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Cisco Secure Firewall vs Cisco Secure Workload comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

Cisco Secure Firewall
Ranking in Cisco Security Portfolio
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
428
Ranking in other categories
Firewalls (6th)
Cisco Secure Workload
Ranking in Cisco Security Portfolio
9th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
Cloud and Data Center Security (8th), Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (13th), Microsegmentation Software (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Cisco Security Portfolio category, the mindshare of Cisco Secure Firewall is 6.8%, up from 5.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco Secure Workload is 8.9%, up from 3.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cisco Security Portfolio
 

Featured Reviews

Phil Shiflett - PeerSpot reviewer
Unified policies streamline network management but complex licensing requires attention
Cisco Secure Firewall has some growth opportunities in terms of visibility and control capabilities regarding managing encrypted traffic. It has the ability to analyze encrypted traffic, and there is potential for more integration with APIs and AI to enhance these capabilities. Cisco Secure Firewall needs improvement in deployment time and the capability to access the CLI during support calls. I often encounter issues when technical support uses a CLI that is not familiar to me while troubleshooting through the GUI. My ongoing complaint for the last six years has been the lack of CLI functionality, which hinders my ability to work on the firewall, alongside concerns regarding deployment time. For the next release, they should look at the features offered by competitors such as Fortinet, including the ability to perform packet capture directly from the interface. If they enhanced their troubleshooting efficiency related to packet capture for each specific rule, it would simplify the process significantly.
Raj Metkar - PeerSpot reviewer
Discover internal application dependencies and create a dependency map
We actively seek improvements in integrating the Infoblox DDI platform with Cisco Secure Workload. This integration allows Cisco Secure Workload to learn about our networks and network tags, providing valuable insights into vulnerabilities related to the operating system and various applications installed on our servers. Recently, Cisco announced a new product called HyperShield, an AI-based autonomous micro-segmentation solution. While Cisco has not stated that HyperShield will replace Cisco Secure Workload, it represents a natural evolution for the company. HyperShield features dynamic policy discovery and enforcement; however, once policies are enforced, they do not change until a discovery occurs, requiring a re-enforcement process. This new platform operates autonomously, minimizing the need for user or security engineer intervention. I would have expected Cisco to incorporate more automatic discovery and enforcement features within the existing Cisco Secure Workload product. Instead of enhancing the current product, they have introduced a new solution. Cisco plans to honor existing Tetration licenses, allowing users to transition to HyperShield without additional costs, reflecting the investment enterprises have already made. From Cisco’s perspective, this represents a natural progression in their product line. While the product name changes, it seems more of a rebranding effort. The enhancements are greater autonomy, improved discovery, and automatic enforcement, which are now being introduced in HyperShield. Cisco Secure Workload offers automatic policy enforcement but cannot adjust policies dynamically as the application needs to change. Having used the platform for the past five years, the recent announcement has been reassuring. Cisco has confirmed that our investment in the platform will not go to waste. They will honor our existing licenses, providing a natural migration path to the new solution without any disruption

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution offers very easy configurations."
"Cisco ASA NGFW significantly improves our bank. It protects any high-value products that we use from hackers, viruses, malware, and script-bots. It gives us metrics on network traffic as well as what kind of attacks we are getting from the outside."
"The initial setup is easy."
"Cisco Secure Firewall is a scalable solution."
"Strong in NAT and access-lists."
"The central management feature makes it easier to configure once, push out, and replace firewalls when they go bad. It's nice to have one pane of view, one pane of glass."
"I haven't had any major problems so I haven't had to open a ticket with technical support."
"It helped us a lot with our VPNs for the home office during COVID. There has been more security and flexibility for VPNs and other applications."
"Instead of proving that all the access control lists are in place and all the EPGs are correct, we can just point the auditor to a dashboard and point out that there aren't any escaped conversations. It saves an enormous, enormous amount of time."
"It's stable."
"Secure Workload's best feature is that it's an end-to-end offering from Cisco."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is that we don't have to do packet captures on the network."
"Generally speaking, Cisco support is considered one of the best in the networking products and stack."
"The product offers great visibility into the network so we can enforce security measures."
"A complete and powerful micro-segmentation solution."
"The only use case I can see that makes sense is micro-segmentation. I think there are other use cases for it. The main purpose of the product is to do micro-segmentation by collecting IP. That could be done by installing an agent, and then you have all the communication coming in and out. You could also use some flow sensors installed in the network that receive a copy of the traffic and then report that back to the system."
 

