Fortinet FortiGate-VM vs Menlo Secure comparison

Fortinet and Menlo Security are both solutions in the Firewalls category. Fortinet is ranked #9 with an average rating of 8.5, while Menlo Security is ranked #52. Fortinet holds a 1.9% mindshare in Firewalls, compared to Menlo Security’s 0.1% mindshare. Additionally, 98% of Fortinet users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Menlo Security users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 16, 2024

Menlo Secure and Fortinet FortiGate-VM are two significant players in the cybersecurity market. Fortinet FortiGate-VM seems to have the upper hand due to its robust set of features, indicating better overall user satisfaction despite higher pricing.

Features: Menlo Secure is praised for its straightforward deployment, effective threat isolation, and reliable web protection. Fortinet FortiGate-VM is noted for its comprehensive security features, including advanced threat protection, extensive configuration options, and superior capabilities.

Room for Improvement: Users of Menlo Secure suggest enhancing integration with various security tools, improving its reporting features, and adding more user-friendly management tools. For Fortinet FortiGate-VM, feedback points to a need for more intuitive management tools, better documentation, and simplified initial configuration.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Menlo Secure is recognized for its easy and quick deployment, minimal complexity, and effective customer support. Fortinet FortiGate-VM, although recognized for its powerful features, has a steeper learning curve and requires more substantial initial configuration, though its customer service is well-regarded.

Pricing and ROI: Menlo Secure is viewed as cost-effective with reasonable setup costs and decent return on investment. Fortinet FortiGate-VM, while having higher initial costs, is considered worth the investment due to its extensive features and long-term benefits.

To learn more, read our detailed Fortinet FortiGate-VM vs. Menlo Secure Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Fortinet FortiGate-VM vs. Menlo Secure

April 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 850,236 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 May 2025, in the Firewalls category, the mindshare of Fortinet FortiGate is 21.4%, up from 17.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Fortinet FortiGate-VM is 1.9%, up from 1.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Menlo Secure is 0.1%, up from 0.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Firewalls

Featured Reviews

EhabAli

Sr. Cybersecurity Solutions Architect at BMB

Efficient, user-friendly, and affordable

In the past, NSS Labs was utilized to test files and verify the numbers and datasheets. It would be beneficial to have an organization or testing lab that can verify the numbers in our datasheets since changes are frequently made, which can be inconvenient for review. For instance, when comparing different competitors such as Forcepoint, Palo Alto, and Check Point, the throughput or numbers in the datasheet may be lower than the actual numbers. Conversely, Fortinet typically reports very high numbers, but they cannot be replicated in the real world. Therefore, it would be advantageous for them to partner with a neutral testing organization such as NSS Labs to validate these numbers, thus providing more credibility and comfort to everyone regarding the accuracy of the datasheets. For the migration, everyone has a firewall in use and I am selling Fortinet. Typically, I am replacing another firewall. Previously, there was a tool available to convert configurations from one firewall, such as Palo Alto, to Fortinet, but this tool is no longer free. If it could be made free again, it would be very beneficial. This tool shows a lot of promise and is very good. Making it free would help many companies deliver their products in a more efficient and integrated way. It would also be more valuable to include the tool with the firewall package or license instead of having to pay extra for it. Paying extra puts more pressure on small companies to deliver the firewall and complete the configuration, especially if they have hundreds or thousands of policies. It's very painful to move through these policies line by line. The stability has room for improvement. When it comes to Secure SD-WAN, everything is fine. They are going the right way. SD-WAN is very promising. They can provide the SD-WAN solution separately, but they will not take this approach because even the smallest firewall can support the features, so there is no need to have a separate service or appliance. They are following the right steps, and there is nothing to be improved. Feature-wise, I'm really satisfied with the new release, and the features they have added. For now, it's fine.

