devices, ideal for complex networks.
Compliance Reporting: Simplifies audits with templates for standards like PCI-DSS and ISO 27001.

What benefits should users consider?

Enhanced Security: Streamlines security policy management, reducing redundant rules.
Operational Efficiency: Automates processes, leading to faster and more accurate changes.
Regulatory Compliance: Provides tools for easy alignment with industry standards.
Centralized Control: Offers centralized management over firewalls and application connectivity.

In complex industries, AlgoSec aids in risk analysis, firewall policy management, and compliance auditing. Organizations optimize firewall rules and automate policy changes, achieving improved security and operational efficiency across multiple vendor environments. AlgoSec's tools are integral to streamlining change management and enhancing security posture in large network structures.

AlgoSec

Cisco Defense Orchestrator (CDO) is a cloud-based management solution designed to ensure streamlined and consistent security policies across the Cisco security portfolio. Specifically tailored to manage all Cisco Secure Firewall form factors (running either ASA or Firepower Threat Defense (FTD) software), CDO offers real-time visibility and troubleshooting capabilities, effectively enhancing overall network security.

CDO addresses the challenges of migration, supporting transitions from on-premises to cloud environments and facilitating the shift from ASA to FTD configurations. As organizations embark on their cloud adoption journey, CDO simplifies provisioning workflows for remote branches, reduces operational expenditures related to inventory management, and offers scalability for multi-cloud deployments.

Cisco

Sample Customers

Maersk, Delta Airlines, Chevron, General Motors, T-Mobile, Chevron, AT&T, BP, Bell Canada, HCA Healthcare, Morgan Stanley, Unilever, Nationwide Insurance Enterprise, US Bank, Microsoft

Insurance Company of British Columbia, Shawmut

Buyer's Guide

AlgoSec vs. Cisco Defense Orchestrator

March 2025

Free Report: AlgoSec vs. Cisco Defense Orchestrator

Find out what your peers are saying about AlgoSec vs. Cisco Defense Orchestrator and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.

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