Rapid7 InsightIDR vs WatchGuard Firebox comparison

Rapid7 and WatchGuard are both solutions in the Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) category. Rapid7 is ranked #26 with an average rating of 8.1, while WatchGuard is ranked #20 with an average rating of 7.6. Additionally, 95% of Rapid7 users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 95% of WatchGuard users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Aug 5, 2025

Rapid7 InsightIDR and WatchGuard Firebox are competing security products in IT security management. Rapid7 InsightIDR takes the edge in threat detection and response through its advanced data analytics and user behavior analysis compared to WatchGuard Firebox's strength in comprehensive network security features.

Features: Rapid7 InsightIDR offers robust data analytics, user behavior analysis, and integration with SIEM tools, enhancing threat detection and response capabilities. WatchGuard Firebox provides strong firewall features, VPN functionality, and network traffic management, efficiently defending the network perimeter.

Room for Improvement: Rapid7 InsightIDR could enhance integration capabilities and reduce complexity in setting up certain features. It might benefit from improved user interface customizations. WatchGuard Firebox could improve its reporting features, simplify its setup process for first-time users, and enhance its threat detection accuracy.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Rapid7 InsightIDR supports flexible, cloud-based deployment for quick setup and scalability, alongside comprehensive support services. WatchGuard Firebox requires a more hands-on setup due to its appliance-based nature but offers solid remote access options and reliable customer service with device warranties and support contracts.

Pricing and ROI: Rapid7 InsightIDR aligns its pricing with cloud-based scalability, focusing on reducing operational expenditures and improving ROI through faster incident response. WatchGuard Firebox typically features upfront hardware costs, offering enduring network protection and potentially high ROI for businesses prioritizing extensive network security.

To learn more, read our detailed Rapid7 InsightIDR vs. WatchGuard Firebox Report (Updated: August 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Rapid7 InsightIDR vs. WatchGuard Firebox

August 2025

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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

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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Asim Naeem

Principal IT Security & Compliance at IBEX Holdings Ltd

Providing comprehensive insight into alerts while working towards AI enhancement

I definitely recommend Rapid7 InsightIDR. It is becoming better, with improvements being continuously made to the product. Right now, I do not have any advice about Rapid7 for other users because every organization or user has different criteria or multiple use cases, so I refrain from commenting on that. I rate the overall solution seven out of ten.

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Rajesh Makwana

Regional Pre-Sales Engineer at Roundrobin Tech

Efficient bandwidth management and secure network access with a strong firewall

The primary use case of the Firebox mainly revolves around bandwidth management, unnecessary web blocking, application control, and protection against brute force attacks. It is also implemented for load balancing, SD-WAN, and branch-to-branch connectivity from one location to another. We also use…

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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

"The Intrusion Prevention System and the web filtering are both working well."

"There are many features packed and significant flexibility from Fortinet FortiGate in being able to do numerous things."

"Fortinet FortiGate's ease of management is the most valuable feature."

"It has upscaled our security posture, especially regarding external connectivity, because any access or connection from the company has to go through the Fortinet FortiGate firewall."

"The best features of Fortinet FortiGate include the simple user interface."

"The pricing is great and very reasonable."

"Some of the valuable features are the firewall, IPS, web filter, and gateway capabilities. Additionally, it is easy to use and flexible."

"FortiGate firewalls are user-friendly, and I like the security profiling features."

More Fortinet FortiGate pros

"I have seen that Rapid7 InsightIDR provides security to the networks and endpoints in the company."

"The solution is very scalable in terms of the licensing model."

"The technical support is a solid 10 out of 10 as they take the time to answer any questions or problems which may arise in a reasonable time frame."

"The solution's initial setup is easy."

"If you were on other solutions, you would notice that they use agents from third-party, from open-source, from a native OS, or from other tools. Here, however, it is an agent from Rapid7 itself. This adds to the solution's overall capabilities."

"User behavioral analytics allows us to pinpoint abnormal or suspicious behavior among millions of events every day."

"Simple configuration and automatically syncs to the cloud platform."

"Integration with threat modeling from the Metasploit and InsightIDR repositories."

More Rapid7 InsightIDR pros

"The most valuable features of the WatchGuard Firebox are all the security and updated features. You are able to configure the solution from the cloud platform and the application and web interface are very nice."

"The set up was quite straightforward and we handled it in-house. It took a few hours to deploy the product."

"The pricing of the solution is okay. It's not the most expensive option."

"Easy to change the model if you need more performance, with good cohesion in the whole lineup of devices."

