Fortinet FortiGate-VM vs ShieldX comparison

The compared Fortinet FortiGate-VM and ShieldX solutions aren't in the same category. Fortinet FortiGate-VM is ranked #9 in Firewalls , with an average rating of 8.5, and holds a 1.9% mindshare in the category. ShieldX is ranked #14 in MS , and holds a 0.3% mindshare. Additionally, 98% of Fortinet FortiGate-VM users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of ShieldX users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 16, 2024

Fortinet FortiGate-VM and ShieldX compete in the network security category. ShieldX appears superior due to its advanced security features, although Fortinet stands out for its pricing and support.

Features: Fortinet FortiGate-VM is recognized for advanced threat protection, extensive firewall capabilities, and reliable protection. ShieldX is noted for deep visibility into network traffic, micro-segmentation capabilities, and granular security policies.

Room for Improvement: Fortinet FortiGate-VM could improve its configuration complexity, reporting capabilities, and initial setup challenges. ShieldX could benefit from enhanced integration with third-party tools, more streamlined management interfaces, and faster response times from support.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Fortinet FortiGate-VM deployment is generally straightforward, though some users face challenges with initial setup. ShieldX deployment is smoother with less intricate setup. Fortinet's customer service is highly rated, while ShieldX's support is adequate but could be faster.

Pricing and ROI: Fortinet FortiGate-VM is known for competitive pricing and strong ROI, making it cost-effective for larger deployments. ShieldX has higher pricing, but its advanced features justify the expense, presenting a compelling value proposition for some users.

To learn more, read our detailed Fortinet FortiGate-VM vs. ShieldX Report (Updated: December 2024).

Buyer's Guide

Fortinet FortiGate-VM vs. ShieldX

December 2024

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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

Mindshare comparison

Firewalls

Microsegmentation Software

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.

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Sitti Ridzma Salahuddin

System Engineer at Trends and Technologies, Inc

Integrates seamlessly and helps with real-time threat response

Since the solution we offered was a complete suite with Fortinet FortiGate-VM, it was easier for them to manage because they have FortiManager as well. The main reason they wanted to position FortiGate in the cloud was so that they could easily deploy through FortiManager. That was the selling point we had for them. Especially for their multiple branches, where they had approximately 60 sites, and some assets were in AWS, it was really a good deployment opportunity. FortiManager and FortiAnalyzer were also part of that solution.

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MichaelProcyshyn

IT Director at park holidays uk

Proactively monitors, blocks, and reports what it has blocked; and self-updates meaning there is zero maintenance

The most valuable feature is the automatic scaling. With its microservices, it scales both up and down, depending on traffic and throughput. The traffic through our website depends on holiday bookings. It's very quiet in November through January, and then our traffic picks up quite rapidly and, at our peak, we will take in excess of a million pounds of business a day through our website. The UI was also one of the huge selling points. My web development manager was blown away with the detail and the granularity that you can get out of the UI. It is a very strong and informative UI, with the amount of data it provides. Uptime on the system has been 648 days and we do very little to it because it self-updates and alerts. It does everything that we need it to do, so the administration side of it is zero. One of the beauties about ShieldX is that it's such a good "fire-and-forget" product.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Mainly the FortiGate reporting system is very good. It guides us through all the expectations of security. Fortinet provides us all that we need for security. Also, Fortinet FortiGate is a next-generation firewall. It is much more advanced than others."

"The most important feature, normally for small business customers, is link load balancing."

"This solution has solid UTM features combined with a nice GUI."

"I like how we can achieve total integration."

"You can create multiple Virtual Domains (VDOMs), which are treated as separate firewall instances."

"It is very flexible to use."

"It has improved our security capabilities."

"Fortinet FortiGate has impacted our cost savings and security efficiency positively."

More Fortinet FortiGate pros

"While the stability maybe isn't quite to the level of Cisco, it is a very cost-effective solution. It's cheap compared to Cisco."

"The performance overall is very good."

