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Fortinet FortiGate pros and cons

Vendor: Fortinet

4.2 out of 5

592 reviews
92% willing to recommend

Pros & Cons summary

Fortinet FortiGate offers scalable SD-WAN capabilities that reduce operational costs and ensure seamless connectivity. Its comprehensive security features, including threat protection, are cost-effective for large networks but may be less accessible for smaller organizations due to pricing. Despite user-friendly management, concerns exist about its logging, reporting, and stability when multiple features are enabled. Slow technical support and frequent firmware bugs are notable drawbacks impacting user experience.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

SD-WAN capabilities are frequently praised for reducing operational costs and ensuring seamless connectivity without downtime.

Fortinet FortiGate is recognized for its scalability, making it suitable for managing networks of various sizes, including extensive multi-site deployments.

Users appreciate Fortinet FortiGate's robust set of security features, including threat protection, intrusion prevention, and web filtering, enhancing network security significantly.

Fortinet FortiGate is noted for its cost-effectiveness, providing advanced security features and functionalities at a more affordable price compared to competitors.

The administration of Fortinet FortiGate is user-friendly, contributing to reduced time and effort for deployment and management, leading to substantial ROI for organizations.

CONS

Fortinet FortiGate's technical support response time is considered inadequate and slow, impacting user experience negatively.

There are concerns regarding Fortinet FortiGate's frequent firmwares updates introducing bugs, resulting in instability and the need to revert to older versions.

Pricing and licensing models of Fortinet FortiGate are highlighted as expensive, making it less accessible for smaller organizations.

Fortinet FortiGate's logging and reporting capabilities need enhancements to provide more detailed insights without requiring additional tools.

Fortinet FortiGate faces challenges with stability when multiple features are enabled, affecting overall performance.

Fortinet FortiGate Pros review quotes

Manager, Information Technology Operation/Presales at TechMonarch

Jun 13, 2025

The best features of Fortinet FortiGate include its easy configuration and user interface.

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Solution Architect at airtel

Jun 18, 2025

The main benefits that Fortinet FortiGate brings to customers include that if you're going for a single fabric with core switches, access switches, and APs, compared to legacy Cisco or Aruba, the Fortinet FortiGate does not require a controller for the access points.

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RB

Manager, Information Technology at a consumer goods company with 11-50 employees

Jun 11, 2025

Fortinet FortiGate is pretty robust. The updates and firmware releases are pretty timely. They have a good product revision and review system, so they are constantly reviewing their configuration and the different mechanisms that are used on Fortinet FortiGate.

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Fortinet FortiGate

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Learn what your peers think about Fortinet FortiGate. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: June 2026.

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Bernard Samontanes

Staff Infrastructure & Security Engineer at Mozn Systems

Jun 12, 2025

The best feature of Fortinet FortiGate is the IPS or IDS implementation. I appreciate most the agility or the flexibility to create hashes to block incoming threats, and I can integrate with third-party threat intelligence with our FortiGate.

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Aymar Tala Defo

Cyber Security Analyst at a educational organization with 10,001+ employees

Jun 11, 2025

One of the best features of Fortinet FortiGate is that it's a very powerful equipment that gives many security features in a single box with good performance, and the user interface is friendly to use and configure.

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PD

IT Consultant at a tech services company with 1-10 employees

May 22, 2025

The scalability is easy with switches and access points that are basically plug-and-play for the most part.

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JK

IP Network Security Specialist at MTN Ghana

Aug 3, 2025

Since deploying FortiGate 3401E clusters, we have observed: Dramatic Reduction in Risk Exposure—blocked peer-to-peer and unauthorized applications (e.g., BitTorrent) at the perimeter and east-west segments, eliminating a major source of malware and bandwidth abuse.

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Manager at Volta River Authority

May 28, 2025

Stateful packet inspection is valuable. It also does SSL packet inspection. It is able to provide a VPN for remote users with secure connectivity.

