Fortinet FortiGate-VM vs Meraki MX comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Fortinet FortiGate-VM and Meraki MX based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Firewalls solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
To learn more, read our detailed Fortinet FortiGate-VM vs. Meraki MX Report (Updated: November 2023).
745,775 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured 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 protects against internet-based threats, both internal and external. It is scalable, stable, easy to use, and easy to install.""FortiGate's web and URL filtering are unlike any other firewall I've used. The functionality of URL filtering in those solutions is problematic because everything is encrypted, and firewalls can't break that encryption protocol. Fortinet has an SSL proxy, so the encryption is done before the packet ever leaves the FortiGate. The URL filter is definitely one of the most helpful features.""I appreciate FortiGate's flexibility, which allows for centralized management through FortiManager.""The technical support in our region is excellent.""FortiGate is on the cheaper end, and it offers good value.""In terms of security, we have not experienced any security flaws or loopholes, and it has proven to be quite stable.""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.""The tool is a nice product and easy to handle. The software's user interface is also good. You can easily implement remote access in the solution."

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"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiGate-VM are its flexibility and scalability. This solution is available as a license, which allows us to activate it based on the specific needs of the customer. This gives us and the customer a great deal of versatility and customization options.""The solution's initial setup process was very easy.""We work in the archiving domain where a secure environment is very important. We have some special requirements regarding the security of infrastructure.""Good for the servers and can stop network attacks, including spam.""Fortinet FortiGate-VM is very easy to create the user of VPN, allowing them to use it quickly. Additionally, the integration and interface are good.""The best part about FortiGate-VM is its strong security.""It is easy to set up the solution.""The setup is simple."

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"You can use your web browser to do the configuration which is easier than Cisco CLI transcripts.""Ease of management is the best thing about the solution.""I think cloud management is key. The cloud management and support are the two things that make the product great.""Point-to-point VPNs can dynamically follow IP changes with no need for static IPs.""The solution is easy to set up.""The solution is good for load balancing.""The product is quite secure, easy to manage, and well-connected with other devices.""The cloud management system is really valuable."

More Meraki MX Pros →

Cons
"We had some issues in the beginning while setting it up, but after doing the firmware update, it is working fine.""The reporting in Fortinet FortiGate could improve. Customers are having to purchase additional reporting components. When I have used the Sophos solution it is a complete solution, in Fortinet FortiGate you have to use additional tools to have the features needed.""Lacks sufficient security options.""Fortinet FortiGate could improve the user interface. There should be more functionality and options through the GUI.""Fortinet FortiGate needs to improve the logging and reporting. Additionally, the next-generation application's policies should be improved. When they were released they had bugs.""Its reporting can be improved. Sometimes, I don't get proper reports.""The pricing could always be better.""The non-error conserve mode has room for improvement."

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"FortiGate's application load balancing has to be improved. They need to improve a lot on the load balancing and RAF side. They are far behind Citrix in that regard.""The product has issues with integration. I would like to see better integration in future releases of the product.""Right now, we have two data centers that are a thousand kilometers apart. It would be nice to be able to string them together.""One thing that can be better is added automation. And, on top of that, enhanced security when it comes to the automation itself.""The solution can improve by adding separate interfaces for proxy and flow-based usage.""New versions are complicated with a big configuration.""Fortinet support needs improvement. The response times are lackluster. Fortunately, the product is stable and we seldom have issues. Also, it takes months for them to deliver hardware when we order it.""The users must buy FortiSIEM to get advanced analytics."

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"They're very complacent and I find the rule set to be a little arcane.""MX can only be managed via a web interface, but I'm accustomed to using a CLI or a graphical interface. I would also like to see more reporting features. It doesn't provide enough information for me to know precisely about some clients.""Meraki tech support staff have a lot more visibility into your network than you do, which is frustrating at times. I understand the approach is to keep the dashboard easier to understand. This will frustrate more advanced users at times.​""It is very expensive.""We can’t access GUI management and CLI opening features when the Internet is unavailable.""We do not have account managers in our region for the solution. Some governments don't use the product since it is attached to the internet.""Pricing is an area where the solution lacks since it is an expensive tool.""The product is quite complex to set up."

