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AlgoSec vs FireMon Security Manager comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 4, 2024

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
FireMon Security Manager
Ranking in Firewall Security Management
4th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
56
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 FireMon Security Manager is 16.6%, up from 16.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Firewall Security Management
 

Q&A Highlights

it_user1292127 - PeerSpot reviewer
Feb 27, 2020
 

Featured Reviews

Shameerudheen Kp - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Ganesh-Khutwad - PeerSpot reviewer
Rapid policy insights with robust dashboards and cross-vendor automation
FireMon Security Manager is excellent for real-time compliance management. It allows us to quickly retrieve any policy needed for testing and easily analyze it for loopholes. If a loophole exists, FireMon provides comprehensive details within the policy manager. It alerts us to firewall rule additions or changes that violate compliance policies. It supports various firewall platforms, including Checkpoint, Zscaler, Fortinet, Cisco, and AWS, and provides centralized management for all configured policies through a single console. FireMon Security Manager provides many features, like whether my firewall is compatible with required standards such as NTP and SNMP. Each compliance included in our RFPs is shown in the UI of FireMon. It gives robust and clear dashboards, making it easier to understand risks because the policies have ratings showing usage, and the number of hit attacks. It streamlines our compliance reporting processes by providing comprehensive risk and compliance assessments. It offers a range of features, including verification of firewall compatibility with protocols like NTP and SNMP, and detection of signal charges. FireMon effectively addresses all compliance requirements outlined in our RFPs. For instance, it can determine if firewalls or proxies within a stack are configured in Secure Mode or Active-Active mode. FireMon Security Manager enables us to generate reports on all these aspects, ensuring thorough compliance monitoring and documentation. FireMon Security Manager is robust and can help automate firewall policy changes across large multi-vendor enterprise environments. FireMon Security Manager helps automate firewall policy changes across various environments, including on-premises, cloud, hybrid, SASE, and SD-WAN. It also simplifies cleaning up firewall rules in our environment. The time required to accurately create, approve, and deploy firewall policy rules has been reduced. Tasks that took 30 minutes can now be completed in just five minutes using FireMon. FireMon provides immediate visibility into our policies through a robust and clear dashboard, making it easy to identify errors or misconfigurations based on the policy rating.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"AFA provides project teams with a simplified way to obtain the status on their current rule set."
"ABF is application-centric. which helps to track changes in the application from day one."
"AlgoSec has reduced the need for additional manpower and we can now use the time to tackle other security-related issues."
"It has reduced the workload for the firewall team thanks to the API integration with our ticketing system, handling the standard types of requests automatically."
"AlgoSec is able to provide a consistent view into all of an organization's firewalls, regardless if the management is done by different companies."
"AlgoSec's ability to integrate with various security and networking solutions enhances its overall value."
"The solution helps visualize and manage the hybrid network."
"It has reduced our audit preparation efforts and costs drastically and maintains continuous compliance."
"It is a good product. Previously, we were using only spreadsheets to compare the usage, but now with FireMon, we are able to clean up or review the policies to some extent. It is still a work in progress, but we are at a good stage now."
"I've been using the reports to see what is going on, and that is a helpful feature. We can track down unused rules, which helps with compliance. We can see rules that have not been used or that are duplicates or overly permissive."
"The most valuable feature is the reporting capability because everything that we do is a result of our being able to query a report, based on our environment and our PCI compliance efforts."
"Compared to other applications, it is user-friendly. The appearance of the menus and titles is clear and they are easy to follow. Of course, it requires some experience through using it, to go through everything, but it is not very difficult. It is an easy application to use."
"FireMon saves us a lot of time and it's nice because if you're adding a rule that's similar to another rule, it'll tell you so sometimes you can just edit the one and add another source or destination in there without creating a duplicate rule. It enables you to consolidate and have fewer, more meaningful rules. We're saving around 30% of our time."
"The most valuable feature is that everything is recorded in the historical logs, including the firewall rules, headcounts, object-level usage, and the rule documentation. The rule certification details are also there, which means that someone can be held accountable for a specific firewall rule."
"For the cleanup of firewall rules, it performs really well for us. We utilize it in our regular rule cleanup tasks, several times a year. FireMon is our primary tool when doing that, either by going through its out-of-the-box compliance rules or using it to search for certain things in our rules that we want to prune from our firewalls."
"It is the single place where we go to review all of our firewall changes. The solution makes it easier for us to track all the changes made. It is a central place where we can look at all the firewall rules, because we have three different firewall vendors. It save us time and creates efficiencies by looking at the general picture."
 

