Fortinet FortiADC vs Fortinet FortiDDoS comparison

The compared Fortinet FortiADC and Fortinet FortiDDoS solutions aren't in the same category. Fortinet FortiADC is ranked #7 in ADC , with an average rating of 8.0, and holds a 10.3% mindshare in the category. Fortinet FortiDDoS is ranked #13 in DDOS , with an average rating of 8.0, and holds a 2.9% mindshare. Additionally, 86% of Fortinet FortiADC users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 90% of Fortinet FortiDDoS users who would recommend it.

Fortinet FortiADC

Read 24 Fortinet FortiADC reviews

3,555 Views
2,968 Comparison Views

86% willing to recommend

Fortinet FortiDDoS

Read 15 Fortinet FortiDDoS reviews

1,109 Views
923 Comparison Views

90% willing to recommend

Fortinet FortiADC

Fortinet FortiDDoS

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Fortinet FortiADC and Fortinet FortiDDoS based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about NetScaler, F5, HAProxy and others in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC).

To learn more, read our detailed Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

April 2025

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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 FortiADC

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) (7th)

Fortinet FortiDDoS

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (13th)

Mindshare comparison

Fortinet FortiADC and Fortinet FortiDDoS aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Fortinet FortiADC is designed for Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) and holds a mindshare of 10.3%, up 7.8% compared to last year.
Fortinet FortiDDoS, on the other hand, focuses on Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection, holds 2.9% mindshare, down 3.0% since last year.

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection

Featured Reviews

Saeid Khanipour Ghobani

IT Manager at Technology Evaluation Center

High-level load balancing and routing protocols but scalability is limited to 200 gigabits

The initial setup and configuration are very easy because the solution includes a simple OS. Initial configuration takes about ten minutes for simple environments. It is important to assess the environment and decide what services, servers, and web applications are needed. The solution can be configured in router mode or one-arm mode which uses source NAT as destination NAT to send traffic to the firewall. One-arm mode is more complex and requires discussions with our engineers. For example, you have a website with Node.js for your programming language, Amazon S3 for your CDN, NGINX for your web server, and you use both React and reCAPTCHA. Our team meets with your developer to learn your website and OS through a multi-step process and then we configure the solution to protect everything.

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Yazan Omar

Systems Engineer at aic²

An easy-to-use tool with great GUI

The product's initial setup phase was really easy. There is a lot of time involved in the testing phase and other processes related to the area of deployment, so it may take up to two weeks to deploy the solution. The solution is deployed on an on-premises model. One person is enough to take care of the deployment phase of the product. The person involved in the deployment phase needs to better understand topologies when dealing with Fortinet.

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

"I use load balancing technology like Round Robin or low weight to maintain session-based connections. This ensures that clients can connect to their applications without interruption."

"The solution enhances performance by efficiently balancing the load across multiple backend servers."

"The user interface is very easy and integrates with Sandbox easily."

"We can do patches offline without causing customers outages. The web application firewall features, especially those related to the OWASP Top Ten, provide automated protections. This allows more flexibility in patching the backend applications. Additionally, it offers visibility into the requests being made to the applications, and you can't protect what you can't see."

"The most valuable feature is its simplicity."

"Because ADC is the intermediary between the servers and the end-user application, it gives thorough information about the traffic, what the problem is."

"It's a good product because it supports all the features that ADC solutions in the market can support, like F5 solutions, for example, such as the LTM of F5."

"FortiADC provides load-balancing capabilities needed for integration with other Fortinet platforms."

More Fortinet FortiADC pros

"The solution already has security profiles and it can protect from DDoS attacks and other kinds of attacks."

"This solution can protect Layer 3, Layer 4 and Layer 7 attacks of applications for us."

"I find the interface easy to use."

"The equipment works very well, and I have not encountered any issues with it."

"The most valuable feature is the cloud DDoS scrubbing capability."

"Among its key features: Detects and mitigates DDoS attacks at L3 to L7; negligible to zero false-positives; Generates and sends reports without the need for an expensive third-party solution."

"It allows me to see all the traffic on my network."

"The product's initial setup phase was really easy."