More Meraki MX Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "It is more expensive than Sophos. Fortinet is overall more expensive than Sophos. The small range of Fortinet, such as 60F and 80F, is more expensive than the small range of Sophos. Sophos is cheaper. In addition, if you jump from 80F Series to 100F Series, the price doubles."
  • "The license is yearly. We pay for the top end. It's called 360."
  • "Here in Brazil, we're going through difficult economic times and the tax on the dollar is high. All the solutions from minor competitors are growing in the market. The prices have come more competitive."
  • "Licensing for Fortinet FortiGate is on a yearly basis. Pricing for it is a bit high. It could be cheaper."
  • "The licensing scheme of Fortinet is better than Cisco. It is more logical."
  • "The solution requires a license annually, it is not a user license, you can have as many users as your want. I must renew the license regularly per device."
  • "It was probably about $2,500 per firewall. It was all included. It included support, services, threat management software, and 24/7 FortiCare on it. Cisco products are more expensive."
  • "There is a license to use Fortinet FortiGate."
  • More Fortinet FortiGate Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "The license we pay is a yearly fee. I can't say it's very expensive; it is a good price and is highly suitable for our usage."
  • "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."
  • "The price of the solution could be less expensive. There are some features that have to be purchased separately that have their own license."
  • "It is more expensive than its competitor, e.g. Sophos."
  • "Installation does not require another license making it an inexpensive solution."
  • "I would rate the product's pricing as four out of five."
  • "The price of the solution is competitive. Fortinet FortiGate-VM had a lot of advantages when it came to pricing. However, the competition has also geared up to a larger extent and it has become comparable now to the other solutions."
  • "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."
  • More Fortinet FortiGate-VM Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "I think the price is comparable with other solutions of the same kind. Depending on the use case it could be cheaper or more expensive, I think it offers good value."
  • "The price of Meraki MX is between $8 and $1,200. Additionally, we typically purchase a three-year enterprise license, and we pay approximately $899 and mark it up a bit."
  • "The pricing for Meraki MX is all right, but as the hardware needs to be licensed, the cost depends on the complexity of the device and the term. Pricing could be $100 to $10,000 yearly or even more for a more complex device."
  • "It is an expensive solution. There is a five-year licensing requirement. We already renewed licenses for all our devices."
  • "The solution is expensive."
  • "The solution is expensive compared to other vendors but you can get good discounts if you know the account manager. The product is less expensive than a normal Cisco subscription. The tool's hardware warranty is a lifetime but you need to purchase support which comes in three, five, and seven years subscriptions."
  • "The larger MX products are on the expensive side."
  • "The product’s pricing depends on the discount Cisco gives to different people."
  • More Meraki MX Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
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    Top Answer:From my experience regarding both the Sophos and FortiGate firewalls, I personally would rather use FortiGate. I know… more »
    Top Answer:As a solution, Sophos UTM offers a lot of functionality, it scales well, and the stability and performance are quite… more »
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    Top Answer:The ease of access and user-friendly setup is a valuable feature. Fortinet proves to be particularly straightforward to… more »
    Top Answer:We have Meraki Mx devices now, we are looking to replace them. But that is because the Meraki MX platform lacks SSL… more »
    Top Answer: Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) software is the operating software for the Cisco ASA suite. It supports… more »
    Top Answer:Meraki equipment requires a current license in order to operate. This also gets you hardware replacement and tech… more »
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    FortiGate 60b, FortiGate 60c, FortiGate 80c, FortiGate 50b, FortiGate 200b, FortiGate 110c, FortiGate
    FortiGate Virtual Appliance, FortiGate-VM
    MX64, MX64W, MX84, MX100, MX400, MX600
    Learn More
    Cisco
    Video Not Available
    Overview

    Fortinet FortiGate is an innovative line of firewalls that aim to protect organizations from all types of web-based network threats. They come in a wide variety of product types. Fortinet FortiGate’s solutions are available in a large range of sizes and form factors and are key components of the Fortinet Security Fabric, which enables immediate, intelligent defense against known and new threats throughout the entire network.