Read full review

Pietro Di Blasi

Pre-Sales Analyst at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees

Organize networks efficiently while benefiting from strong reliability and support

The main use is for clients who are migrating to the cloud. We started this journey during the pandemic, and the main case is with clients who are moving to either a private or a public cloud The solution allows us to organize our networks and access within one vendor, using an integrated…

Read full review

Olivier DALOY

Group Information Systems Security Director - CISO at Faurecia

Secures users wherever they are and enable us to inspect SSL traffic, but we encountered too many issues

The solution should have no impact but it does have a bit of impact on end-users. For example, we encountered some issues in the downloads that took longer than they did without using Menlo. That is clearly not transparent for users. We expected not to have any latency when downloading anything from the internet with Menlo compared to without Menlo. We are now transitioning to another solution. The main reason for that is that managing all of the exceptions and troubleshooting all of the issues our users have had connecting to the internet has become too significant in terms of workload, compared to what we hope we will have with another solution. In other words, we hope to get the same level of protection, while reducing the number of visible bugs, issues, latencies, impacts on performance, et cetera, that we have today with Menlo. We already solved most of them, but we still have too many such instances of issues with Menlo, even though it is protecting us for sure. The weak point of the solution is that it has consumed far too much of my team's time, taking them away from operations and projects and design. It took far too much time to implement it and get rid of all of the live issues that we encountered when our users started using the solution. The good point is that I'm sure it is protecting us and it's probably protecting us more than any other solution, which is something I appreciate a lot as a CISO. But on the other hand, the number of issues reported by the users, and the amount of time that has been necessary for either my team or the infrastructure team to spend diagnosing, troubleshooting, and fixing the issues that we had with the solution was too much. And that doesn't include the need to still use our previous solution, Blue Coat, that we have kept active so that whatever is not compatible or doesn't work with Menlo, can be handled by that other solution. It is far too demanding in terms of effort and workload and even cost, at the end of the day. That is why we decided to transition to another solution. If we had known in the beginning that we would not be able to get rid of Blue Coat, we probably would not have chosen Menlo because we were planning to replace Blue Coat with something that was at least able to do the same and more. We discovered that it was able to do more but it was not able to replace it, which is an issue. It is not only a matter of cost but is also a matter of not being able to reduce the number of partners that you have to deal with. In addition, they could enhance the ability to troubleshoot. Whenever a connection going through Menlo fails for any reason, being able to troubleshoot what the configuration of Menlo should be to allow it through would help, as would knowing what level of additional risk we would be taking with that configuration.

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 have found Fortinet FortiGate to be scalable."

"The most valuable features are the possibility of having one fabric for switching on security."

"The security on offer is very good."

"The scalability of Fortinet FortiGate is good."

"Anti-Spam web content filterinG."

"The main reason why I purchased the particular unit was that it had good reviews and what other people were saying as far as its completeness and its leading capabilities in terms of endpoint security was very good."

"It enables our organization to become more productive. Also, it protects our NEtWare from viruses and malware."

"The feature I like most is the SD-WAN. It allows you to manage more than one ISP at the same time. And there is a high-availability mode, so if one of your ISPs is down, you still have a backup."

More Fortinet FortiGate pros

"The most valuable features are the SD-WAN and the web filtering applications control."

"The standard features, including the filtering, are quite good. All the basic features are pretty useful for us."

"We work in the archiving domain where a secure environment is very important. We have some special requirements regarding the security of infrastructure."

"The most valuable features are the IPS and Antivirus."

"The VM it's very quick for deployment. If we need to have a POC for a customer, if we don't have any hardware physically at our premises, at our store, in our office, we can download the VM from Fortinet and install all the VM to their environment in order to run it. If we have a customer that says "let's start tomorrow" we are able to do that in a way that's not possible with a hardware version."

"The thing that I like the most is that they're very willing to work with us to resolve issues that they haven't taken care of before in their product."

"It provides an ease of management and configuration as well."

"The most valuable features of this solution are the integration within the environment, with centralized reporting."

More Fortinet FortiGate-VM pros

"For us, the primary goal is protection on the web, and that's extremely important. We're not using any of the other services at this time. The web part is key to the success of the organization. It gives us the ability to protect. It can isolate. It opens the session in an isolated format so that the code isn't running locally. It is running over in the Menlo environment, not in ours. It is not running on the local computer, whereas if you were to go to a normal website, it would run Java or something else on the local machine and potentially execute the malicious code locally. So, it does give us that level of protection."

