Cisco ASA firewall vs. Juniper SRX

[Ludacris]

Can someone explain which firewall would be better for a small office. We are looking to replace a firebox with something that will do SSL VPN. The ASA and SRX is what we arrived at, but don't know how to choose between the two.

We are only a 25 users office and will probably be looking to spend less than $1000. What do you guys think?

[Webmaster]

Your budget seems to be in the right ballpark. However, the Juniper SRX is simply not ready for production. I have been checking on the progress of that line for the last year and half. I wanted to purchase a few of them for a project because on paper, they kick ass. The Juniper forums and even the Juniper rep stated otherwise. Numerous things don't work right. VPN tunnels are flaky and sometimes don't work at all. The SSL VPN feature in the SRX is not the same as their SA line of SSL VPNs.

You can't go wrong with the ASA line. You should check on the licensing feature with the ASA as I think they do license the number of SSL VPN users. The SSL VPN technology is hands down much better in both feature set and performance than older ones like PPTP. You won't be disappointed with it.

[GIBBION]

I have a few SRX devices in production and we went the routing of using them for basic policies only. We had issue after issue with the VPNs. Stick with the other stuff.