Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN vs FatPipe SD-WAN comparison

Cisco and FatPipe Networks are both solutions in the Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) Solutions category. Cisco is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.0, while FatPipe Networks is ranked #23. Cisco holds a 10.1% mindshare in SDW, compared to FatPipe Networks’s 1.2% mindshare. Additionally, 91% of Cisco users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of FatPipe Networks users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN and FatPipe SD-WAN based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Fortinet, Cisco, Check Point Software Technologies and others in Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) Solutions.

To learn more, read our detailed Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) Solutions Report (Updated: March 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) Solutions

March 2026

Download the complete report

Helped 884,873 peers since 2012

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

Fortinet FortiGate

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) Solutions category, the mindshare of Fortinet FortiGate is 12.3%, down from 20.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is 10.1%, down from 15.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of FatPipe SD-WAN is 1.2%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) Solutions Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Fortinet FortiGate	12.3%
Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN	10.1%
FatPipe SD-WAN	1.2%
Other	76.4%

Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) Solutions

Featured Reviews

Vasu Gala

Manager, Information Technology Operation/Presales at TechMonarch

A stable solution with an intuitive interface and quick customer service

I have been working with Fortinet FortiGate, WatchGuard, Sophos, and SonicWall. I'm not as comfortable with SonicWall because of their UI and limitations. I prefer Fortinet above all other options. When it comes to configuration, I am confident in my ability to handle various tasks, including creating policies such as firewall rules, web policies, and application policies. Additionally, I can configure VPNs and implement load balancing, among other tasks. Overall, I feel much more comfortable working with Fortinet. Fortinet has made significant improvements by integrating AI with firewalls for threat analysis and prevention. In the past 2-3 years, they have launched FortiSASE and SIEM, and they also provide SOC services. Both Palo Alto and Fortinet FortiGate are excellent. While Fortinet FortiGate comes at higher prices, the functionality and support justify the cost. They promptly resolve firmware issues and inform all support providers about configuration changes.

Read full review

Danish Nazir

Network Manager at HPCL

Faced complex visibility and policy challenges but have improved basic traffic routing control

I have found some other solutions more insightful and user-friendly as compared to Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN, but the basic SD-WAN functionality is good enough. I am using it only because it was done as a pilot project, specifically for my 60 to 70 sites. For the majority of the sites, I am using Fortinet's Secure SD-WAN solution and I found that more viable and more in alignment with my requirements. For example, there is not any Internet Service Database available in Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN intrinsically. If I want to write a policy based on applications, I am not able to write it, at least in Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Viptela deployment that we have done, and that is fairly easy to do in Fortinet. The second issue is the logging capability. I think the visibility that Fortinet Secure SD-WAN has is not even comparable. Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN does not provide that sort of insight or control as far as traffic steering is concerned. With respect to the SLAs, I barely know which sort of SLAs are violated in Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN, so I do not have clear visibility on where the traffic is moving from at my spoke or hub locations. I believe Fortinet gives me a very clear picture of where the traffic is going. Overall visibility, whether it is data traffic or logs, is much better in Fortinet compared to Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN. The complexity of Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Viptela is noticeable and quite complicated to configure. If something breaks, you have to involve TAC and others to fix it. On the contrary, you can work with underlays. Even if your IPsec overlay tunnel is down, it does not impact your production. Thus, we find Fortinet's solution significantly better than Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN solution. I have used Application-aware Routing in Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN. However, I found it to be very complicated, especially regarding policy writing. For my breakout of VC traffic, we had to write a bunch of IP addresses for Zoom, Webex, and others. Presently, it can only identify Webex as an application, and I highly doubt whether there is any application identification for Zoom and other platforms, as we were not able to find it during our implementation. It is done through static whitelisting of the IPs, which is not a scalable solution since IPs can change at any time. Overall, the application-aware routing policies are not as flexible and scalable as the Internet Service Database feature of Fortinet provides. The struggles encompass policy writing, logging capabilities, traffic visibility, and complex configuration. There is also the issue of load balancing. We have faced considerable challenges with traffic load balancing between the links. Although the SLA targets are configurable, understanding how traffic flows is challenging, making troubleshooting exceedingly difficult. Overall, I find it a quite complicated solution with not that much operational usability.