Cons

"Our experience with support has been inconsistent. Sometimes, support is fast and clean; other times, not so much. Occasionally, they have taken a while to respond or provided an inadequate workaround instead of a solution."
"The GUI has not been upgraded for a long time and could use updating."
"We don't dare push the new policy automatically, We don't have confidence in this feature."
"Country-specific regulations should be added when required. Doing this on my own with baseline compliance is quite difficult."
"I would like to see more object-based reports on groups and object usage."
"The Flash to HTML5 rewrite has been bumpy."
"The reporting could be a bit better."
"The license rekeying needed for when you need to change a firewall usually takes a bit of time."
"FireMon could improve its end-user practices. As an end user, I am just trying to catch up on all the alerts. There are so many, and you still have to go through them and document what was found."
"When it comes to identifying risk in our environment and prioritizing fixes, it is really about the different priorities within the organization. FireMon is not so smart that it can tell what's important to us. It's up to us to figure that out."
"We've had recurring issues managing FireMon's internal backups. Sometimes, the space allocated for the backup is full, and there is no process where it deletes files that are older than I certain date. It's just waiting for the storage to get full and then it's cleaned up. It isn't something that creates serious issues for us."
"A phone app would be nice. This is the reason why it is not perfect yet."
"The issue for me started with Fortinet not being able to see things correctly. It lost its appeal in terms of what it could do for me from a security standpoint, so I do not pay as much attention to it."
"Our firewalls have multiple paths through them and FireMon falls short a little bit because it's not Palo Alto-centric. I don't think FireMon has kept up with where Palo Alto is at. They started out being Check Point-centric for years and they've never really fully embraced the nuances others, like Palo Alto or Fortinet, have. They don't handle a lot of the capabilities and attributes that Palo Alto does yet. They're working on it. They're getting there."
"Some of the core functionality in our environment doesn't seem to work. We will get buggy code releases. They need to work on their Q&A of every code release."
"We have had some stability issues that are affecting operations. We rely heavily on this solution and if it isn't working then we have to create rules manually."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost of the tool can be recovered with AlgoSec automations."
"The price is within the standard of security products."
"The pricing of AlgoSec is fair."
"The pricing for this solution seems to be reasonable for the functionality."
"The price came in where we really didn't even need to have much of a discussion. That was very good. There are also options regarding what you want to pay for. It wasn't really pushed on me that I have to get all of it or else I can't be an AlgoSec customer."
"I find the price too expensive. It looks a bit like SAP, so it does have standard functionality out of the box, but you will spend a lot of money if you want to customize it. However, the price is not as extreme as SAP or Oracle, but the actual implementation does turn out to be expensive."
"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."
"I compared the prices of AlgoSec with Tufin and FireMon. I don't recall the exact cost, but it was within budget and not very expensive. In addition to standard licensing fees, we didn't have any significant additional costs. We did hire new people for the change management process, but that's not a technology issue."
"It's a good value. From a licensing standpoint... it's very simple to understand, and gives us a good bang for the buck."
"Its pricing is good. Compared to others, it is not so expensive."
"Pricing model seems fair."
"We pay for it yearly."
"The pricing was very good during our initial year, but they increased it this year a little bit. The price is okay. It is not cheap, but it is still average."
"Relative to what it offers, the price is fair."
"We don't license all of the devices in our network, so it does not provide us with a comprehensive visibility of all devices in a hybrid network at this time."
"The pricing is very good, very straightforward. It also came in cheaper than AlgoSec and Tufin."
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Answers from the Community

it_user1292127 - PeerSpot reviewer
Feb 27, 2020
Feb 27, 2020
Well before both the products have their own pros and cons. But the criteria you mention, I would say you can go with AlgoSec with the following reasons: 1. It's less expensive compared to FireMon. 2. Need very less amount of resources as compare to FireMon who need a huge amount of resources with their basic level VM as well. 3. Easy to manage and configure. 4. I found AlgoSec bette...
2 out of 4 answers
CG
Feb 24, 2020
Unfortunately we chose Tufin over both those products, sorry I cannot give you a comparison on either. For us, Tufin simplifies the needs we have for Risks/Cleanup/Violations in our FW policies. We also leverage compliance policy for best practices. You can also take advantage of the reporting functionally which suites your environment or infrastructure such as: - New Revision - Advance Change - FW Modul Change - Object Change - Expired Rules - Rule and Object Usage - Policy Analysis - Security Risk - Rule Documentation.
Sunil Kumar. - PeerSpot reviewer
Feb 25, 2020
Well before both the products have their own pros and cons. But the criteria you mention, I would say you can go with AlgoSec with the following reasons: 1. It's less expensive compared to FireMon. 2. Need very less amount of resources as compare to FireMon who need a huge amount of resources with their basic level VM as well. 3. Easy to manage and configure. 4. I found AlgoSec better than FireMon in terms of reporting. But the biggest drawback with AlgoSec is their tech support which takes a huge amount of time to respond and investigate the issue. And in the end, they will always provide you one solution which is a known bug in the product and they will release an HA for that.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
20%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Retailer
5%
Computer Software Company
19%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
6%
 

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?
I am into operations and not aware of cost or pricing.
What needs improvement with AlgoSec?
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 s...
What do you like most about FireMon?
I like the Security Manager console where we can see any changes that have been made or pull the results of an assessment and control the policies that we implement.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for FireMon?
Comparatively, FireMon has a very good price and is below the general competition in cost. I have not seen any additional fees beyond the general contract fees for the usage I have. So, I have not ...
What needs improvement with FireMon?
For one company I work with, I use Fortinet, and FireMon is not able to understand the zones that Fortinet uses. Part of that compliance piece does not provide me with the necessary information. An...
 

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 
Convey, MGM Resorts International, Southwest Airlines, Alkami, Costco, Aetna, IBM, Verizon, Wells Fargo
Find out what your peers are saying about AlgoSec vs. FireMon Security Manager and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
845,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.