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Cisco Security Cloud Control vs FireMon Security Manager comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 27, 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

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
FireMon Security Manager
Ranking in Firewall Security Management
3rd
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 August 2025, in the Firewall Security Management category, the mindshare of Cisco Security Cloud Control is 1.4%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of FireMon Security Manager is 17.9%, up from 16.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Firewall Security Management
 

Featured Reviews

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…
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

"This product provides excellent centralized device controls and reporting."
"Cisco Defense Orchestrator has useful guides for the steps that need to follow by users."
"The most valuable feature is that you can push one policy or one rule out to several devices at a time."
"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."
"We use a lot of image upgrades. We take some 20 devices and then we update everything at once, including the policies. We apply policies for groups. For certain groups, like anti-viruses, we send out policies and apply them to every single device. It's really easy and simple."
"The most valuable feature is the automation, as it reduces user intervention and allows us to focus on other tasks."
"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 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."
"Overall, I would rate this solution a nine out of ten."
"The SQL language is convenient to use. It allows us to process a bunch of criteria very quickly and narrows things down if there is an issue with the firewall. It's easy to do that with SQL queries."
"We also use the solution’s SASE integration capabilities to extend security policy management for cloud firewall management. It helps in creating one consistent rule across multiple platforms and it improves accuracy."
"It provides us with a single pane of glass for our on-prem environment, to see configuration. We have not implemented into the cloud yet. We can search for an object group and see where it lives on any firewall in the enterprise or find security rules, no matter what firewall they're on."
"The most effective feature is the general reporting on compliance."
"The unused objects is another nice feature, where it digs a little bit deeper into comparing the logs that it sees versus the configurations that it sees... The unused objects feature will go through in a pretty detailed way and show us which ones aren't being used. Or, if they are used, it will show us how often they're used."
"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."
"The most valuable features are the security assessments and the ability to identify unused rules or objects."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Cisco Defense Orchestrator can improve by providing more support for third-party security components."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"When it comes to documentation, they need to start putting together a basic command manual. With Cisco, you can look up a command and it gives you examples of three or four different ways that command can be used. It tells you how to put it into the GUI and the CLI. FireMon does need to start doing that."
"When it comes to real-time compliance management, something that is missing is alerting on certain, predefined controls. It would be good to have a predefined set of controls which, if not complied with in a newly set up rule, would create an alert for us. That is something that is missing, out-of-the-box."
"The initial setup can take some time, including connecting it and configuring it. It's not something that is easy for anybody to do. There is time and energy required because of the number of systems you have to configure to get it to work properly."
"The support response time has room for improvement."
"Its reporting can be improved. I am the only one who works a lot with it, and I am having problems in terms of reporting. In the case of Palo Alto, I'm okay with it, but with some of the Cisco devices, such as routers, when I provide the reports to other teams for review, they always say that the hit count is incorrect. So, I was struggling for a long time to work with them. When working with other teams, they have a lot of questions about reporting, such as how it reports, and we are still struggling with that."
"Sometimes, there is a problem related to the sizing itself. If we have many devices added or if the firewall complexity is huge, we might experience some lag in processing. It may relate to the hardware specifications."
"One area for 7.x customers that needs improvement is the migration. It is an involved process so get ready to spend some time getting your environment back to the way it was."
"We are looking for more integration with SIEM and other tools."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"If you compare to what is available on the market, they are in the same range with respect to pricing."
"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."
"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 covered under the CIsco Enterprise License Agreement (ELA). So, it is licensed and ours."
"FireMon is very expensive. I think that they charge a premium. In general, they are very pricey. Compared to their competitors, they cost a little more than the other solutions that we evaluated."
"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 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."
"FireMon is cheaper than AlgoSec."
"We pay for it yearly."
"Pricing is reasonable."
"It's a good value. From a licensing standpoint... it's very simple to understand, and gives us a good bang for the buck."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
48%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
6%
Government
3%
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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 ...
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...
 

Also Known As

Cisco Defense Orchestrator, CDO
No data available
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Insurance Company of British Columbia, Shawmut
Convey, MGM Resorts International, Southwest Airlines, Alkami, Costco, Aetna, IBM, Verizon, Wells Fargo
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco Security Cloud Control vs. FireMon Security Manager and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
865,295 professionals have used our research since 2012.