Read full review

Akshay Kharkar

Network Engineer at Manschaft IT Pvt Ltd

Beneficial technology, reliable, and simple deployment

Our client has a data center and all the applications servers and servers are in their data center. We design a solution, for all their branches. If they wanted to access the internet or the applications, they route traffic to their data center and then can access these applications with FatPipe…

Read full review

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The stability of the solution is excellent, as it is with other Fortinet products."

"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiGate that I found are its next-generation firewall capabilities with stateful inspection and antivirus, along with features such as a reverse proxy that are missed by some other firewall products such as Palo Alto or Check Point."

"Their web interface to manage it is excellent, even compared with other providers."

"The setup is easy."

"Using this product makes the VPN seamless and almost invisible to me in the sense that I don't have to think about it."

"The initial setup is very straightforward and easy, with wizards helping to configure the device efficiently."

"The value is the capability of having multiple services with one unique license, not having the limitation per user licensing schema, like other vendors."

"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiGate are it is one of the most mature firewalls in the UTM bundle."

More Fortinet FortiGate pros

"The product is stable."

"Load balancing is a feature that allows us to take the best of our links and distribute the load intelligently, always with an eye on the end-customer experience."

"Cisco SD-WAN is a highly stable solution."

"It has a very good GUI."

"The best feature of this technology that is available to us is the ability to do better load-balancing."

"Encryption, which is native to the solution, is a valuable feature. Also, central management, onboarding of devices, QS, and routing applications are all okay."

"The solution's application control and application traffic steering tool are its most valuable aspects in terms of how we utilize the product."

"Initial setup is easy."

More Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN pros

"The most valuable feature of FatPipe SD-WAN is it's based on SD-WAN technology."

Cons

"We had some issues in the beginning while setting it up, but after doing the firmware update, it is working fine."

"Fortinet FortiGate can improve the integration with Active Directory. Additionally, I would like to have a Cloud Controller, such as they do in the Cisco Meraki solution."

"I would like some automated custom reporting."

"Vulnerability scanning could be improved."

"The built-in logging and reporting is limited without FortiAnalyzer."

"They should do a better job in testing when they put out a new release because when a new software version is released, it is not always stable or does not always have all the previous features working correctly."

"We also have FortiAnalyzer deployed here, so we want to enable the soft functionality of FortiGate and built-in compression for a firewall VPN use case. We want the ability to deploy a gateway for HTTPS enabled on this firewall. It is currently only for use in our headquarters."

"The room for improvement is about the global delivery time period. Usually I need to wait for almost one month to deliver it overseas. So if you can shorten the deliver time it'd be great."

More Fortinet FortiGate cons

"The platform needs to be updated to be more stable and simple."

"The user interface needs improvement. Users should be able to find various features faster without much tweaking."

"We don't have any issues with this solution other than the price."

"I would like to see features related to security compliance, including a view of compliance with standards. With this, I should be able to do an audit of my network with SDWAN."

"The product's application delivery feature needs improvement."

"The main area for improvement in Cisco SD-WAN is the lack of documentation, which often lags behind the software releases."

"We recently found some bugs."

"The solution could be a bit cheaper."

More Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN cons

"FatPipe SD-WAN can improve the price to scale the solution."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price depends on the size of the company. From the beginning, you just want to know the internet bandwidths, speed, and the number of users to be able to offer the right product and model. They have a lot of products in FortiGate according to the size of the company, like 200D and 300D."

"The beauty is the price performance ratio is great with FortiGate. It provides all the features we needed and the price is comparable with others' firewalls. The price is quite competitive with the firewalls with similar features."

"Fortinet FortiGate is cost-efficient. Palo Alto is expensive, but Fortinet FortiGate is not."

"The solution is offered as an annual license."

"I would rate pricing to be about four or five out of ten, it is reasonable."

"It scales well if you know what to buy from a physical box standpoint. They seem to offer something for every level."