"It has reduced security events to follow up on. While it is not 100%, there has been probably a 90% or more reduction. We were getting hit left, right, and center constantly from people browsing the Internet and hitting bad websites. It was not just bad websites that were stood up to be malicious, but good sites that were compromised."

"Accessing the internet with a proxy from anywhere is the most valuable feature. It ensures that users are only able to browse legitimate websites. If they happen to go to a legitimate website with a malicious payload, the isolation feature will take care of that."

"The fact that it is a cloud proxy solution is another feature we like. For example, if you acquire a new company, you can use it to protect that new company without the need to install anything physically on their networks."

Cons

"I would like reporting to be improved and should offer a lot more tools to monitor the products."

"The cloud management and automation capability could be improved."

"We faced difficulties with the configuration because there are many features we could optimize using Fortinet FortiGate, but our reseller didn't have a good understanding of it. So, we just use it on a basic level, not with the best practice for using FortiGate."

"The debugging and troubleshooting has room for improvement."

"The support from Fortinet FortiGate could improve. They are not easily accessible when we need them. They could improve their response time."

"Stability and technical support are the two major issues I have found with Fortinet."

"The solution could be more secure and stable."

"Regarding challenges, customers initially faced issues like internet dropping, but after firmware upgrades, everything worked well."

More Fortinet FortiGate cons

"We have experience stability issues, when the product sizing is wrong or on configuration errors."

"Fortinet devices are acknowledged as highly potent and come with a notable cost. These devices offer extensive visibility, an array of configurations, and a range of security features. However, there's room for enhancement in their routing and switching security aspects, akin to Cisco's offerings. A noteworthy aspect here is Meraki, which offers cloud controllers. If FortiGate were to introduce a similar cloud management solution, it could strongly compete with both Meraki and Cisco products. Cisco operates in two sectors: enterprise and SMB. Particularly in the SMB market, they hold sway due to their convenient cloud management features. For instance, Meraki's cameras and wireless access points can be easily controlled through their cloud management portal. If FortiGate were to provide cloud-based management solutions for SMB customers, it could cater to a significant portion of the market, considering that a substantial number of customers fall within the SMB and mid-level enterprise categories."

"The price and licensing of the solution can be better."

"In the next releases, it would be nice to see central cloud management."

"Pricing is complex."

"The GUI could be improved."

"Right now, we have two data centers that are a thousand kilometers apart. It would be nice to be able to string them together."

"The one thing that could be improved is the integration with the exchange. The gateway level controls can be enhanced a bit more. For example, it's still little here and there. You do get malicious attacks and suspicious emails like spam. It's not like Sophos where we got a lot of spam email, and yet, it's still relatively vulnerable. It can be upgraded, maybe with a fifth-generation firmware that it is ready for unknown threats."

More Fortinet FortiGate-VM cons

"Currently, I don't have a good way to see which of my rules are being used in the access control lists. I have numerous entries, but are they all still needed? A report that would show me my list of who is allowed and whether we're actually using it would be useful because I can then go clean up my list. It would be easier to manage. We would eliminate the vulnerability of unused services."

"The user monitoring could still be improved."

"We are now transitioning to another solution. The main reason for that is that managing all of the exceptions and troubleshooting all of the issues our users have had connecting to the internet has become too significant in terms of workload, compared to what we hope we will have with another solution."

"In the best of all worlds, we wouldn't have to make any exceptions. However, that is a big ask because a lot of that depends on how websites are constructed. For example, there are some very complex, application-oriented sites that we end up making exceptions for. It is really not that big an issue for us to make the exceptions. We feel like we are doing that without a huge impact on our security posture, but we do have to make some exceptions for complex sites, e.g., mostly SaaS-type sites and applications."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It has a competitive price."

"The pricing is flexible."

"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 license is yearly. We pay for the top end. It's called 360."

"The price range is quite acceptable and normal."

"The price is fine."

