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Check Point IPS vs Cisco Sourcefire SNORT comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 19, 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

Check Point IPS
Ranking in Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS)
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
56
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Cisco Sourcefire SNORT
Ranking in Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS)
14th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) category, the mindshare of Check Point IPS is 5.0%, down from 9.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco Sourcefire SNORT is 3.6%, down from 3.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS)
 

Featured Reviews

Jeroen Devroede - PeerSpot reviewer
A stable tool that provides its users with intrusion protection functionalities
Based on what I hear from my full-time firewall administrators, the upgrade process or the maintenance of the devices for each firmware upgrade requires one to break the cluster and run a specific moment at a time, a single node concept. I hear from my admin that the firmware upgrade process is quite cumbersome. Our company has made Check Point very well aware of the cumbersome firmware upgrade process, including the other customers as well. The aforementioned details can be considered for improvement. The price of the product needs to be improved since it is an expensive solution. All the components of Check Point IPS are expensive, while licenses of the product exceed all its other expenses. If you have a data center without infrastructure, you will suffer from losses on a monthly and yearly basis due to DDoS attacks, which we know about since we have the data for ourselves. It is up to each customer to determine how long he can lose his data center, and then you count if it is possible to lose it for that amount of time, and if you don't, then pay the price for the firewall.
Jack Poon - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers ease of setup and good documentation
When it comes to the product's deployment phase, we have a lot of vendor support. We have a lot of skills here in Hong Kong. Our company doesn't find any problem deploying Cisco solutions. The solution is deployed on an on-premises version. Speaking about the time required to deploy the solution, I would say that we have quite a lot of previous experience with deploying Cisco products. We have our company's standard design document, which we need to follow. We have a standard testing procedure for all those features. We just take out some appropriate parts and then compile them into one document for an individual project. It is actually quite easy for us to do the documentation, so it just takes one or two hours, and we can do the implementation because all the materials and testing procedures are already in our company standard documents, so it is not that difficult for us.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I would rate this solution a 9 out of 10."
"I can easily monitor all of our connected devices and I get instant notification of reconnections and new connections, which removes some of the monitoring burden."
"It offers robust protection with features such as Next Generation firewall capabilities, mobile solutions, and proactive threat prevention."
"Check Point Intrusion Prevention System has great profiles, and we can continuously create, modify, activate, deactivate or configure any specific setting to allow the profile to focus on just one thing or for certain attacks."
"The integration is a valuable feature."
"The solution's IPS functionality and firewall functionality are the solution's most valuable features."
"IPS easily allows follow-up flags on recently updated patterns. If, in rare cases, a false positive does occur, it is quickly detected and an exception can be easily created."
"Behavior analytics and monitoring capabilities of Check Point IPS are valuable, especially for cybersecurity purposes."
"Cisco Sourcefire SNORT is easy to configure and the reporting is great. It's also very user-friendly."
"The whole solution is very good, and stable."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the filtering."
"It is quite an intelligent product."
"The solution can be integrated with some network electors like Cisco Stealthwatch, Cisco ISE, and Active Directory to provide the client with authentication certificates."
"The most valuable features of Cisco Sourcefire SNORT are the dashboard for monitoring events."
"Solid intrusion detection and prevention that scales easily in very large environments."
"The solution is stable."
 