"It is a complete package, and it has complete offerings. It fit the needs, and our customer is happy with it."

"The ROI is good since I get free support."

"The ease of access and user-friendly setup is a valuable feature. Fortinet proves to be particularly straightforward to configure, offering simplicity without complexity. Moreover, visibility is easily attainable due to certain factors. Price, implementation, and budget considerations play a role. When it comes to Cisco implementation, the process tends to be more intricate, which many customers find unfavourable for their business needs."

"Fortinet FortiGate-VM is one of the easiest and most user-friendly brands we use, with excellent threat intelligence and accessibility."

"The product is quite user-friendly so we didn't have a lot of issues that needed to be addressed."

"The most valuable feature of the solution is that it is easy to operate."

More Fortinet FortiGate-VM pros

"We were able to see what devices are talking to each other, giving us more visibility."

"ShieldX has been designed from the very beginning to work well in cloud environments. It understands autoscaling, automation, and auto-configuration. These are the things which are important in today's operating environment."

"The UI was also one of the huge selling points. My web development manager was blown away with the detail and the granularity that you can get out of the UI. It is a very strong and informative UI, with the amount of data it provides."

"The Adaptive Intention Engine is fantastic. It allows us to develop security policies using the language of our internal customers. It's machine-learning applied to security workflows. That allows us to much more easily construct the policies that will protect those workflows."

"The most valuable feature is the automatic scaling. With its microservices, it scales both up and down, depending on traffic and throughput."

"...It takes the exact same policies that you would apply to your on-premise environment and enables you to simply apply them to the cloud. It becomes one policy for both on-prem and for the cloud."

"It has helped us tighten our security posture. Now, staff can only access things that they should be accessing."

Cons

"Difficult to add or define, and not that easy to configure and manage."

"The WAF is extremely limited."

"They need to improve their technical support."

"At first glance, the interface for the device is very confusing."

"Application management can be improved."

"A sandbox would be good in order to be able to inspect the emails containing spam and be able to validate the emails that contain malware, prior to delivering to the customer."

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

"During a recent upgrade from old devices to the latest ones, corporate IT faced challenges as there was no straightforward migration process, requiring many manual steps."

More Fortinet FortiGate cons

"We are experiencing a failed login issue. There should also be improvements in functionalities we store to enhance our services."

"The product is satisfactory. I haven't identified any features to improve, and based on the number of deployments I've handled with FortiGate-VM, there haven't been any complaints from the customer's side."

"Integrating multi-factor authentication with FortiGate-VM can be challenging. While multi-factor authentication is important, not all customers have it enabled. Integration with third-party solutions like ManageEngine or Duo can be complex and sometimes problematic during testing."

"Technical support could be improved."

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

"Technical support could be better."

"The scalability feature of the solution has certain shortcomings, making it an area where improvements are required."

"They should keep us up to date about the latest version. That's the biggest thing. Currently, we have to go looking for the latest version. We should get notified about what's going on with the versions. I would like to see easier dual-factor authentication."

More Fortinet FortiGate-VM cons

"We are having some issues with their LDAP and integrating it with the Active Directory. We can't seem to set it up."

"I would like better reports and in-depth reporting."

"With any kind of tool like ShieldX, where you're in the cloud instead of a traditional firewall, you're using CPU resources in those environments to provide the protection. So there's a cost associated with CPU resources. I'm pressing upon them to make the product much more efficient and use less CPUs to do the same thing."

"There should be a bit more customer care, with regular review meetings on it or regular reports. It would be nice to have a quarterly or biannual review of what ShieldX has blocked."

"They need to be consistent in performance and capabilities over time, given the fact that this is new and I want to see where this goes in the next year or so. As the vendor continues to evolve and add future functionality, we want to make sure that we are still keeping up with the integrations, etc. Time will be the key factor here. The proper support for some of the latest technologies, Docker containers, etc. They need to keep up with threat landscape, so we will see how the security get layered. This is what we are going to be keeping an eye on."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is not a very costly product if you compare it with other products. The return on investment is also good. If you compare the return of investment and money that you are spending on this product with Palo Alto, Cisco, Check Point, and other solutions, the investment is very less. We are happy with this solution. The optional licenses are there, and you can choose which one you want and which one to avoid."