"Its price is good."

"It is somewhat expensive compared to other solutions such as Sophos."

More Fortinet FortiGate pricing and cost advice

"The initial cost is quite significant, but the investment is worthwhile."

"The pricing for Cisco SD-WAN is more expensive than other brands or solutions, such as Fortinet and Palo Alto Networks, so it's one out of ten."

"Cisco is more expensive than some competing products."

"We can only buy three-year licenses, not monthly. The cost seems high for us, especially since we're in Vietnam, which isn't a rich country. But we still like the product because it is good."

"It's costly. The cost is high compared to competitors."

"The pricing of this solution is very expensive."

"You can get subscriptions for three or five years."

"In the Russian market where we operate, this solution is expensive."

More Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN pricing and cost advice

Information not available

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) Solutions solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

884,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

11%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

11%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

Computer Software Company

18%

Media Company

16%

Wholesaler/Distributor

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	360
Midsize Enterprise	135
Large Enterprise	190

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	44
Midsize Enterprise	15
Large Enterprise	44

No data available

Questions from the Community

Which is the better NGFW: Fortinet Fortigate or Cisco Firepower?

When you compare these firewalls you can identify them with different features, advantages, practices and usage a...

See all answers

What is the biggest difference between Sophos XG and FortiGate?

From my experience regarding both the Sophos and FortiGate firewalls, I personally would rather use FortiGate. I know...

See all answers

What are the biggest technical differences between Sophos UTM and Fortinet FortiGate?

As a solution, Sophos UTM offers a lot of functionality, it scales well, and the stability and performance are quite ...

See all answers

What do you like most about Cisco SD-WAN?

When considering the most valuable features of Cisco SD-WAN, the decoupling of self-monitoring stands out significant...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco SD-WAN?

The pricing of Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is rated between eight and nine out of ten, where ten is the most expensive.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Cisco SD-WAN?

I have found some other solutions more insightful and user-friendly as compared to Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN, but the bas...

See all answers

Ask a question

Earn 20 points

Comparisons

Sophos Firewall vs Fortinet FortiGate

Compared 19% of the time

Cisco Secure Firewall vs Fortinet FortiGate

Compared 13% of the time

Netgate pfSense vs Fortinet FortiGate

Compared 4% of the time

Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls vs Fortinet FortiGate

Compared 4% of the time

OPNsense vs Fortinet FortiGate

Compared 3% of the time

More Fortinet FortiGate Competitors

Prisma SD-WAN vs Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN

Compared 12% of the time

VMware VeloCloud SD-WAN vs Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN

Compared 6% of the time

Aruba EdgeConnect SD-WAN Platform vs Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN

Compared 5% of the time

Cato SASE Cloud Platform vs Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN

Compared 5% of the time

Meraki SD-WAN vs Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN

Compared 4% of the time

More Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Competitors

VMware VeloCloud SD-WAN vs FatPipe SD-WAN

Compared 19% of the time

Forcepoint Next Generation Firewall vs FatPipe SD-WAN

Compared 17% of the time

Aruba EdgeConnect SD-WAN Platform vs FatPipe SD-WAN

Compared 9% of the time

Peplink SpeedFusion vs FatPipe SD-WAN

Compared 7% of the time

More FatPipe SD-WAN Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Fortinet FortiGate

March 2026

Download Fortinet FortiGate product report

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN

March 2026

Download Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN product report

Buyer's Guide

Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) Solutions

March 2026

Download FatPipe SD-WAN product report

Also Known As

Fortinet FortiGate Next-Generation Firewall

Cisco SD-WAN

FatPipe Symphony, Symphony, FatPipe Symphony SD-WAN, Symphony SD-WAN

Overview

Fortinet FortiGate is a versatile network security tool offering features like VPN, firewall, web filtering, intrusion prevention, and scalability. It is known for its performance and integration with other Fortinet products, making it a preferred choice for robust cybersecurity.