Cons

"When entering, it always takes a long time to load."
"The only thing they could maybe improve is that we notice right away that the performance decreases when we enable the IPS, especially beyond the CPU and memory usage. If you want to enable the IPS and you have a lot of traffic, it can have an impact. The performance could be improved."
"I would like the product to provide us with intelligence to understand what we really have in our environment."
"Improvement suggestions include more attractive dashboards, enhanced visual analytics, and automated attack path correlation in SmartEvent to improve situational awareness."
"There is an issue with precision."
"I observed on our management that sometimes IPS does not connect to the threat cloud, we have to check and improve it. Otherwise, all of the features are good."
"What I would like to improve in IPS would be the capacity of the hardware. I would also like to be able to sort signatures by severity. This would greatly impact how well I can manage my environment."
"The tool's pricing could be better."
"To be frank, the product is not really stable, although they're working on that. Whenever I go to the technical community with an issue, they will usually say that it is not there yet, but the technical team are working on it. The issues are not insolvable. I think they should just keep working on the product to make sure that the product can become very stable. The technical support is great. I appreciate that. We have a lot of communities supporting Firepower now, so you can find help for whatever issue you have."
"The implementation could be a bit easier."
"Integration with other components — even Cisco's own products — can be enhanced to improve administrative experience."
"The cloud can be improved."
"The initial setup is a little difficult compared to other products in the market. It depends on the environment. If we are doing any migration, it might take months in a brown-field environment."
"I want to see a better dashboard for the product. The dashboard can be a bit modified or enhanced."
"With the next release, I would like to see some PBR, so that you can do the configuration with the features."
"I did not experience any pain points that required improvement. Maybe a couple of false-positives, but that's about it."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The module has a considerable cost but you can save by purchasing a package with several modules instead of making a single purchase."
"There is a license needed to use the Check Point IPS which is not expensive. However, the Check Point IPS device is expensive."
"Enabling IPS does not require any additional license purchase from OEM, as it comes by default with the NGFW bundle."
"I rate the product price an eight on a scale of one to ten, where one means it is very cheap and ten means it is very expensive. The product is expensive."
"The tool's licensing model is good. The licensing costs are yearly. I rate it an eight out of ten."
"I think that the price of support is around $40,000 USD or $50,000 USD per year."
"You can pay for Check Point IPS yearly, or you can go with a three-year license. There's no extra cost apart from the standard licensing fee."
"The pricing model can be more competitive."
"We have a three-year license for this solution."
"If one is an extremely expensive product, and ten is cheap, I rate the tool's price as a five."
"I don't know the exact amount, but most of the time when I go to a company with a proposition, they will say, "This thing that you are selling is good, but it's expensive. Why don't you propose something like FortiGate, Check Point, or Palo Alto?" Cisco device are expensive compared to other devices."
"Licensing for this solution is paid on a yearly basis."
"The cost is per port and can be expensive but it does include training and support for three years."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
22%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
12%
University
7%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Check Point IPS?
The most valuable feature of the solution is called tunneling. Tunneling is one of the major security features that hackers cannot penetrate through.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Check Point IPS?
Comparisons with Fortinet show that Check Point IPS is relatively more expensive, but we found it cheaper to retain it rather than switch.
What needs improvement with Check Point IPS?
I believe Check Point IPS can be improved by making it more proactive and predictive and fine-tuning the false positives. When I say more proactive and predictive, I believe they can improve on the...
What do you like most about Cisco Sourcefire SNORT?
The product is inexpensive compared to leading brands such as Palo Alto or Fortinet.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco Sourcefire SNORT?
If one is an extremely expensive product, and ten is cheap, I rate the tool's price as a five. There are some other tools in the market that are more expensive than Cisco. There are no additional c...
What needs improvement with Cisco Sourcefire SNORT?
Cisco offers the Cisco DNA Center, which is a source that provides crucial information for us to monitor performance, and see whether there is any trouble. We are using Cisco DNA center, but again,...
 

Also Known As

Check Point Intrusion Prevention System
Sourcefire SNORT
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Morton Salt, Medical Advocacy and Outreach, BH Telecom, Lightbeam Health Solutions, X by Orange, Cadence, Nihondentsu, Datastream Connexion, Good Sam, Omnyway, FIASA, Pacific Life, Banco del Pacifico, Control Southern, Xero, Centrify
CareCore, City of Biel, Dimension Data, LightEdge, Lone Star College System, National Rugby League, Port Aventura, Smart City Networks, Telecom Italia, The Department of Education in Western Australia
Find out what your peers are saying about Check Point IPS vs. Cisco Sourcefire SNORT and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
860,592 professionals have used our research since 2012.