More Fortinet FortiDDoS pros

Cons

"I had a terrible experience with Fortinet support. I only used support once when I bought the solution. I got no response for two days. However, I believe that it's no longer the case. Fortinet solutions have problems when they're launched. For example, we had issues with Fortinet's authenticator when it came out. We also had trouble with FortiNAC in the beginning."

"One of the product's areas of improvement includes reducing the number of components requiring additional licenses, such as antivirus and IDS, which are already covered by our firewall."

"If I need design help, they do not assist; they say it is a design issue they cannot support, and I must approach the system integrator."

"Because it is so generic, the documentation requires special attention. A person who has not worked on Fortinet FortiADC or a similar product will struggle to understand what the document is trying to say. The documentation could be more specific, and more detailed."

"The solution’s pricing could be improved."

"I will queue all the details clearly on the ticket, including the diagram, log files, and everything else. Once a case is assigned, they ask the same questions again without checking the submitted details."

"The product's stability for VMs could be better."

"I think it would be helpful if Fortinet put more video examples on their cookbook site."

More Fortinet FortiADC cons

"The solution can be a little more user-friendly and it can be more affordable."

"The main improvement would be to change the firewall model, however, currently, everything is fixed and working well."

"The tool needs to focus more on the area of application traffic management, where it currently has some shortcomings."

"The primary area for improvement is the on-premises capacity limit, currently fixed at 10 GB."

"There aren't really any aspects of the solution we are unhappy with. It's been a positive experience overall."

"The product’s pricing needs improvement."

"Alerts and reporting features must be improved."

"I find that there have been issues in the past year with the solution hanging. It freezes often."

More Fortinet FortiDDoS cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Our basic license excludes features such as antivirus and IDS. Due to license limitations, some functionalities are not configured."

"The solution's pricing is an issue and should be improved."

"I rate Fortinet FortiADC's pricing one out of ten. It is fixed."

"The product has affordable pricing."

"The solution could be more cost-effective."

"The product has average pricing. I rate its pricing a five out of ten."

"I believe the price is good. It's fair. There are no extra costs."

"They offer a perpetual license."

More Fortinet FortiADC pricing and cost advice

"The product’s pricing needs improvement."

"It's quite pricey."

"The solution is reasonably priced."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

18%

Financial Services Firm

Government

Comms Service Provider

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

University

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

Is Citrix ADC (formerly Netscaler) the best ADC to use and if not why?

For ADC, any ADC can do a good job. But in case if you want to add WAF functionality to the same ADC hardware you have to look for other ADC's like F5, Imperva, Radware, Fortinet, etc.

See all answers

Do you recommend Fortinet FortiADC?

I recommend Fortinet FortiADC. My experience with Fortinet has been very positive. Our company has been using it for around five years. We mainly use FortiADC for the load balancing of application ...

See all answers

What do you like most about Fortinet FortiADC?

The user interface is very easy and integrates with Sandbox easily.

See all answers

Which is the best DDoS protection solution for a big ISP for monitoring and mitigating?

Arbor would be the best bid, apart from Arbor, Palo Alto and Fortinet have good solutions. As this is an ISP, I would prefer Arbor.

See all answers

What do you like most about Fortinet FortiDDoS?

The product's initial setup phase was really easy.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fortinet FortiDDoS?

Fortinet FortiDDoS offers lower costs compared to other solutions. The licensing costs are annually renewed.

See all answers

Comparisons

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) vs Fortinet FortiADC

Compared 27% of the time

Fortinet FortiWeb vs Fortinet FortiADC

Compared 25% of the time

NetScaler vs Fortinet FortiADC

Compared 11% of the time

Kemp LoadMaster vs Fortinet FortiADC

Compared 9% of the time

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs Fortinet FortiADC

Compared 1% of the time

More Fortinet FortiADC Competitors

Arbor DDoS vs Fortinet FortiDDoS

Compared 27% of the time

Cloudflare vs Fortinet FortiDDoS

Compared 15% of the time

Radware DDoS Protection Service vs Fortinet FortiDDoS

Compared 11% of the time

Fortinet FortiWeb vs Fortinet FortiDDoS

Compared 11% of the time

Corero vs Fortinet FortiDDoS

Compared 4% of the time

More Fortinet FortiDDoS Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Fortinet FortiADC

