Fortinet FortiGate-VM vs Menlo Secure comparison

Why PeerSpot?

Fortinet and Menlo Security are both solutions in the Firewalls category. Fortinet is ranked #11 with an average rating of 8.4, while Menlo Security is ranked #54. Fortinet holds a 2.2% mindshare in Firewalls, compared to Menlo Security’s 0.4% mindshare. Additionally, 98% of Fortinet users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Menlo Security users who would recommend it.

Fortinet FortiGate-VM

Read 151 Fortinet FortiGate-VM reviews

13,314 Views
12,116 Comparison Views

98% willing to recommend

Menlo Secure

Read 5 Menlo Secure reviews

3,933 Views
1,023 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Fortinet FortiGate-VM

Menlo Secure

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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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: September 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Fortinet FortiGate-VM vs. Menlo Secure

September 2026

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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 FortiGate-VM

Ranking in Firewalls

11th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

151

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Menlo Secure

Ranking in Firewalls

54th

Average Rating

9.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Secure Web Gateways (SWG) (25th), ZTNA (27th), Cloud Security Remediation (6th)

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the Firewalls category, the mindshare of Fortinet FortiGate-VM is 2.2%, up from 1.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Menlo Secure is 0.4%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Firewalls Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Fortinet FortiGate-VM	2.2%
Menlo Secure	0.4%
Other	97.4%

Firewalls

Featured Reviews

Ehab Ali

Senior Presales Consultant at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Unified security fabric has simplified multi-country deployments and strengthened threat response

FortiGate VM delivers exceptional performance and security with no degradation of service or protection (same features as the HW option). As part of the Fortinet Security Fabric, it extends across clouds and distributed locations, mitigating blind spots in virtual infrastructures. FortiGate VM can be rapidly deployed, managed through a centralized platform, and offers a range of purchasing options to suit every need. Also, FortiGate VM offers versatile deployment options across both public and private clouds, supporting all major public clouds including AWS, Azure, and Google as well as most hypervisors such as VMware, Hyper-V, and KVM. These deployments enable organizations to create scalable, high-performance firewalls that can be tailored to different virtualized environments and hyper-scale public cloud infrastructures. FortiGate VM integrates seamlessly with various infrastructure as code (IaC) tools such as Jenkins and GitLab, supporting security as code practices.

Read full review

reviewer2701794

Head Of Bluechip Enterprise at a manufacturing company with 51-200 employees

Provides strong protection and multiple use cases but struggles with market recognition

There aren't specific areas for improvement; however, they're not as well known as the big vendors such as Palo Alto. Menlo Secure is a smaller company with limited resources and funding, which makes it challenging to compete with larger companies such as Palo and Cisco. What can be improved is market awareness and adoption of the technology. When selling it in the channel, regardless of how good the technology might be, success depends more on market adoption and awareness.

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

"Fortinet FortiGate-VM is user-friendly and can be handled by anyone."

"We try to build our services around Fortinet products."

"It is highly scalable because it has a mesh architecture that allows consistent policies."

"I rate the tool's stability a ten out of ten."

"The setup is simple."

"It gives all the features of a full-fledged firewall with great performance."

"The features I find most useful in Fortinet FortiGate are its simplicity of utilization, which is very important, and its provision of interfaces to see the alerts and other things."

"That's primarily why we steer clients in the direction of Fortinet."

More Fortinet FortiGate-VM pros

"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."

"Either you have access to something or don't have access to it, and if you do, we can ensure, 100 percent of the time, that there is nothing malicious that is going to impact our system in any way."

"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."

"We are not aware of a single compromise from the web since implementing the solution."

"The solution is invisible to our end users, so it doesn't have any impact on their work or performance."

"This security technology addresses risk and enables people to conduct business without that risk, which is where the ROI is realized."

"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."

"We have definitely seen ROI, as we save a ton of money and time because 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."

More Menlo Secure pros

Cons

"The graphical user interface should be enhanced."

"The product may not be as robust as Palo Alto. However, unless you are a big bank, you probably won't need it to be."

"FortiGate-VM does have that too, but it doesn't work as well."

"FortiGate-VM is more expensive than Sophos."

"There should be a bit more automation."

"I require many more features as of now."

"The debugging and troubleshooting has room for improvement."

"Sizing can be challenging for customers interested in using Fortinet FortiGate-VM."

More Fortinet FortiGate-VM cons

"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."

"Menlo Secure is a smaller company with limited resources and funding, which makes it challenging to compete with larger companies such as Palo and Cisco."

"Currently, I don't have a good way to see which of my rules are being used in the access control lists."

"The user monitoring could still be improved."

"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."

"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."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool is neither expensive nor cheap, so it is okay."

