Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

AlgoSec vs Cisco Security Cloud Control comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 22, 2025

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
6.8
Number of Reviews
186
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Cisco Security Cloud Control
Ranking in Firewall Security Management
14th
Average Rating
8.2
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Firewall Security Management category, the mindshare of AlgoSec is 22.8%, up from 20.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco Security Cloud Control is 1.2%, down from 1.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Firewall Security Management
 

Featured Reviews

SAURABH JAMBHULKAR - PeerSpot reviewer
Empowers organizations to reduce change management time by 80% and improve audit efficiency
AlgoSec offers essential features such as risk management, policy optimization, change management, traffic simulation, and compliance auditing. Risk management is crucial for security, enabling deep analysis and threat prioritization, while traffic simulation allows interactive diagnostics for operational traffic management. Change management includes tools for monitoring policy changes and ensuring compliance with security standards, making these features significant for any organization. AlgoSec positively impacts my organization by reducing operation burden, enhancing time efficiency, and saving costs associated with security management. AlgoSec firewall analyzer helps with policy complexity by identifying unused or redundant rules and objects, recommending optimizations such as merging similar rules and removing unnecessary allows. Over time, firewalls can accumulate risky configurations, leading to increased overhead and troubleshooting time, but with AlgoSec, we simplify our rule sets, improve firewall performance, and facilitate faster change implementations.
Vivek Balaji - PeerSpot reviewer
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…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"ActiveChange integrates with your change workflow and ticketing system. For example, a change request is made to open port 8080. Then, if the guy who was supposed to implement that change mistakenly opened port 80, then ActiveChange will say, "What was approved was 8080, but what you actually opened was 80." That actually helps to fix human errors. It helps to check everything that is being done. You can go through the analysis and see changes that were made, and AlgoSec is able to alert you immediately. Whenever there is a change, notifications are sent to the administrators because it gives you that real-time alerting and change."
"Firewall Analyzer and AppViz are the most important features because they provide a lot of information regarding network segmentation. For us, this is a valuable input in order to provide network segmentation for various applications that we have developed in-house or that we bought from vendors. Our network is not properly segmented right now, but we plan to do it using AlgoSec. This is the most important feature for us right now."
"It has reduced our audit preparation efforts and costs drastically and maintains continuous compliance."
"It helps us to streamline our firewall rules, identify risks, and provide better visibility. This product has significantly saved the time and human efforts in creating and deploying firewall rules. It is now easier for our cybersecurity team to analyze firewalls rules and ACLs, using them in a more efficient manner."
"FireFlow continues to drive customer efficiencies, allowing an organisation to keep up with the pace of change."
"This has helped to restrict rules, delete rules that are too permissive, and create a configuration that complies with our security policy."
"Users utilize this tool to make their change requests."
"The visibility provided by the single pane of glass for managing multi-vendor firewalls is excellent and then pinpointing network connectivity issues is certainly on a very good level."
"The bulk changes feature is definitely the most valuable."
"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."
"If our server is blocked, this solution shows us why it is blocked and allows us to update the network routing."
"The ability to do operations on multiple firewalls at once is valuable because it saves time and mental effort. The solution's ability to make bulk changes makes it very convenient to manage things at once on multiple targets."
"The most valuable feature is that you can push one policy or one rule out to several devices at a time."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is being able to do centralized upgrades on the ASAs. We can select all of those ASAs, and say, "Upgrade these ASAs at this scheduled time." It will copy down the ASA image, ASDM image, and then do the upgrade and failovers, and then put it all back into service as required at a scheduled time. It automates that process for us."
"Cisco Defense Orchestrator has useful guides for the steps that need to follow by users."
 

Cons

"It doesn't support all features on our firewalls. For instance, planning changes, which include net rules, doesn't work. It didn't integrate so well with the ACI network."
"Country-specific regulations should be added when required. Doing this on my own with baseline compliance is quite difficult."
"Since COVID-19, a number of the technical support team members have been working from home or remotely. So, we haven't gotten support people right when we need them. Sometimes, it takes a couple of hours or even days for us to get that instant support that we used to get."
"It gives you the capability to make changes to hundreds of your firewalls at the same time, but big enterprises have change management policies. Change managers will never allow you to make changes to more than 10 devices at the same time, which is a feature in AlgoSec. Because, what if something goes wrong, then you have to roll back and figure out what caused the impact, e.g., which firewall did not work well. Doing that post-mortem becomes a difficult thing. So, change automation on a firewall is actually defeating the purpose of the change management policies in any organization. If you run a bank, you will not allow anyone to make changes at the same time from a single click for 10 firewalls. The bank will never allow this."
"I believe Active Change needs to be improved because not all products are supported, and some functions cannot be implemented by Active Change either."
"We have a complaint about the compliance check, in that sometimes we want to keep rules rather than merge them."
"We would like to see more features in the GUI so that we don't have to work with the API as extensively."
"It needs better API integration with its third-party firewall management."
"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."
"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."
"They can centralize all products and provide a correlation about an incident and the response. They can also provide an on-premises solution. Currently, Cisco Defense Orchestrator is just for cloud deployments, not for on-premises deployments. Customers have to manage it on the cloud. We are based in Vietnam, and most of the customers here prefer to have on-premises deployments. Customers, especially from banking and government sectors, do not prefer to do anything on the cloud. Some of the small enterprises use the cloud."
"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."
"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."
"Cisco Defense Orchestrator should be made more user-friendly overall."
"It should have more features to manage FirePOWER appliances."
"I've found dozens of bugs over the year we've been using it. The more I use it for different things, the more problems I find... Most of the problems have to do with the user interface. A lot of thought and work has gone into the back-end component to make the product do what it's intended to do, but the way it is presented for use hasn't gotten nearly as much thought to make it smart and bug-free."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Initially, it was more expensive, but we managed to negotiate the price. It's about average now."
"The pricing is flexible with a low cost setup."
"AlgoSec may be little pricier with its licenses, but it is probably better than any of other competitors."
"It will reduce your operations costs with improved team performance."
"Use the entire suite for its best benefits."
"I propose to purchase licenses for all of the networking devices in the network, because if not all of the devices are integrated then the query of particular access cannot be discovered entirely."
"It seems we have recovered our money on this appliance, so it is money well spent."
"Pricing is easy to grasp."
"It's around £500 per unit for a three-year license."
"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."
"It is covered under the CIsco Enterprise License Agreement (ELA). So, it is licensed and ours."
"If you compare to what is available on the market, they are in the same range with respect to pricing."
"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 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."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Firewall Security Management solutions are best for your needs.
860,168 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
6%
Computer Software Company
49%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Legal Firm
3%
 

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.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AlgoSec?
Pricing for AlgoSec is fairly competitive. Rating the pricing on a scale from one being high to ten being low, the price is considered competitive without being specified absolutely.
What needs improvement with AlgoSec?
The user interface for AlgoSec has remained unchanged for the last ten years and could benefit from being more interactive and informative. Additionally, a cloud offering as a SaaS would relieve th...
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...
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.
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 ...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Cisco Defense Orchestrator, CDO
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
 

Overview

 

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
Find out what your peers are saying about AlgoSec vs. Cisco Security Cloud Control and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
860,168 professionals have used our research since 2012.