"Other firewalls are more expensive than Fortinet FortiGate, such as the Azure firewall."

"The price of FortiGate support is too expensive."

More Fortinet FortiGate pricing and cost advice

"We are on an annual license for this solution and it could be cheaper."

"The basic pricing in Austria is OK, but asking for special offers, e.g., NPOs, NGOs, trade up, and/or trade in, is always useful."

"There are yearly or monthly licenses which you can choose from."

"The best part of Fortinet is the license is bundled together, so it is easy to use and apply."

"The product is expensive. Users can opt for a one-year, two-year, three-year, or five-year subscription model when it comes to licensing."

"Licensing is pretty standard. It's approximately 15% of the total cost per year as a subscription cost."

"There is a need to make payments towards the licensing costs attached to the solution."

"The pricing and licensing are not as expensive as its competitors."

More Fortinet FortiGate-VM pricing and cost advice

"It is appropriately priced for what they're doing for us. Considering the protection provided, I feel their pricing is spot-on."

"The solution is expensive. It's more expensive than the solution I previously used. Compared with the other cloud-based solutions, it's very competitive."

"We save a ton of money and time. Previously, the numerous hits that we were receiving from our security tools, prior to implementing them, had to all be chased down, dispositioned, and endpoints had to be reimaged. It was just a ton of effort to do all that. That is where the savings from time and money come in."

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Firewalls solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

850,236 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

20%

Computer Software Company

14%

Comms Service Provider

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

20%

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Government

Computer Software Company

19%

Financial Services Firm

14%

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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

Features comparison between Palo Alto and Fortinet firewalls

In the best tradition of these questions, Feature-wise both are quite similar, but each has things it's better at, it...

See all answers

Which would you recommend - FortiGate VM or Azure Firewall?

Both of these solutions are excellent options that provide flexible scalability and solid security. Fortinet Fortigat...

See all answers

What do you like most about Fortinet FortiGate-VM?

An enhanced security solution for any kind of alert that we have configured.

See all answers

Ask a question

Earn 20 points

Comparisons

Sophos XG vs Fortinet FortiGate

Compared 22% of the time

Netgate pfSense vs Fortinet FortiGate

Compared 13% of the time

Cisco Secure Firewall vs Fortinet FortiGate

Compared 11% of the time

WatchGuard Firebox vs Fortinet FortiGate

Compared 5% of the time

Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls vs Fortinet FortiGate

Compared 2% of the time

More Fortinet FortiGate Competitors

Azure Firewall vs Fortinet FortiGate-VM

Compared 26% of the time

Palo Alto Networks VM-Series vs Fortinet FortiGate-VM

Compared 5% of the time

Zyxel Unified Security Gateway vs Fortinet FortiGate-VM

Compared 4% of the time

Fortinet FortiOS vs Fortinet FortiGate-VM

Compared 3% of the time

Cisco Secure Firewall vs Fortinet FortiGate-VM

Compared 3% of the time

More Fortinet FortiGate-VM Competitors

Cisco Umbrella vs Menlo Secure

Compared 22% of the time

Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks vs Menlo Secure

Compared 16% of the time

Prisma Access Browser vs Menlo Secure

Compared 14% of the time

Symantec Endpoint Security vs Menlo Secure

Compared 13% of the time

Zscaler Internet Access vs Menlo Secure

Compared 11% of the time

More Menlo Secure Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Fortinet FortiGate

May 2025

Download Fortinet FortiGate product report

Buyer's Guide

Fortinet FortiGate-VM

May 2025

Download Fortinet FortiGate-VM product report

Buyer's Guide

Menlo Secure

April 2025

Download Menlo Secure product report

Also Known As

FortiGate 60b, FortiGate 60c, FortiGate 80c, FortiGate 50b, FortiGate 200b, FortiGate 110c, FortiGate, Fortinet Firewall

FortiGate Virtual Appliance, FortiGate-VM

Menlo Security Web Security, Menlo Web Security

Overview

Fortinet FortiGate offers comprehensive network security and firewall protection across multiple locations. It effectively manages data traffic and secures environments with features like VPN, intrusion prevention, and UTM controls.