"We have been waiting a long time for the vendor to give us licenses, it has been five months and we are still waiting. However, the price is reasonable."

"Of all the firewalls that we compared, FortiGate is the cheapest and most affordable, so we are satisfied with the pricing."

"I would rate the product's pricing as four out of five."

"It is an expensive solution if you are migrating from an open source solution."

"Our license is yearly, but we're thinking of going monthly. I think it's somewhere around 100,000 for VM04. Nowadays, everyone wants to be a hacker, so we believe in security. That's why we also have third-party people that we involve to make sure that we're secure. I don't think the costs are too bad. You still want to get advice from people who worked in security for many years, so you add a third party. The third party also said they would give their share like 100K, or 200K or something like that, so I don't think it's too expensive for security. I think it just adds more trust."

"This solution is very expensive."

"There is an annual license required to use the solution."

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."

"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."

"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."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Outsourcing Company

Construction Company

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

14%

Construction Company

11%

Outsourcing Company

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	74
Midsize Enterprise	35
Large Enterprise	43

No data available

Questions from the Community

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 kind of depends what you value most. PA is good at app control, web filtering a...

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 Fortigate VM integrates well and has excellent centralized reporting. It is very easy to...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fortinet FortiGate-VM?

I am not involved in the pricing and costs associated with Fortinet FortiGate-VM, as those are handled by the CFO. We are in operations, and we just access the product as it is and take care of the...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Menlo Security Secure Web Gateway?

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Menlo Security Secure Web Gateway?

People are mainly using it for zero trust web access. Menlo Secure is built from the ground up to provide zero basic access, and by doing it that way, it has multiple use cases. For example, it man...

See all answers

What advice do you have for others considering Menlo Security Secure Web Gateway?

Secure file sharing and data protection is not exactly what Menlo Secure is designed to do. While it can handle some of these functions, people typically choose another technology for those specifi...

See all answers

Comparisons

Fortinet FortiGate vs Fortinet FortiGate-VM

Compared 9% of the time

Azure Firewall vs Fortinet FortiGate-VM

Compared 9% of the time

Palo Alto Networks VM-Series vs Fortinet FortiGate-VM

Compared 8% of the time

Cisco Secure Firewall vs Fortinet FortiGate-VM

Compared 7% of the time

Check Point Cloud Firewall (formerly CloudGuard Network Security) vs Fortinet FortiGate-VM

Compared 5% of the time

More Fortinet FortiGate-VM Competitors

Prisma Access Browser vs Menlo Secure

Compared 12% of the time

Check Point Harmony SASE (formerly Perimeter 81) vs Menlo Secure

Compared 12% of the time

Netskope Next Gen Secure Web Gateway vs Menlo Secure

Compared 10% of the time

Cloudflare One vs Menlo Secure

Compared 9% of the time

Fortinet FortiGate vs Menlo Secure

Compared 6% of the time

More Menlo Secure Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Fortinet FortiGate-VM

October 2026

Download Fortinet FortiGate-VM product report

Buyer's Guide

Menlo Secure

September 2026

Download Menlo Secure product report

Also Known As

FortiGate Virtual Appliance, FortiGate-VM

Menlo Security Web Security, Menlo Web Security

Overview

Fortinet FortiGate-VM delivers robust security services and advanced network management suitable for cloud environments, providing solutions like firewall and SD-WAN, with seamless integration across Fortinet devices.

FortiGate-VM is designed for enterprise security, offering comprehensive features like intrusion prevention and application filtering. It's known for its scalability and flexibility, supporting cloud platforms such as Azure and AWS. It enhances threat response and network management efficiency, thanks to real-time threat response, intuitive integration with existing systems, and cost-effectiveness.

What are the key features of Fortinet FortiGate-VM?

Strong Security: Offers firewall, intrusion prevention, and application filtering.
SD-WAN Capability: Improves network connectivity and performance.
Scalability: Efficient scaling in cloud environments.
Integration: Seamlessly connects with other Fortinet devices.

What benefits can users expect from Fortinet FortiGate-VM?

Enhanced Network Management: Simplifies deployment with real-time threat response.
Cost-Effectiveness: Optimal for managing network protocols at reasonable costs.
Flexibility in Deployment: Suitable for secure virtual machine operations on platforms like Azure or AWS.

Fortinet FortiGate-VM is predominantly employed in industries requiring stringent data center security, enabling network segmentation and VPN services. It's particularly favored by organizations using virtual and cloud networks due to its Unified Threat Management capabilities, making it an efficient solution for protecting virtual environments from threats.

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

Security7 Networks, COOPENAE

Information Not Available

Buyer's Guide

Fortinet FortiGate-VM vs. Menlo Secure

September 2026

Free Report: Fortinet FortiGate-VM vs. Menlo Secure

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