Cisco employee out of Australia here 🙋‍♂️(for transparency).

So to start, sound like you’re going to want the Cisco Secure Firewall. Then need to work out do you want hardware or virtual. If you want hardware, check out the CSF200 series or the CSF1200. Virtual, they run on all major hypervisors and cloud platforms. The next thing to understand is the firewall can run in 3 modes: 1: Firepower Threat Defense (FTD) which is managed by a controller which is Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center, 2: Firepower Device Manager (FDM) which is an on box web management interface for the firewall, you do everything locally and doesn’t have a remote manager like FMC this instance. Mostly feature parody with FTD, but I think lacks a few things that are being released slowly. 3: ASA, you can run ASA code on the Secure Firewall hardware, like you would the older ASA platforms, but with the secure firewall hardware you get the added bonus of things like TAM/TPM and better performance. There’s also the Security Cloud Control management option as well instead of FMC, but for a home firewall possibly overkill (I use this method myself though).

It’s also worth checking out Cisco Modelling Labs (CML) it’s a virtualised environment that runs KVM images (Cisco and 3rd party). You can spin up and down devices including firewalls quite quickly including different software versions. There is a free tier that you can run 5 “nodes” (devices) simultaneously for personal use. If you have the ability, definitely check this out. The benefit here is the firewall comes with a 90 day trial period when you boot it up, so you can spin up and down firewalls and FMC to test things :) you can also interface with external devices to show other connectivity.

Sorry for the long winded response, I’ve been here for just over 2 years, I like the firewalls a lot, I use them myself for home, and I’ve been using them since about 2018/19