Organizations rely on Fortinet FortiGate for its robust integration with advanced security policies, ensuring significant protection for enterprises, cloud environments, and educational sectors. It facilitates network segmentation, application-level security, and authentication management, securing communication within and between locations such as branches and data centers. Its efficient SD-WAN and UTM features enable streamlined data management and enhanced threat protection capabilities. Users appreciate its centralized management, facilitating seamless operations across diverse environments.

What are the key features of Fortinet FortiGate?

VPN Capabilities: Ensure secure remote access for users and seamless site-to-site connections.
Intrusion Prevention System (IPS): Detect and prevent security threats and vulnerabilities.
Advanced Firewall: Offers robust firewalling with application control and web filtering.
SD-WAN: Optimizes application performance and enhances bandwidth management.
SSL VPN: Provides reliable and secure access for remote workers.

What benefits should users expect from Fortinet FortiGate?

High-performance Security: Delivers effective threat mitigation with high availability.
Centralized Management: Simplifies network operations with cloud-based management tools.
Detailed Analytics: Provides comprehensive insights into network activity and security threats.
Load Balancing: Ensures optimal resource distribution and traffic management.

Fortinet FortiGate is crucial in sectors like education, offering robust networks for secure data flow between campuses and facilitating remote learning. In enterprise environments, it allows efficient management of application traffic and security across multiple branches, while in the cloud, it seamlessly integrates with diverse platforms to enhance security infrastructure.

Fortinet

FortiGate Virtual Appliances allow you to mitigate blind spots by implementing critical security controls within your virtual infrastructure. They also allow you to rapidly provision security infrastructure whenever and wherever it is needed. FortiGate virtual appliances feature all of the security and networking services common to traditional hardware-based FortiGate appliances. With the addition of virtual appliances from Fortinet, you can deploy a mix of hardware and virtual appliances, operating together and managed from a common centralized management platform.

Fortinet

Menlo Security Secure Application Access

Menlo Security Secure Application Access makes zero trust access easy, giving users secure connectivity to private applications, including web and legacy applications. At the core of Secure Application Access is the Menlo Secure Cloud Browser, which fetches, secures and delivers the content for users.

In addition to providing simple-to-deploy, clientless ZTA, Secure Application Access and the Menlo Secure Cloud Browser protect applications from attacks such as session hijacking, cookie manipulation, and other tactics that employ protocol manipulation.

Secure Application Access protects applications from Internet threats and provides granular controls for added protection of the application and associated data. These security controls include Read-only/Read-write, Upload/download, Copy/paste, AV scanning, Sandboxing, and Data Loss Prevention.

Last Mile Data Protection

Menlo Last-Mile Data Protection identifies and prevents sensitive data from leaving your company by meticulously inspecting all file uploads and user input across browsing sessions. Leveraging the Secure Cloud Browser, users are protected from the internet and you can protect your organization from data loss with comprehensive traffic monitoring and controls. This approach addresses the growing concerns surrounding data leakage in the age of AI tools like ChatGPT.

By identifying sensitive data through file types, regular expressions, or predefined libraries, Menlo Last-Mile Data Protection empowers security teams to regulate data input into AI platforms and prevent unauthorized uploads. This capability provides crucial protection for intellectual property, PII, and other confidential information.

The solution leverages the Menlo Cloud Security Platform's visibility and control over traffic to reliably detect and prevent data leaks originating from both browser submission forms and non-browser traffic. With the ability to inspect encrypted web traffic, Menlo Last-Mile Data Protection enforces DLP policies consistently across all users and devices, ensuring comprehensive data protection.

Menlo Security

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

Security7 Networks, COOPENAE

Information Not Available

Buyer's Guide

Fortinet FortiGate-VM vs. Menlo Secure

April 2025

Free Report: Fortinet FortiGate-VM vs. Menlo Secure

Find out what your peers are saying about Fortinet FortiGate-VM vs. Menlo Secure and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.

DOWNLOAD NOW

850,236 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our Fortinet FortiGate-VM vs. Menlo Secure 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.