Cons

"One area where the ASA could be improved is that it doesn't have AMP. When you get an ASA with the Firepower model, ASA with FTD, then you have advanced malware protection."
"The integration, especially for APIs or with other firewall products, is a challenge for me."
"It would be nice if you didn't have to configure using a command-line interface. It's a bit technical that way."
"Regarding stability and reliability, I have experienced false negative alerts with the CS models, which indicate that my switch has gone down, but in reality, it has not. That is a fix that is needed."
"Other firewalls, upgrading is a very easy task; from the graphical user interface, you just need to import the firmware versions into it and install it. In this firewall, you need to have a third-party solution in both. It's a process. It's a procedure, a hard procedure, actually, so there is no straightforward procedure for upgrading."
"When comparing the graphical interface of this solution to other vendors it is more difficult to configure. There is a higher learning curve for administrators in this solution."
"The use of it has really bogged down our response time for certain problems, given we have to go through AT&T for everything."
"The initial setup could be simplified, as it can be complex for new users."
"They should scale down the hardware a bit. The initial hardware investment is two million dollars so it's a price point problem. The issue with the price comes from the fact that you have to have it with enormous storage and enormous computes."
"I'd like to see better documentation for advanced features. The documentation is fairly basic. I would also like to see better integration with other applications."
"It has an uninviting interface."
"The integration could be better, especially with different types of solutions."
"There is some overlap between Cisco Tetration and AppDynamics and I need to have a single pane of glass, rather than have to jump between different tools."
"There's room for improvement when it comes to Cisco Secure Workload. A couple of internal areas could be refined a little bit. They are trying to solve it, depending on where you suppose the agent is. Suppose you have the agent on both the server and the client, which could be the front-end server or web server connecting to the. In that case, if those two are communicating on RPC, the server can look into its configuration. It could go down and find the configuration file on the FTP server and then set the policies to it. But there are a lot of different FTP servers out there. It's also a complex case for the tool to support all FTP servers."
"Secure Workload is a little complicated to use, and the dashboard isn't intuitive, so it takes a while to learn how to use it."
"The emailed notifications are either hard to find or they are not available. Search capabilities can be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We bought a three-year license as a part of the enterprise agreement, which includes help with implementation and troubleshooting. We have a big data center with many applications, so implementation was not straightforward. We had to put effort into it. It wasn't an easy or straightforward implementation. The support that we got from Cisco engineers with the three-year premium license was helpful. The enterprise agreement helped to consume the licenses in a practical and faster way and streamline the implementation."
"This product requires licenses for advanced features including Snort, IPS, and malware detection."
"Pricing for Cisco is expensive. There are additional costs for the licensing part, support, and even the hardware part. The device cost is very high. I would be very happy with an improvement on the price."
"It's more expensive than Fortinet and Juniper. The price is high compared to other vendors. In general, for the license, it's not that expensive."
"Cisco pricing is premium. However, they gave us a 50 to 60 percent discount."
"We pay about $200 yearly and we have two firewalls."
"The pricing is fair compared to competitors."
"To discuss with Cisco Systems or their partners to gain the optimal price and to not consider, without verifying, the false information that Cisco ASA is very expensive."
"It is not cheap and pricing may limit scalability."
"Pricing depends on the scope of the application and the features. Larger installations save more."
"The cost for the hardware is around 300k."
"The price is outrageous. If you have money to throw at the product, then do it."
"The pricing is a bit higher than we anticipated."
"Regarding price, Cisco Secure Workload can be expensive if you don't have a budget. If you're not doing micro-segmentation, every extra security measure or enforcement you're putting on top of your existing environment will be an extra cost. It's not a cheap solution at all. But from my point of view, if you need to do micro-segmentation, this is one of the best tools I've seen for it. I can't compare that to Microsoft's solution because I haven't looked into it. I've looked into VMware and Cisco. Those are the only two that I know of. I didn't know that Microsoft could do micro-segmentation at all. Maybe they can, but I haven't heard anything about it."
"The price is based on how many computers you're going to install it on."
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Comparison Review

it_user206346 - PeerSpot reviewer
Mar 11, 2015
Cisco ASA vs. Palo Alto Networks
Cisco ASA vs. Palo Alto: Management Goodies You often have comparisons of both firewalls concerning security components. Of course, a firewall must block attacks, scan for viruses, build VPNs, etc. However, in this post I am discussing the advantages and disadvantages from both vendors concerning…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
31%
Computer Software Company
16%
University
6%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Computer Software Company
24%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Which is the better NGFW: Fortinet Fortigate or Cisco Firepower?
When you compare these firewalls you can identify them with different features, advantages, practices and usage at large. In my opinion, Fortinet would be the best option and l use Fortinet too...
Which is better - Fortinet FortiGate or Cisco ASA Firewall?
One of our favorite things about Fortinet Fortigate is that you can deploy on the cloud or on premises. Fortinet Fortigate is very stable, reliable, and consistent. We like that we can manage the e...
How does Cisco's ASA firewall compare with the Firepower NGFW?
It is easy to integrate Cisco ASA with other Cisco products and also other NAC solutions. When you understand the Cisco ecosystem, it is very simple to handle. This solution has traffic inspection ...
What do you like most about Cisco Secure Workload?
The product provides multiple-device integration.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco Secure Workload?
CloudStrike offers antivirus capabilities and firewall features for servers and VDI but lacks automatic policy discovery. This raises questions about the resources required to discover and write po...
What needs improvement with Cisco Secure Workload?
We actively seek improvements in integrating the Infoblox DDI platform with Cisco Secure Workload. This integration allows Cisco Secure Workload to learn about our networks and network tags, provid...
 

Also Known As

Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Firewall, Cisco ASA NGFW, Adaptive Security Appliance, Cisco Sourcefire Firewalls, Cisco ASAv, Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall
Cisco Tetration
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

There are more than one million Adaptive Security Appliances deployed globally. Top customers include First American Financial Corp., Genzyme, Frankfurt Airport, Hansgrohe SE, Rio Olympics, The French Laundry, Rackspace, and City of Tomorrow.
ADP, University of North Carolina Charlotte (UNCC)
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco Secure Firewall vs. Cisco Secure Workload and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
860,168 professionals have used our research since 2012.