We performed a comparison between Azure Firewall and Fortinet Fortigate based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Fortinet Fortigate is the winner in this comparison. It is stable and reliable and, according to reviews, has a wider variety of features than Azure Firewall. Fortinet Fortigate also received higher marks in the support category.
"One of the best features is the ease of use. It's also easy to teach new engineers to use the ASA CLI."
"The fact that we can use Firepower Management Center gives us visibility. It allows us to see and manage the traffic that is going through the network."
"The main thing that I love the most is its policy and objects. Whenever I try to give access to a user, I can create an object via group creation in the object fields. This way, I am not able to enter a user in the policy repeatedly."
"The deep packet inspection is useful, but the most useful feature is application awareness. You can filter on the app rather than on a static TCP port."
"Cisco ASA works very nicely from an administration perspective. The management of the device is very nice. The ASDM (Adaptive Security Device Manager) is the software that we use and it is very easy to configure using the GUI."
"It's very stable and mature."
"The IP filter configuration for specific political and Static NAT has been most valuable."
"If configured, Firepower provides us with application visibility and control."
"The firewall policy control, URL content control, and antivirus are all the most valuable aspects. Threat prevention is as well quite good."
"Among the most valuable features are the DDoS protection that protects your virtual machines, the threat intelligence, and traffic filtering."
"I think that one of the best features is definitely the premium version, along with the IDPs in terms of the intrusion detection and prevention system."
"The initial setup is straightforward; Azure Firewall does not have a complex implementation process. It is very simple; you just need to enable the service within Azure. It does not require any maintenance because it is managed by Microsoft, that is, it is a fully managed service."
"Azure's cost-effectiveness is its major advantage."
"Network filtering is valuable. The scalability capability from the cloud-native service helps us a lot because it simplifies our day-to-day maintenance activity."
"It's auto-scalable, which is a great feature."
"I like its order management feature. It doesn't have the kind of threat intelligence that Palo Alto has, but the order management makes it much simpler to know the difference."
"Fortigate represents a really scalable way of delivering perimeter network security, some level of layer 7 security, WAF, and also a way to create a meshed ADVPN solution."
"The payment function for applications is good."
"The most valuable feature of Fortinet FortiGate is security. They are known for efficiency and are on the top of Gartner Quadrant reviews. Fortinet FortiGate has an easy-to-use platform with a good graphical interface. The configuration is simple and the solution provides an overall good layer of security."
"One of the nice things about FortiGate is that it can be deployed on the cloud or on-premises. You can actually do both. That's the biggest reason why I stick with this solution as opposed to something like Cisco Meraki. Another nice thing is that I can log directly into a FortiGate or get to it through their FortiCloud access products. They're pretty reliable and consistent. One of the reasons why I started using the product was their single pane of management. I can deploy their line of firewalls in conjunction with their switching and access points, and I can manage the entire network from one interface. I don't have to log into one interface for the firewall, another one for the access points, and another one for the switches. These firewalls have access point controller functionality built right into the system, so I don't even have to purchase additional devices to manage them."
"The solution is stable."
"Some of the key features of the solution is that it has good reporting, you can receive many details from the connection, for example, clients and website information."
"This version is stable. I don't have any issues with this solution, in our environment, it works well."
"Good load balancing feature."
"We're getting support but there's a big delay until we get a response from their technical team. They're in the USA and we're in Africa, so that's the difficulty. When they're in the office, they respond."
"It needs to provide the next-generation firewall features that other vendors provide, like data analytics, telemetry, and deep packet inspection."
"The main problem we have is that things work okay until we upgrade the firmware, at which point, everything changes, and the net stops working."
"The visibility for VPN is one big part. The policy administration could be improved in terms of customizations and flexibility for changing it to our needs."
"When we first got it, we were doing individual configuring. Now, there is a way to manage from one location."
"The solution needs to have better logging features."
"We cannot have virtual domains, which we can create with FortiGate. This is something they should add in the future. Additionally, there is a connection limit and the FMC could improve."
"The content filtering on an application level is not as good as other solutions such as Palo Alto."
"An Azure firewall is not a real firewall."
"For large organizations, a third-party firewall would be an added advantage, because it would have more advanced features, things that are not in Azure Firewall."
"It has fewer features than you can get from other firewalls, like anti-spam and anti-phishing. Those kinds of things are not included. It only includes IDS and IDB."
"You have to have a defined IP range within your network to associate it with your network. The problem is you have to plan ahead of time if you expect to use the firewall in the future so that you don't have to reconfigure your subnets or that specific IP range. Other than that, I don't any issues. I use it for basic configuration for a single application, so I really don't try to leverage it for multiple applications where I might find some complexity or challenges."
"Azure Firewall should have a free trial version for new users so that they can evaluate it before deploying it."
"The development area and QA area could be improved. With those improvements, we can improve projects and take even less time to implement them."
"The reporting, logging, and monitoring features, as well as the flexibility of the policies, need to be improved."
"It needs a lot of improvement, especially on intruder detection. They are working hard on that."
"There aren't really any negative aspects to discuss."
"The solution could be more evenly structured."
"The solution could have licensing fees reduced in the future."
"The support is the main thing that needs to be improved."
"FortiGate support could do some improvements on their IPv6 configuration. Right now it's still in the very early stage for utilizing in an enterprise level network environment."
"It can be a little bit more user-friendly in terms of policy definition and implementation. It seems a little bit complicated, and it could be simplified."
"The customization could be improved. Cisco, for example, is much better at this. They need to work to be at least as good as they are."
"The solution could be more secure and stable."
Azure Firewall is ranked 14th in Firewalls with 17 reviews while Fortinet FortiGate is ranked 1st in Firewalls with 141 reviews. Azure Firewall is rated 7.0, while Fortinet FortiGate is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Azure Firewall writes "Good value for your money, good URL filtering, supports intrusion prevention, and is stable". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Fortinet FortiGate writes "A reliable and consistent solution that allows us to manage the entire network from one interface and supports on-premises and cloud deployments". Azure Firewall is most compared with Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Fortinet FortiGate-VM, Palo Alto Networks VM-Series, Check Point NGFW and Sophos XG, whereas Fortinet FortiGate is most compared with pfSense, Sophos XG, Check Point NGFW, Meraki MX and WatchGuard Firebox. See our Azure Firewall vs. Fortinet FortiGate report.
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