"Regarding the reporting, I was in the Dimension server earlier today. It's very powerful. I like it. And the management features are easy to use. I like the fact that I can open up the System Manager client or I can just do it through the web if I'm making a quick change."

"It does its job very well, and it is quite easy to put to use."

"Their centralized console simplifies management for organizations with multiple Fireboxes."

"The most important feature of this solution is the SLAs."

More WatchGuard Firebox pros

Cons

"The big license options have web filtering, IDS, and a lot of other things, but it's not like they are all good."

"Areas of improvement for Fortinet FortiGate include the need for more training and certification, especially when dealing with distributors globally, which presents challenges in product availability and delivery timelines."

"Fortinet needs more memory to save the log files. We need it to save the logs on the hardware and not in the cloud. I know this feature is available in FortiCloud, but if we need this log locally, it is not available."

"I think there could be more QoS features"

"There are some problems that support cannot give you a logical reason as to why it happened. For example, I had a case where I was dealing with a WhatsApp application that was giving issues. Technical support gave more than one reason it could be giving issues, but none of them solved the problem. Eventually I solved the problem, but it was far from the solutions that support had given."

"The product does need better support in the cloud environment. It's not exactly cloud-native right now."

"The process of configuring firewall rules appears excessively complex."

"They could improve the response time and quality of support."

More Fortinet FortiGate cons

"InsightIDR is only available in a cloud version. Some of our customers prefer an on-prem solution because they want to manage the security within their environment."

"The searching feature in Rapid7 InsightIDR needs to evolve"

"It takes time for the product's support team to resolve issues, making it an area of concern where improvements are required."

"The solution's XDR agents cannot compete with the XDR solutions out there yet."

"They should add more configuration and security features to it."

"There are certain limitations with Rapid7 that I am working on."

"Cloud risk assessment is one area where I think they need a lot of improvement."

"The integration capabilities of the solution have certain shortcomings where improvements are required."

More Rapid7 InsightIDR cons

"The reporting isn't so good. If they worked to improve this aspect of the solution, it would be much stronger."

"There is no message displayed for the user on the desktop informing them that access to a web page has been blocked by Application Control."

"There is a problem with the RAM - it's eating up resources. The RAM utilization sometimes reaches up to 80% - 95%, and what we do is just restart the firewall."

"This is a great product and offers great protection but they don't hear the customers' needs. They don't make improvements as per the customers' requests."

"I'm not really impressed with the reporting side of it. It may be something I just haven't figured out very well, but it's hard to filter down on reporting of the actual valuable information that you would want. There is a lot of information out there so you have to have some kind of tool capture it and then filter through. So far, I haven't found the reporting side of the WatchGuard to be that user-friendly."

"Setup of this solution is complex, it's not plug and play."

"Since WatchGuard acquired Panda, there may be synergies in consolidating both solutions under a single name to reduce customer confusion."

"Its documentation could be improved. Sometimes, you need to search a bit longer to find what you are looking for."

More WatchGuard Firebox cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"It is not the cheapest one, but its price is very competitive."

"I think that the pricing is fair."

"Fortinet FortiGate's price can be reduced."

"They are very competitive, but we like to have the factory warranty taken care of."

"It's very affordable."

"It's very competitive."

"It's an expensive solution."

More Fortinet FortiGate pricing and cost advice

"I am sure that there are cheaper products out there, but none that meet so many of our needs whilst maintaining stability and usability."

"Licensing is by endpoint and amount of retention time (at least ours is). Default retention was one year, but we are able to push the retention further if needed. There's also a provide-your-own-S3 option for longer retention if you don't want to pay for the additional retention years in your Rapid7 agreement."

"Rapid7 InsightIDR is priced very well and is cost-effective."

"Rapid7 InsightIDR charges us based on the endpoints we connect to."

"It is more reasonably priced than other vendors."

"It is a reasonably priced solution."

"The pricing and licensing are competitive."

"I rate Rapid7 InsightIDR's price a four on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive."

More Rapid7 InsightIDR pricing and cost advice

"Very competitive pricing regarding throughput compared to other alternatives."

"The solution is cheap."

"Its cost is okay. It is not too expensive, not too low. I would rate it a nine out of ten in terms of pricing."

"The price of the WatchGuard Firebox is reasonable."

"The cost was somewhere in the vicinity of $2,000 to $3,000 for each one..."

"The price is so small that I don't pay attention to it anymore. I think we pay a few thousand dollars for two to three years, so about $100 per month. That's for all of our users. There is an additional cost if we want to go with a deeper licensing model, but we just pay for antivirus, IPS, and main product support."