Fortinet FortiGate stands out as a comprehensive cybersecurity solution with strong performance and ease of configuration. It delivers unified threat management, integrating features such as dynamic routing, SD-WAN support, and centralized management. Despite its strengths, improvements in the web interface's stability, pricing structures, and reporting capabilities are needed. Users seek better integration with third-party tools and automation advancements to enhance the experience further. These enhancements, alongside improvements in bandwidth management and the reduction of licensing costs, are points of interest for users looking to capitalize on FortiGate's extensive capabilities.

What are Fortinet FortiGate's key features?

VPN: Ensures secure remote connections.
Firewall: Protects against unauthorized access.
Web Filtering: Blocks malicious sites and content.
Application Control: Manages and controls applications.
Intrusion Prevention: Detects and prevents vulnerabilities.
SSL Inspection: Enhances security by inspecting encrypted traffic.

What benefits should be considered when evaluating Fortinet FortiGate?

Affordability: Offers cost-effective security solutions.
Reliability: Known for consistent and stable performance.
Integration: Seamlessly integrates with other Fortinet products.
Comprehensive Protection: Provides broad threat protection capabilities.

Fortinet FortiGate is widely implemented across industries as a primary firewall system for securing internet gateways and safeguarding data centers. It supports businesses in achieving SD-WAN integration and enhances cybersecurity by providing essential features like antivirus, web filtering, and application control. Enterprises utilize FortiGate for securing remote connections and ensuring compliance with security standards, making it adaptable for different network sizes and industries.

Fortinet

Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN offers centralized management and integrates seamlessly with existing Cisco ecosystems. It simplifies deployment with zero-touch provisioning, delivering robust security and optimized application routing.

Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN provides essential capabilities for organizations seeking secure remote connectivity and cost reduction, notably through its support of hybrid environments. While pricing and complexity present challenges, its advanced application control and cloud compatibility make it a valuable asset for connecting branches and data centers. Users benefit from enhanced security, network assurance, and simplified management, driving operational efficiency.

What are the key features of Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN?

Centralized Management: Streamlines network operations through a single interface.
Zero-Touch Provisioning: Simplifies deployment, reducing manual setup efforts.
Application-Aware Routing: Enhances performance by prioritizing critical applications.
Robust Security: Integrates strong security measures for data protection.
Hybrid Environment Support: Facilitates connectivity across various environments.
Integration with Cisco Products: Ensures seamless operation within existing networks.

What benefits can users expect from Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN?

Cost Efficiency: Reduces networking expenses by optimizing resource usage.
Operational Simplicity: Streamlines processes, reducing resource strain.
Enhanced Security: Strengthens defenses with integrated security features.
Improved Connectivity: Ensures reliable communication for remote sites.
Scalability: Supports varying enterprise sizes with tailored solutions.

In banking, retail, and enterprise sectors, Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN facilitates effective network management by enhancing connectivity between branches and data centers. Its security features and zero-touch deployment are particularly valued, providing scalable solutions for locations that demand reliable, application-prioritized networking.

Cisco

Symphony is one of the FatPipe’s products which are offering Software-Defined WAN (SD-WAN) solution. This SD-WAN solution simplifies the deployment and management of connectivity at remote sites. More over enterprises deploying Symphony with Orchestrator are not only provided with the ability to centrally control their WANs but also to manage branch office configuration. The appliances can be deployed with zero-touch installation as well.

FatPipe Networks

Sample Customers

Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, IBM, Cisco, Dell, HP, Oracle, Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, Vodafone, Orange, BT Group, Telstra, Deutsche Telekom, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, CenturyLink, NTT Communications, Tata Communications, SoftBank, China Mobile, Singtel, Telus, Rogers Communications, Bell Canada, Telkom Indonesia, Telkom South Africa, Telmex, Telia Company, Telkom Kenya

Doyle Research, Ashton Metzler & Associates

Information Not Available

Buyer's Guide

Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) Solutions

March 2026

Download Free Report

Find out what your peers are saying about Fortinet, Cisco, Check Point Software Technologies and others in Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) Solutions. Updated: March 2026.

DOWNLOAD NOW

884,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our list of best Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) Solutions vendors and best WAN Edge vendors.

We monitor all Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) Solutions 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.