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Fortinet FortiPortal vs VMware Cloud Director comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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 FortiPortal
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
Firewall Security Management (10th)
VMware Cloud Director
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
68
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Management (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

Fortinet FortiPortal and VMware Cloud Director aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Fortinet FortiPortal is designed for Firewall Security Management and holds a mindshare of 1.0%, up 0.9% compared to last year.
VMware Cloud Director, on the other hand, focuses on Cloud Management, holds 6.3% mindshare, down 7.3% since last year.
Firewall Security Management
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

Andriejus Artamonovas - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers reliable log retention and monitoring with prompt customer support
Fortinet FortiPortal ( /products/fortinet-fortiportal-reviews )'s most valuable feature as a free service is the log retention for at least seven days. It is useful for our service-providing company as I manage many clients and need reminders for UTM license expiries. The service comes bundled when buying licenses, providing these features for free. Fortinet cloud also allows for basic management such as monitoring expiries and storing logs from devices for a week if configured correctly.
NiteshKumar1 - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides crystal clear dashboarding and allows you to manage and monitor your infrastructure
The overall dashboarding is very crystal clear. The ability to switch from one infrastructure to another infrastructure and get into detailed information, whether it is compute, storage network, or whatever. That helps you get a holistic view of the overall infrastructure running in your landscape. This also helps the leadership and management be aware of the right potential investment strategy by looking at the potential utilization. vCloud Director also provides ways and means through which you can make a prediction or a forecast of the infrastructure that would be needed in the future, depending on what you are currently running. That does not take away the fact that we have to be completely aware of our pipeline projects in our schedule so that you can plan your infrastructure requirements accordingly. vCloud Director provides multifold features that have been beneficial to the end users.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"From a scalability perspective, I found the solution to be completely fine...The solution's technical support is absolutely fine."
"I recommend Fortinet FortiPortal without any reservations, backed by my experience with its potent features and reporting capabilities."
"I am very comfortable with it, including it's reporting on threats and through its activities."
"The role-based access controls give us granular control over what features to present to a customer, and the integration into FortiAnalyzer is the most valuable feature."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is application control."
"The firewall and site-blocking features are valuable."
"I like the product's asset management which gives clear hardware details."
"The customer likes it for the graphs, the dynamics and the reporting functionality it offers."
"Remote console (ability to control booting and OS installation process)."
"The stability is rock solid."
"The most valuable feature of vCloud Director is the scaling architecture that they have built."
"Their technical support is great. We had some difficult cases and they were able to solve them in a timely manner."
"The initial installation and setup are very quick."
"vCloud Director is a stable solution."
"They can do any provisioning for the virtual machines. For instance, they will only see those resources if we allocate 10 Ghz database storage. The limitation is due to our setup: we need to ensure customer isolation, as vCloud Director supports multi-tenancy."
"What I found most valuable in vCloud Director is the multi-tenancy."
 

Cons

"So if it's more than a thousand, there could be some scalability issues. It becomes more complex as you go."
"It's useful for us but if it had more educational reporting, it would good. It's not necessarily lacking but it's an area that could get better."
"I find their logging a little bit trickier to manage. The logging of events is broken up into a lot of different categories. Instead of breaking up my logs into several different places, I personally like to have all the events in one spot and then filter them down. In particular, I find that troubleshooting on Fortinet takes a little bit longer just because of those functional breakups in the logs."
"The product must have in-built SD-WAN connectivity."
"The only complaint about Fortinet FortiPortal is the need for frequent firmware upgrades, as it requires constant updating due to potential security vulnerabilities."
"There can be defects in Fortinet FortiPortal when functioning at high temperatures."
"If you are a very small company or a person on your own, it's harder to get any response from technical support."
"The solution is more expensive than other products."
"The initial setup of the vCloud Director was not complex and not easy, it was in the middle range of difficulty. It could be made easier."
"The solution's pricing is high, and VMware should consider lowering it."
"If you have a deployed environment and lose it, you can't easily deploy it back with vCloud Director. Because of this reason, we don't have the data protection, disaster recovery, and container features."
"The solution's installation is difficult, and you need somebody with the solution's knowledge to do the installation."
"vRealize Orchestrator is an expensive tool."
"The initial setup is not straightforward; it can be complicated. The deployment can take one to two weeks."
"The tool's price is one of the challenges we faced with the solution, making it an area requiring improvement."
"Technical support is something that we've had problems with in the past. Across all the VMware solutions we have not always had the best response from support. To be fair a lot of the issues that came up for us have been quite niche but it seems that in terms of release cycles they introduced a lot of bugs and it's a lot of stuff that support generally has to work quite hard on. There have been cases when we've logged critical priority issues and not had responses in time. I think support is something that can be worked on."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Fortinet FortiPortal is expensive in Pakistan."
"Fortinet FortiPortal is relatively expensive, but being an industry-leading firewall, it does come with a cost."
"The price of the solution is reasonable."
"The solution is quite expensive."
"On average, it tends to be cheaper than other enterprise solutions."
"The licensing costs attached to the solution make it an expensive product."
"Fortinet FortiPortal is not expensive."
"I am satisfied with the pricing for this solution."
"We pay monthly for all of the licenses."
"The solution is costly, efficient, and robust versus alternative solutions."
"The licensing cost is high for vCloud Director. It is mostly a perpetual license."
"It runs our company in the millions of rand every month."
"The solution's price is the market standard and depends on usage."
"My company has no problems with the pricing of the product as we got good discounts from VMware."
"vCloud Director is priced higher than other solutions, such as Nutanix."
"On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing eight and a half to nine out of ten."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Media Company
7%
Computer Software Company
20%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Government
10%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Fortinet FortiPortal?
The firewall and site-blocking features are valuable.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fortinet FortiPortal?
The cost of Fortinet FortiPortal is affordable, particularly for our subscription. Compared to other solutions like Cisco, it's significantly cheaper. I would rate the price as a six out of ten.
What needs improvement with Fortinet FortiPortal?
The only complaint about Fortinet FortiPortal is the need for frequent firmware upgrades, as it requires constant updating due to potential security vulnerabilities. With a proper license, the abil...
Would you change anything about VMware vCloud Director if you could?
VMware vCloud Director works very well and there are not many things that I would like to see changed. However, a single thing comes to mind when I think of improvements and that is integration. In...
What is the biggest improvement you saw at your company after you started using VMware vCloud Director?
For my company, VMware vCloud Director noticeably increased operational efficiency. When I started working here a few years ago, my organization was using another cloud management tool. We switched...
Is vCloud Director convenient for building applications?
When it comes to building applications, vCloud Director offers you various methods to create cloud-ready ones. For example: Your DevOps team is supported through Infrastructure as Code services w...
 

Also Known As

FortiPortal
vCloud Director
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Black Gold Regional Schools, Amadeus Hospitality, Jefferson County, Chunghwa Telecom, City of Boroondara, Dimension Data
MicroStrategy, National Democratic Institute, and NYSE Euronext.
Find out what your peers are saying about AlgoSec, Tufin, FireMon and others in Firewall Security Management. Updated: June 2025.
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