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Fortinet FortiManager vs IBM Tivoli NetCool comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 2, 2025

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 FortiManager
Ranking in Network Management Applications
3rd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
74
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
IBM Tivoli NetCool
Ranking in Network Management Applications
15th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
13
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Network Management Applications category, the mindshare of Fortinet FortiManager is 4.1%, down from 5.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Tivoli NetCool is 3.7%, up from 2.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Management Applications Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Fortinet FortiManager4.1%
IBM Tivoli NetCool3.7%
Other92.2%
Network Management Applications
 

Featured Reviews

SudeepMaydeo - PeerSpot reviewer
Global Head of IT Infrastructure at EPL Americas
Ensures seamless integration and centralized visibility for network security operations
The version upgrade from a single dashboard for all the firewalls in one click is the beauty of Fortinet FortiManager as the most impactful feature in managing our network security. Fortinet FortiManager's policy management enhances our security protocols by enabling us and giving integrated centralized visibility, which has proven to be very healthy. Because of this, we have identified some of the vulnerabilities in our systems, and we mitigated them through Fortinet FortiManager. The central dashboards and the visibility are what appealed to us to go with Fortinet FortiManager. Fortinet FortiManager has adapted to changes in our network scale and complexity as we have geographically 18 international locations, all equipped with firewalls and some cybersecurity initiatives and IT infrastructure initiatives.
Petar Ganev - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Enterprise Monitoring Engineer at Commerzbank
Reliable for enterprise monitoring but no longer actively developed
There are problems with the latest security requirements because many things have changed in recent years, and now the security audits are very strict. And we need to switch to something else. We need to patch it constantly. Moreover, it is a very old tool and a little bit difficult to support. Otherwise, they work okay.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Everybody is quite happy with the way that the graphical user interface works."
"The centralized policy management helps with the creation of policies because it is easy to monitor and facilitates installation."
"It's a very rich, robust product."
"FortiManager offers a full zero-touch provisioning feature that allows us to create a template of our devices and onboard them remotely without visiting the site."
"Even without the security orchestration, just the fact that the customer could request the firewall team to configure a job that would roll out a configuration on the firewalls and it could be deployed across all the firewalls through the FortiManager was a big improvement compared to deploying the new firewall rule on each firewall sequentially."
"Fortinet FortiManager can centrally manage all FortiGates and is effective for the deployment of updates and patches."
"There is something called zero-touch provisioning, where you can add a new device without any configuration. You just add it to FortiManager and then forget about it."
"The technical support for us is great."
"Tivoli NetCool allows us to grasp a lot of data that can be applied toward predictive analytics and auto-remediation."
"Anything is possible with Tivoli. It's quite a robust system."
"Full featured - event/fault management, performance management, topology map, discovery, RCA, event enrichment, Proviso will chart data from almost any source with a variety of aggregation options."
"It's very easy to use."
"Support is one of the best aspects of this solution. NetCool is a good product that has good flexibility. There are a lot of documents available online which is one of the best features of IBM Tivoli Suite. Whenever an issue happens, rather than going to technical support, if you find the exact issue in Google, you can get tech notes for that particular issue."
"The scalability of monitoring, the breadth of supported network components, the scale of the number of monitoring events, and the flexibility in customization make this a well-rounded product."
"The solution is a complete package; it has various useful elements including inventory management and incident management packaged inside it, and anything is possible with Tivoli since it is quite a robust system that offers a lot of useful integration capabilities."
"The feature I have found most valuable with NetCool is how it collaborates all the alarms, and then it does a predictive analysis, providing a consolidated alarm view and management."
 

Cons

"Performance issues should be improved. We have problems when we have more mobile connections than local devices. Most of us have two to three devices."
"There are a lot of bugs that need to be fixed, for example, the ZTP."
"The pricing and support could be improved."
"Fortinet FortiManager could improve them by adding more portfolio components."
"I didn't like the connectivity with FortiManager and FortiSwitch, which was buggy and annoying and had fewer features."
"Not just in FortiManager, but in any Fortinet project in general, the troubleshooting is very hard."
"The reporting details have room for improvement."
"FortiManager could improve by making it easier to port larger policy packages to the FortiGate firewalls. Sometimes, there's an issue when we install a big package of policies. If you have a couple thousand policies for FortiGate firewalls, it can take a few minutes to receive a response from the remote devices. It's only an issue when you're dealing with thousands of policies and installing them on a large number of devices."
"The solution does not have any AI capabilities."
"I think the UI should be updated and made more presentable and eye-catching. Compared to NCE in Huawei, NSN in Nokia, the UiPath and Ubiquiti, it feels very old legacy."
"This is another one of those suites glued together from a myriad of acquisitions and it shows once you get under the hood."
"Customization and integration that you need to do to make the product fit your needs is very complex. It is not a product that somebody could easily pick up without any prior training or experience."
"Tivoli NetCool is based on a Linux platform, it would be beneficial if they moved it to Windows because not everyone is acquainted with Linux."
"The installation could be simplified, and technical support could be faster."
"The solution is not user-friendly."
"From a customer perspective, it is quite an expensive solution to initially implement and then support."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The license model they use depends on the size and is not limited to the users."
"On a scale from one to ten with one being the highest price and ten being the lowest price, I would rate FortiManager's price at three."
"FortiManager isn't expensive, but its cost is dependent on which services are required."
"The solution requires you to have a license for every device, as well as for any advanced features being used, which makes it costly for high-volume users. However, for a large-scale environment with a lot of customers we have found it to be a worthwhile investment."
"The price of Fortinet FortiManager is inexpensive."
"Fortinet FortiManager can be expensive."
"For us, it is a little bit expensive."
"On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a six out of ten."
"The price of the product is too expensive."
"Licensing fees are paid on a yearly basis."
"It costs around 100k for every ten servers, which is lower than similar products from other vendors."
"Customers are required to pay a licensing fee."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Construction Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Outsourcing Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Construction Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business34
Midsize Enterprise17
Large Enterprise21
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise5
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fortinet FortiManager?
I am satisfied with the licensing cost, and I would rate it an 8.5.
What needs improvement with Fortinet FortiManager?
I think Fortinet FortiManager can be improved as the web page loading is slightly slow.
What is your primary use case for Fortinet FortiManager?
My main use case for Fortinet FortiManager is to manage multiple FortiGate devices. I can confirm that I use Fortinet FortiManager perfectly in my main use case.
What is the best network monitoring software for large enterprises?
I have worked from 1973 with all kind of systems in large enterprises across the world. And have experience with all kind of software in monitoring from infra to end to end, it depends on the funct...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Tivoli NetCool
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Black Gold Regional Schools, Amadeus Hospitality, Jefferson County, Chunghwa Telecom, City of Boroondara, Dimension Data
Claranet, Consolidated Communications, Telus, €sterreichische Bundesbahnen (€BB), Telekom Srbija, Bendigo Community Telco, Capgemini, Schweizerische Bundesbahnen (SBB)
Find out what your peers are saying about Fortinet FortiManager vs. IBM Tivoli NetCool and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
914,109 professionals have used our research since 2012.