    Fortinet FortiGate provides users with next-generation firewall solutions that provide proven protection with unmatched performance across the network, from internal segments to data centers to cloud environments. You can protect every part of your network without exception. Additionally, your protections can be managed from a single central location. This ensures that the task of protecting your network is infinitely easier to accomplish.

    Benefits of Fortinet FortiGate

    Some of the benefits of using Fortinet FortiGate include:

    • The ability to manage your firewalls from a centralized automated control console. Fortinet FortiGate’s FortiManager enables administrators to exercise control of their firewalls in a streamlined manner. Administrators have full visibility and control over their system from a single location. It utilizes automation that collects information in real time, which greatly simplifies and reduces the cost of running various types of workflows. Administrators can free up resources by automating the most basic tasks.
    • The ability to produce uniform, appropriate, and coordinated responses to threats across networks. Fortinet FortiGate’s FortiGuard feature generates system protections in near real time. This allows administrators to address threats to the system with custom-made solutions that can be uniformly enforced.
    • The ability to scale up your security to fit your changing security needs. Fortinet FortiGate’s design allows users to accelerate the transfer of data between users and escalate the number of users that are covered without compromising security of performance. This means that users can grow their networks and continue to collaborate without worrying about the system slowing down or coming under attack.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Fortinet FortiGate’s firewall solutions are cutting edge. They stand out from competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are the robustness and power of their firewalls. Fortinet FortiGate’s firewall provides users with many valuable features that allow them to maximize what they can do with the solution. These firewalls enable users to use a single piece of software to accomplish tasks that often require the use of multiple pieces of software.

    PeerSpot user Eric S., a Solutions Engineer and Consultant at a tech-services company, notes the robustness of this solution when he writes, "One of the nice things about FortiGate is that it can be deployed on the cloud or on-premises. You can actually do both. That's the biggest reason why I stick with this solution as opposed to something like Cisco Meraki. Another nice thing is that I can log directly into a FortiGate or get to it through their FortiCloud access products. They're pretty reliable and consistent. One of the reasons why I started using the product was their single pane of management. I can deploy their line of firewalls in conjunction with their switching and access points, and I can manage the entire network from one interface.”

    PeerSpot user Jim M., a network admin at Penobscot Valley Hospital, notes the power of Fortinet FortiGate’s security software when he writes, "It does a lot for you for intrusion protection and as an antivirus. The threat management bundle is worth the money. You don't need another company to monitor your web traffic for you. You can do everything yourself on the firewall. You restrict your own black list for people on the firewall.”

    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.

    Cisco Meraki MX appliances are next-generation firewalls with all the advanced security services needed for today’s IT security. The appliances are ideal for organizations considering a unified threat management (UTM) solution for branch offices, data centers, distributed sites, or campuses. Since Meraki MX is 100% cloud-managed, installation and remote management are simple and zero-touch.

    Meraki MX’s hardware and virtual appliances are configurable in Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google Cloud Platform, and private cloud support is offered through Cisco NFVIS and Alibaba Cloud.

    Organizations of all sizes and across all industries rely on Meraki MX to deliver secure connectivity to hub locations or multi-cloud environments, as well as application quality of experience (QoE) through advanced analytics with machine learning.

    Cisco Meraki’s advanced QoE analytics offers:

    • End-to-end health of web applications at a glance across the LAN, WAN, and application server.
    • Autonomous machine-learned smart application thresholds applied to identify true anomalies that are based on past behavioral patterns.
    • Ability to monitor the health of all MX WAN links across an entire organization.
    • Ability to detail hop-by-hop VoIP performance analysis across all uplinks.

    Cisco Meraki’s SD-WAN offers:

    The Meraki MX’s SD-WAN is unique in that it can be easily extended to deliver optimized access to resources in public and private cloud environments with virtual MX appliances. Its SD-WAN lowers operational costs and improves the performance of remotely-accessed resources. Users can ensure the availability of the apps and services their employees use most through dynamic path selection, policy-based routing, support for application-layer profiles, and VPN.

    Meraki MX offers industry-leading cloud management that has template-based settings which can scale easily from small deployments to tens of thousands of devices. It features an intuitive web-based dashboard for managing mobile devices, united firewalls, switching, and wireless LAN. Users can also benefit from role-based administration, configurable email alerts for a variety of important events, and easily auditable change logs. Meraki MX is capable of producing summary reports with device, user, and application details archived in the cloud.

