We performed a comparison between Azure Firewall and Fortinet Fortigate VM based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Based on the parameters we compared, Azure Firewall seems to be the more favorable choice. It is priced more fairly than Fortinet Fortigate VM; it includes more features; its survive and support ratings were much better than Fortinet’s; and PeerSpot users found Azure Firewall to have a greater ROI.
"Good performance, stability, and virtual domain ability."
"The security on offer is very good."
"Fortinet FortiGate is user-friendly and affordable."
"It increases security posture and is helpful for firewall reporting, intrusion protection, web filtering, and SD-WAN implementation."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiGate are remote access, web filtering, and IPS."
"Fortinet FortiGate is easy to use. Anyone can easily maintain it."
"The security features that they have are quite good. On top of that, their licensing model is quite nice where they don't charge you anything for the SD-WAN functionality for the firewall."
"I like Fortinet's cloud management. It allows me to manage all my devices in different branches for three cloud accounts. Even though I use on-prem devices, I can manage everything on the cloud."
"It is easy for me to protect certain ports or even the IP addresses, as well as do whitelisting, blacklisting, and the FQDN when we want virtual machines connected and to protect certain websites."
"The firewall policy control, URL content control, and antivirus are all the most valuable aspects. Threat prevention is as well quite good."
"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."
"It provided ease of maintenance. If a new firewall was needed, we only had to run the pipelines for this. So, the maintenance was very easy."
"It's auto-scalable, which is a great feature."
"The most valuable feature is threat intelligence. It is based on filtering and can identify multiple threats."
"In terms of the reporting, it's beautiful. It integrates with Azure monitoring and with Azure policies. That piece is a big help. You can set governing policies and you can use the application firewall, as well as the Azure Firewall, to enforce those policies."
"We use the solution for application and server deployment."
"FortiGate integrates well."
"The most valuable feature is that its IPsec works perfectly."
"The best part about FortiGate-VM is its strong security."
"FortiGate-VM has many valuable features: it's easy to use, it's intuitive, it's got very good traffic inspection features, it's got comprehensive filtering categories, and it has an extensive threat database, using FortiGuard."
"The interface is decent."
"Fortinet FortiGate-VM is easy to use."
"The configuration, graphical interface and command line are easy to use."
"The solution can scale well."
"Fortinet FortiGate could improve by having more capabilities for troubleshooting VPN connections. For example, I do get some feedback about the current status, but I could use some history and logging of important events. The information is logged in our Syslog server, but I could use that information from the device. If they could provide a GUI to have some more insight on what's going with my VPN would be useful."
"I'm not sure if it's something that they already have or are developing something, however, we need some dedicated features for container security."
"The solution is very expensive."
"There are some complex administration tasks in their administration portal. That needs to be improved."
"Fortigate's hardware capacities could be improved."
"When we cluster the two Fortinet FortiGate boxes together we have some issues."
"There are mainly two areas of improvement in Fortinet FortiGate— the licensing cost and the timing of upgrading licenses for boxes."
"The stability of Fortinet FortiGate could improve."
"It would be much easier if the on-premises, firewall rules, had some kind of export-import possibility in place, which is not the case right now."
"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."
"An Azure firewall is not a real firewall."
"There should be better monitoring and logging. Currently, it is put in Sentinel. It should be more seamless and from the interface."
"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."
"Azure Firewall has limited visibility for IDPS, no TLS inspection, no app ID, no user ID, no content ID, no device ID. There is no antivirus or anti-spyware. Azure Firewall doesn't scan traffic for malware unless it triggers an IDPS signature. There is no sandbox or machine learning functionality, meaning we are not protected from Zero-day threats. There is no DNS security and limited web categories."
"Azure Firewall definitely needs a broader feature base. It should be able to go all the way up to layer 7 when looking at applications and things like that."
"Azure Firewall should have a free trial version for new users so that they can evaluate it before deploying it."
"Price-wise, it could be slightly better, however, if you compared it to other makes and models of equal category, it is generally cheaper."
"The pricing is expensive."
"The product has issues with integration. I would like to see better integration in future releases of the product."
"Support could be improved a little."
"New versions are complicated with a big configuration."
"The solution could use very well-defined support for resellers."
"FortiGate-VM could be improved by making it cloud-based. I'd like it to be a cloud-based management solution instead of just a dedicated management orchestration tool."
"Areas for improvement would be application control and web filtering."
Azure Firewall is ranked 15th in Firewalls with 14 reviews while Fortinet FortiGate-VM is ranked 8th in Firewalls with 38 reviews. Azure Firewall is rated 7.0, while Fortinet FortiGate-VM is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Azure Firewall writes "Scalability and centralized filtering reduce the management overhead, but there should be a consistent service speed worldwide". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Fortinet FortiGate-VM writes "Flexible with good cloud management and a straightforward user interface". Azure Firewall is most compared with Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Palo Alto Networks VM-Series, Check Point NGFW, Netgate pfSense and Meraki MX, whereas Fortinet FortiGate-VM is most compared with Palo Alto Networks VM-Series, OPNsense, Netgate pfSense, Fortinet FortiOS and Cisco Secure Firewall. See our Azure Firewall vs. Fortinet FortiGate-VM report.
See our list of best Firewalls vendors.
We monitor all Firewalls reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.