April 2025

Download Fortinet FortiADC product report

Buyer's Guide

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection

March 2025

Download Fortinet FortiDDoS product report

Also Known As

FortiADC Application Delivery Controller, FortiADC

Fortinet DDoS, FortiDDos

Overview

Fortinet FortiADC is a robust application delivery controller (ADC) that delivers application optimization, application security, and application availability. FortiADC is a valued offering from Fortinet, which is widely recognized as a trusted supplier of dynamic security solutions worldwide. FortiADC offers dynamic security functions (AV, DDoS, and WAF) in addition to advanced application connectors for a simplified deployment and complete transparency to an organization's networks and applications. FortiADC offers three primary deployment options: physical machine, virtual machine, (VM) and cloud solution options.

Fortinet FortiADC Benefits

FortiADC security protocol: FortiADC integrates with FortiSandbox to improve the overall antivirus security protections where every file is scanned for known and unknown malicious risks. If a file is identified as malicious or problematic, it will be blocked in the future.
SSL protocol: FortiADC securely uses the most up-to-date cryptography to provide exceptional encryption and decryption using a hardware-based SSL ASIC. FortiADC offers complete transparency to inspect all traffic for threats, improves server response time, and reduces backend server load, SSL inspection and SSL offloading. FortiADC integrates seamlessly with Gemalto’s SafeNet Hardware Security Module (HSM).
FortiADC connectors: FortiADC Fabric Connectors offer open API-based integration and coordination with numerous software-defined networks (SDNs), third-party partners, and cloud management providers. Fortinet Fabric Connectors provide deep open and turnkey integration with recognized third-party vendors such as AWS, K8s, OCI, and SAP, in multi-vendor solutions, improving scalability, simplified management, and automation.
Business stability: FortiADC load balancing for on-premise global server load balancing (GSBL) and in the cloud (FortiGSBL Cloud) will ensure users can maintain a reliable and available network by improving the ability of scaling applications throughout numerous data centers to reduce application response times and enhance disaster recovery. Users are able to define protocols based on network latency concerns, overall data performance, and site availability.

Fortinet FortiADC Features

Application availability
- 4-7 application load balancing: DNS, HTTPS, RTMP, RADIUS, MySQL and more
- External fabric connectors: Splunk Integration, AWS/OCI Connector, Kubernetes Service.
- Security fabric connectors: FortiSIEM, Fortigate BanIP Integration, FortiAnalyzer, and more.
- Deployment modes: High availability (AA/AP Failover), Router mode, transparent mode (switch), one-arm mode (proxy with X-forwarded for support.
Web application firewall (WAF)
- Security services: Captcha support, cookie support, HTTP header security, XML/SOAP/JSON validation, CSRF protection, API gateway, and more.
- Application security: Web attack signature, bot detection, web vulnerability scanner, OWASP Top-10 Wizard, API protection and more.

Application enhancement
- HTTP and TCP improvement: TCP buffering, HTTP compressions/decompression, HTTP caching (dynamic and static objects), Bandwidth monitoring using quality of service (QoS), TCP buffering, and more.
- Authentication offloading: Two-factor authentication (Fortitoken/Fortitoken Cloud and Google Authentication), NTLM, AUTH2.0, SAML 2.0 (SP and Idp) RADIUS, LDAP, Kerbos, and local.
- Networking: Integration with Ansible, Cisco ACI, OpenStack and Nutanix, NVGRE and VXLAN support, VLAN and port trunking support, IPv6 Support (SLB, firewall, routing and interfaces), Dynamic NAT, Hide NAT, Static NAT for added scalability and flexibility.
- Management: Syslog support, SNMP using private MIBs with threshold-based traps. REST APIs, VDOMS, data analytics, real-time monitoring graphs, role-based monitoring, intuitive reporting, FortiView integration, and more.

Fortinet

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are ever-evolving and use a variety of technologies. To successfully combat these attacks, you need a dynamic, multi-layered security solution. FortiDDoS protects from both known and zero day attacks with very low latency. It’s easy to deploy and manage, and includes comprehensive reporting and analysis tools.

Fortinet

Sample Customers

Black Gold Regional Schools, Amadeus Hospitality, Jefferson County, Chunghwa Telecom, City of Boroondara, Dimension Data

Buyer's Guide

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

April 2025

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