"WatchGuard offers competitive pricing with attractive margins, benefiting both the company and its partners."

"We are utilizing an MSP licensing model and are content with the minimal amount spent on the devices rather than committing to long-term licensing."

More WatchGuard Firebox pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

16%

Comms Service Provider

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

15%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Government

Computer Software Company

14%

Comms Service Provider

11%

Retailer

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

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When you compare these firewalls you can identify them with different features, advantages, practices and usage a...

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What is the biggest difference between Sophos XG and FortiGate?

From my experience regarding both the Sophos and FortiGate firewalls, I personally would rather use FortiGate. I know...

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What are the biggest technical differences between Sophos UTM and Fortinet FortiGate?

As a solution, Sophos UTM offers a lot of functionality, it scales well, and the stability and performance are quite ...

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What SOC product do you recommend?

For tools I’d recommend: -SIEM- LogRhythm -SOAR- Palo Alto XSOAR Doing commercial w/o both (or at least an XDR) is a...

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What do you like most about Rapid7 InsightIDR?

During simulations or demonstrations, the tool generates alerts, providing details such as the specific application, ...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Rapid7 InsightIDR?

The product pricing is very cheap.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for WatchGuard Firebox?

We are providing our services to all WatchGuard customers in the region.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for WatchGuard Firebox?

We just use it as a secondary WiFi device. We're a small office and we needed to set up a WiFi device for a few of ou...

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What is your primary use case for WatchGuard Firebox?

We're a hospital and we use it for developing our incoming and outgoing policies, and we also use it for VPN.

See all answers

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Compared 6% of the time

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Compared 5% of the time

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Compared 5% of the time

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Compared 5% of the time

Sophos UTM vs WatchGuard Firebox

Compared 4% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Fortinet FortiGate

August 2025

Download Fortinet FortiGate product report

Buyer's Guide

Rapid7 InsightIDR

August 2025

Download Rapid7 InsightIDR product report

Buyer's Guide

WatchGuard Firebox

July 2025

Download WatchGuard Firebox product report

Also Known As

FortiGate 60b, FortiGate 60c, FortiGate 80c, FortiGate 50b, FortiGate 200b, FortiGate 110c, FortiGate, Fortinet Firewall

InsightIDR

WatchGuard Threat Detection and Response, WatchGuard Application Control, WatchGuard Data Loss Prevention, WatchGuard Gateway AntiVirus, WatchGuard Intrusion Prevention Service

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

Parsing hundreds of trivial alerts. Managing a mountain of data. Manually forwarding info from your endpoints. Forget that. InsightIDR instantly arms you with the insight you need to make better decisions across the incident detection and response lifecycle, faster.

Rapid7

WatchGuard Firebox is a high-performance firewall known for its ease of setup, offering robust security with layered protection and centralized management capabilities.

WatchGuard Firebox stands out for its intuitive management and high throughput, addressing security needs with features like VPN, web filtering, and threat detection. Its centralized control and reporting abilities, along with Active Directory integration, make it popular among varied organizations. Its user-friendly interface and ongoing updates enhance usability and reliability. However, there's a call for better cloud-based administration, scalability, and improved integration with third-party vendors.

What are the key features of WatchGuard Firebox?

Ease of Setup: Quick and straightforward installation process.
GUI: User-friendly graphical interface for simplified navigation.
VPN Features: Secure and efficient virtual private network management.
Web Filtering: Advanced filtering for safer browsing experiences.
Threat Detection: Proactive monitoring and detection of cyber threats.

What benefits or ROI should be evaluated?

Centralized Control: Streamlined management from a single point.
High Throughput: Efficient data handling and processing capacity.
Stable Performance: Consistent and reliable operational functionality.
Active Directory Integration: Seamless connection with user directories.
Customer Service: Strong support service for customer inquiries.

WatchGuard Firebox is implemented across industries to secure internet gateways and protect data in multi-site businesses. Its applications span from Unified Threat Management (UTM) and intrusion prevention to compliance support in business environments requiring secure connectivity through VPNs.

WatchGuard

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

Liberty Wines, Pioneer Telephone, Visier

Ellips, Diecutstickers.com, Clarke Energy, NCR, Wrest Park, Homeslice Pizza, Fortessa Tableware Solutions, The Phoenix Residence

Buyer's Guide

Rapid7 InsightIDR vs. WatchGuard Firebox

August 2025

Free Report: Rapid7 InsightIDR vs. WatchGuard Firebox

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