We performed a comparison between Fortinet FortiGate and Meraki MX based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Based on the parameters we compared, Fortinet FortiGate and Meraki MX have a similar user rating regarding ease of deployment, pricing, service and support, and ROI. In terms of features, users of Fortinet FortiGate had mixed reviews on the interface, and felt the reporting feature needed updating. On the other hand, users of Meraki MX felt there was a need for better and more monitoring capabilities.
"It's got the capabilities of amassing a lot of throughput with remote access and VPNs."
"The most valuable feature is stability."
"The features I've found most valuable are the packet captures and packet traces because they help me debug connections. I like the logs because they help me see what's going on."
"If you compare the ASA and the FirePOWER, the best feature with FirePOWER is easy to use GUI. It has most of the same functionality in the Next-Generation FirePOWER, such as IPS, IPS policies, security intelligence, and integration and identification of all the devices or hardware you have in your network. Additionally, this solution is user-friendly."
"One of the most valuable features of Firepower 7.0 is the "live log" type feature called Unified Event Viewer. That view has been really good in helping me get to data faster, decreasing the amount of time it takes to find information, and allowing me to fix problems faster. I've found that to be incredibly valuable because it's a lot easier to get to some points of data now."
"We have not had to deal with stability issues."
"One of the nice things about Firepower is that you can set it to discover the environment. If that is happening, then Firepower is learning about every device, software operating system, and application running inside or across your environment. Then, you can leverage the discovery intelligence to get Firepower to select the most appropriate intrusion prevention rules to use for your environment rather than picking one of the base policies that might have 50,000 IPS rules in it, which can put a lot of overhead on your firewall. If you choose the recommendations, as long as you update them regularly, you might be able to get your rule set down to only 1,000 or 1,500, which is a significant reduction in a base rule set. This means that the firewall will give you better performance because there are less rules being checked unnecessarily. That is really useful."
"The dashboard is the most important thing. It provides good visibility and makes management easy. Firepower also provides us with good application visibility and control."
"The simplicity of the product is great. It's very easy to use, which is a compliment we get all the time in terms of feedback."
"The most valuable feature of Fortinet FortiGate is load balancing. It can provide central management and VPNA. Additionally, it has enhanced our security environment."
"Initial setup is easy to configure."
"Overall security features and performance routing is good."
"There are great templates, so you don't have to customize them if you don't want to. You do have the option to custom create some folders and some reports, however, with what is there, you don't really need to go through extra effort, as they already give you a lot of predefined views of reports and so forth."
"The SD-WAN feature is the most valuable. This feature evolved from link load balancing. It has helped us in terms of our uptime and privatizing applications whenever we experience an outage. The SD-WAN feature has been a plus for us. Two-factor authentication has allowed us to add more users in terms of remote working. We have two-factor authentication for remote workers to authenticate them before they get on the network."
"I like that you are able to manage FortiGate from the FortiManager to create a more centralized environment."
"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. You don't need to pay some other company for another product to do that for you. The firewall can do that for you. So, it's an easy-to-use product for people to be independent. They don't need to rely on other vendors to do what the firewall can do. They can do everything."
"It is very easy to use and manage. It is also very easy to scale."
"They have very good technical support and I have relied heavily on them."
"Its ease of configuration and management is very useful for us and for other companies that don't have an onsite IT person. It is easy to configure and easy to manage. It is easy to configure the VPN with the Auto VPN feature."
"It has very good features; it's easy to use, configure, set up, and deploy."
"In general, Meraki MX is easy to work with."
"Both the scalability and the scalability are great with Meraki MX."
"Meraki makes it easy to be secure and know where the holes are to fix them. We have been fixing anything that we have ever found for 20 years. We keep up-to-date with firmware upgrades. We just try to stay on top of everything for security, like maintaining updates and getting rid of old systems. I feel like we're on top of it."
"The technical support people from Meraki are brilliant."
"This product is managed using the Firepower Management Center (FMC), but it would be better if it also supported the command-line interface (CLI)."
"There is limited data storage on the appliance itself. So, you need to ship it out elsewhere in order for you to store it. The only point of consideration is around that area, basically limited storage on the machine and appliance. Consider logging it elsewhere or pushing it out to a SIEM to get better controls and manipulation over the data to generate additional metrics and visibility."
"One of my colleagues is using the firewall as an IPS, but he is worried about Firepower's performance... With the 10 Gb devices, when it gets to 5 Gbps, the CPU usage goes up a lot and he cannot manage the IPS."
"I would like it to have faster deployment times. A typical deployment could take two to three minutes. Sometimes, it depends on the situation. It is better than it was in the past, but it could always use improvement."
"The ability to better integrate with other tools would be an improvement."
"Deploying configurations takes longer than it should."
"Most of the features don't work well, and some features are missing as well."
"The intelligence has room for improvement. There are some hackers that we haven't seen before and its ability to detect those types of attacks needs to be improved."
"I don't really have anything negative to say as far as Fortinet firewalls are concerned. If anything, they can support a user a little bit better. They can stop being so time-sensitive about how much time the support call has taken, and they can help you do it yourself."
"Quality control on their firmware versions needs improvement. When they introduce new firmware, there tend to be bugs."
"Fortinet FortiGate needs to improve to be on par with its competitors, such as Palo Alto and Sophos. They are the market leaders. Fortinet FortiGate needs to improve its capabilities. However, we are happy with Fortinet FortiGate."
"Fortinet FortiGate could improve by having more storage in the hardware for log data."
"It's my understanding that more of the current generation features could be brought in. There could be more integration with EDRs, for example."
"Fortinet FortiGate can improve by integrating the web application firewall and the DDoS protection part of the solution. Having a WAF feature, web application firewall, and proxy together would be a good benefit."
"The renewal price and the availability could be improved."
"It is stable, but its stability can be improved."
"As far as what needs to be improved — nothing really comes to mind. It does what we need it to do."
"In the next release, because the security is pretty basic, I think they could include additional security features."
"You cannot use switching behaviors as you see on the Meraki switch."
"They need to improve the link between Meraki and Active Directory."
"From the improvement perspective, we need more monitoring capabilities. We want to have full-based access visibility, such as, what is happening when something is trying to reach and it is denying. We cannot see some parts of it. The integration of active directory with this product is not very fruitful. It has some bugs or lacks in the functionality of active directory integration. We are unable to identify where exactly and whether it has really applied our policy."
"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."
"In general, the SD-WAN feature needs to be improved. The load sharing and load balancing of the traffic should be improved. I have had some problems with these features in the past."
"The whole Cisco Meraki range requires easier access for cameras. For a security center, it would be helpful to have easier access to cameras through the portal. Its licensing cost could also be better."
More Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall Pricing and Cost Advice →
Fortinet FortiGate is ranked 1st in Firewalls with 166 reviews while Meraki MX is ranked 2nd in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 16 reviews. Fortinet FortiGate is rated 8.4, while Meraki MX is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Fortinet FortiGate writes "Stable, easy to set up, and offers good ROI". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Meraki MX writes "Makes it easy to stay on top of everything for security". Fortinet FortiGate is most compared with pfSense, Cisco ASA Firewall, Sophos XG, Check Point NGFW and SonicWall TZ, whereas Meraki MX is most compared with Cisco ASA Firewall, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Sophos XG, SonicWall NSa and pfSense. See our Fortinet FortiGate vs. Meraki MX report.
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