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Chief Technology Officer at Litmus

Mar 2, 2026

In my opinion, the main benefits that end users receive from Fortinet FortiGate are that the return on investment is good, whatever money we invest in Fortinet FortiGate product, we get it back in two years' time, it is pretty secure, having very robust hardware and software, updates are pretty good, and in the event of an issue, updates are pretty quick.

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Mattia De Lillo

Senior Systems Engineer at a consultancy with 11-50 employees

Dec 9, 2025

What I appreciate the most about Fortinet FortiGate is that it has a very large integration using Fabric, which they call Fabric Connectors.

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Fortinet FortiGate Cons review quotes

Manager, Information Technology Operation/Presales at TechMonarch

Jun 13, 2025

One drawback of Fortinet FortiGate is that they provide two types of models: one with a hard disk and another without. The model without a hard disk has very low ROM where you can store very few logs, after which you need to upload it to the cloud or purchase a firewall with SSD. That's the only drawback.

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Solution Architect at airtel

Jun 18, 2025

I would rate the technical support of Fortinet FortiGate as a five because it is not as strong as Cisco. Additionally, the turnaround time is very high compared to Cisco.

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RB

Manager, Information Technology at a consumer goods company with 11-50 employees

Jun 11, 2025

We haven't tapped into most of the functionalities that Fortinet FortiGate offers because we're using it just for gateway security. One of the things that I would prefer is a more expansive use of their analyzer. They could do more work on FortiAnalyzer in terms of the data and the information coming from it.

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Fortinet FortiGate

Free Report: Fortinet FortiGate Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about Fortinet FortiGate. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: June 2026.

899,283 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Bernard Samontanes

Staff Infrastructure & Security Engineer at Mozn Systems

Jun 12, 2025

They have recently acquired a CNAP solution which should be integrated into FortiGate boxes natively for protection at any application layer. Since Fortinet FortiGate has Layer 7 protection, they should integrate that as soon as they can for threat detection and network detection.

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Aymar Tala Defo

Cyber Security Analyst at a educational organization with 10,001+ employees

Jun 11, 2025

FortiGate can only retain logs for 24 hours or 7 days. I'm not sure if it holds them for a longer period, such as for a month. It will be useful for assessing our strategy and monitoring our environment without investing in FortiGate Analyzer. It would be beneficial if Fortinet could enhance the FortiGate by providing more statistical and monitoring views for a longer timeframe, rather than requiring access to FortiGate Analyzer.

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PD

IT Consultant at a tech services company with 1-10 employees

May 22, 2025

For Fortinet FortiGate, their code development would definitely be something they need to improve on to reduce vulnerabilities that need to be patched.

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JK

IP Network Security Specialist at MTN Ghana

Aug 3, 2025

In the past six to seven years with the Fortinet FortiGate, we've had two major downtimes, both caused by firmware upgrades.

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Manager at Volta River Authority

May 28, 2025

I wish that they could integrate zero-trust technology into Fortinet FortiGate. I am not sure whether it has been done already, but if they could implement that, it would help significantly.

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Chief Technology Officer at Litmus

Mar 2, 2026

Fortinet FortiGate firewall is good, but other products like the switching part and all that fabric, in handling very audio-video traffic, sometimes it struggles on the switching part, but on the routing part, it is fine.

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Mattia De Lillo

Senior Systems Engineer at a consultancy with 11-50 employees

Dec 9, 2025

Sometimes I experience stability issues, but sometimes they are related to hardware not functioning properly or related to a software bug.

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Show 10 more reviews (out of 549)

Product Categories

Product Categories

Secure Web Gateways (SWG)

Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS)

Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) Solutions

Unified Threat Management (UTM)

Firewall Solutions for Enterprises

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Product Categories

Product Categories

Secure Web Gateways (SWG)

Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS)

Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) Solutions

Unified Threat Management (UTM)

Firewall Solutions for Enterprises

Popular Comparisons

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