"The licensing scheme of Fortinet is better than Cisco. It is more logical."

"It's not the cheapest, but it's value for money. Given everything we've got out of it: the DMZ port, the VPN, and the high availability, it's a pretty reasonable price."

"The price for the device and software is high. However, the solution is of good quality and has a lot of features."

"The pricing depends on the FortiGate model we are using, ranging from $3,000 to $20,000 US dollars."

"It is too expensive for us. My organization is very small, and we have a total of ten users. We have three internal users and seven external users. The FortiGate 100D series is too expensive for renewing the licenses."

"We have the full version of Fortinet FortiGate and we are on a three-year contract with a commitment of five years."

"Its price is good."

More Fortinet FortiGate pricing and cost advice

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

"There is a benefit in terms of the cost of using this solution because the price is very good."

"It has a flexible pay-as-you-go pricing model."

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

"The price is similar to Symantec Endpoint, but it's more expensive than Forcepoint solutions. Fortinet is better than Forcepoint."

"The price of this product is great compared to others."

"It would be nice to have the ability to extend FortiGuard subscriptions at a reasonable yearly cost versus a bulk three year pricing."

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

More Fortinet FortiGate-VM pricing and cost advice

"ShieldX also enables us to migrate to cloud environments faster. That is an important part of it for sure because it takes the exact same policies that we would apply to our on-premise environment and enables us to simply apply them to the cloud. It becomes one policy for both on-prem and for the cloud."

"For a three-year deal we paid £55,000 plus tax... But, and this is a big "but," this was over two years ago. ShieldX had only just hit the market. We were the first company in Europe to buy ShieldX."

"For other security professions who are looking for something which is low in cost that does microsegmentation, they should look at ShieldX. It might not be the big name out there, but it does everything that you are looking for in microsegmentation at a very low price."

"We are actually expecting our costs to drop in the coming year, but it is just a matter of the licensing expiring. That is going to happen in the next six months or so. Then, we will start to see a decrease in overall spend."

"Security policies are now applied as applications are going up. Because it's automated, we don't have the three to four week delay. The insertion of applications in the cloud for us dropped from an average of three to four weeks to a couple of days."

"ShieldX ensures that we can have the separation needed for our environment to avoid drastically increasing the cost on the licensing side. From this perspective, it's been very positive and helpful."

"We are very happy with the pricing and licensing. It's about getting a site-wide license. One of the challenges that we've had with our previous vendor had been the cost of licensing."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

16%

Comms Service Provider

Manufacturing Company

Educational Organization

Computer Software Company

19%

Financial Services Firm

Government

Comms Service Provider

No data available

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

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

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What do you like most about Fortinet FortiGate-VM?

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

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Comparisons

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Compared 20% of the time

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SonicWall NSa vs Fortinet FortiGate

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Sophos XGS vs Fortinet FortiGate-VM

Compared 3% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Fortinet FortiGate

July 2025

Download Fortinet FortiGate product report

Buyer's Guide

Fortinet FortiGate-VM

July 2025

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Buyer's Guide

ShieldX

June 2025

Download ShieldX 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

APEIRO, ShieldX APEIRO

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

The ShieldX Elastic Security Platform dynamically scales to deliver comprehensive and consistent controls to protect data centers, cloud infrastructure, applications and data no matter where they are or where they go to make the cloud more secure than on-premise deployments. Our frictionless approach leverages agentless technology as well as the ShieldX Adaptive Intention Engine which autonomously translates and enforces intention into a set of comprehensive controls - microsegmentation, firewall, IPS and more - making security the easiest thing you do in the cloud.

Fortinet

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

Iowa State University

Buyer's Guide

Fortinet FortiGate-VM vs. ShieldX

December 2024

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