    Meraki MX Key Features

    MX has a robust suite of network services in an all-in-one device, which saves you money by eliminating the need for multiple appliances. These services include:

    • SD-WAN capabilities
    • SNORT®-based intrusion detection and prevention
    • Layer 7 fingerprinting
    • Web caching
    • Application-based firewalling
    • Anti-malware
    • Geo-based firewalling
    • Content filtering
    • Site-to-site auto VPN and client VPN
    • Web search filtering
    • Cisco Advanced Malware Protection (AMP)
    • 4G cellular failover
    • Dynamic path selection
    • Web application health and VoIP health

    Reviews from Real Users

    Meraki MX stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its easy management and its ability to be accessed remotely. Below is some feedback from PeerSpot users who are currently using Meraki MX as their firewall security solution.

    Craig B., a central services engineer at Liberty Technology, writes, “The web console for managing everything keeps everything on Meraki and keeps us from going somewhere else. It is why I think a lot of people like Meraki. Comparing it to SonicWall or even a different Cisco firewall, like traditional ASAs, managing Meraki is a thousand times easier because of fluidity. You don't have to rebuild a table just to change one rule. It's much more readable for a human.”

    Edgardo C., an IT director, notes,”By using the VPN, we can connect remotely. We have two offices, and we could connect them through the VPN. We could establish a network between two sites, and that has improved and increased communication and productivity. Our remote site is able to access the server remotely.”

    Offer
    Learn more about Fortinet FortiGate
    Learn more about Fortinet FortiGate-VM
    Learn more about Meraki MX
    Sample Customers
    Pittsburgh Steelers, LUSH Cosmetics, NASDAQ, Verizon, Arizona State University, Levi Strauss & Co. Whitepaper and case studies here
    Security7 Networks, COOPENAE
    Hyatt, ONS
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Comms Service Provider16%
    Computer Software Company9%
    Financial Services Firm8%
    Manufacturing Company7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization21%
    Computer Software Company15%
    Comms Service Provider8%
    Manufacturing Company5%
    REVIEWERS
    Comms Service Provider16%
    Manufacturing Company11%
    Financial Services Firm9%
    Computer Software Company9%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company22%
    Comms Service Provider9%
    Financial Services Firm7%
    Government7%
    REVIEWERS
    Comms Service Provider23%
    Computer Software Company13%
    Non Tech Company6%
    Performing Arts6%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization20%
    Computer Software Company16%
    Comms Service Provider5%
    Retailer5%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business48%
    Midsize Enterprise23%
    Large Enterprise30%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business27%
    Midsize Enterprise32%
    Large Enterprise41%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business53%
    Midsize Enterprise23%
    Large Enterprise24%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business31%
    Midsize Enterprise17%
    Large Enterprise51%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business55%
    Midsize Enterprise27%
    Large Enterprise18%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business31%
    Midsize Enterprise31%
    Large Enterprise39%
    Buyer's Guide
    Fortinet FortiGate-VM vs. Meraki MX
    November 2023
    Find out what your peers are saying about Fortinet FortiGate-VM vs. Meraki MX and other solutions. Updated: November 2023.
    745,775 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Fortinet FortiGate-VM is ranked 8th in Firewalls with 27 reviews while Meraki MX is ranked 3rd in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 20 reviews. Fortinet FortiGate-VM is rated 8.8, while Meraki MX is rated 7.8. The top reviewer of Fortinet FortiGate-VM writes "Flexible with good cloud management and a straightforward user interface". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Meraki MX writes "Great solution that can manage multiple devices (security, switches, APs, Cameras) with a single pane of glass". Fortinet FortiGate-VM is most compared with Azure Firewall, Palo Alto Networks VM-Series, Fortinet FortiOS and OPNsense, whereas Meraki MX is most compared with Cisco Secure Firewall, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Sophos XG, Netgate pfSense and SonicWall NSa. See our Fortinet FortiGate-VM vs. Meraki MX report.

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    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.