Fortinet FortiGate Reviews

We are a system integrator and Fortigate is one of the firewalls that we implement for our clients. I am a solution architect.

Our primary use for this firewall is the IPS.

One of the things I like best is the ease of configuration.

Management-wise, it is very good.

The most important feature, normally for small business customers, is link load balancing.

The firewall throughput is very good. Most of the customers in this region use FortiGate for their data center firewalls, and the main reason is because of its high throughput.

Fortinet is good in terms of security and threat prevention, but they are not leading. For example, the signature database can be improved.

If they had better integration with security products, such as Cisco ISE or Rapid Threat Containment, then it would be an improvement. Customers that have ISE implemented are able to provide inputs based on malicious traffic, and then ISE will automatically block it.

We have been working with Fortinet FortiGate for the past two years.

Stability-wise, they are good at the job of a data center firewall. For a perimeter firewall, it is for smaller customers, preferably.

The scalability depends on the design and how it was done. You have to think about the next five years. We get lots of new updates on the older versions and if the product is still in support then the new features will be included.

The responsiveness of the support depends on the level of support that you have. If you have premium support then you will get immediate access to them. Otherwise, you have to wait for some time, perhaps an hour, before they get back to you.

On the technical details, there are different levels of access. Once you have engineer access then most of the cases are going to get resolved, or otherwise, they will go to their development team.

In addition to FortiGate, we are using Cisco SFR.

The initial setup is straightforward. We have field configuration guides that we follow and you don't need to have much in-depth knowledge to set it up initially. However, performing the fine-tuning requires that you have proper training on the device.

Deploying the firewall for a new customer will be completed within two to three days, or perhaps a week at the most.

Compared to vendors like Cisco and Palo Alto, FortiGate is the cheapest. However, they only have a small segment of the market. Fortinet is trying to appeal to small and medium-sized customers, and I think that their prices should be a little lower for this segment.

On the high-end devices, it is fine. However, the problem is that their subscription price is very high. If you purchase a one-year subscription with the hardware and then you want to renew for the second year, it is very costly. Your whole price ends up being very high.

As a system integrator, we sell a lot of similar solutions from a variety of vendors. We have found that the Fortinet firewall has a much better throughput than that of the other vendors.

If a large customer is looking for a perimeter firewall then we suggest another vendor, such as Check Point or Palo Alto.

FortiGate is a product that we recommend and we have migrated many customers from other vendors. FortiGate is a better option, although small customers don't care much about security. They only care about basic security. There are only a very few who are really concerned about it and most of them don't have a proper IT group in their company. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We are resellers. We provide products and services to our customers.

It's not just one product. We have been using and installing different kinds of solutions for more than ten years.

I do remember that, of course, the interface was good. It's intuitive, and when we installed it together with access points, we could manage them from one place or from the cloud or from FortiGate itself. 

It's quite comfortable to handle the FortiGate firewall. The fact that we received reports by email, also good. All in all, it's quite a good product, of course, a very good product.

If it would integrate everything in one place then it would be an improvement.

I wanted to buy some switches and integrate them into the system, but we couldn't find anyone here in Israel to provide them or to provide support. Also, we could not get a replacement if something needed to be replaced. 

We wanted to use one vendor to do everything from one managed central management point. It may be something they offer now, but I am not sure.  

It would be helpful if we can have one easy place to manage, or from the cloud to all the devices that are at the client's location. This is the backbone, the switches, the access points, FortiGate, everything. 

Sometimes you do need to know some CLI commands, so it's a bit harder for technicians or new people that don't know it. 

So, if you could do everything without that, it would be much easier when you do V-LANs.

We have been using this solution for a few years.

We are working with several versions because we install them for our customers.

It's a stable product.

It fits for small and medium-sized companies. Regarding the very big ones, I don't know, I'm not in the enterprise market. But for our clients that are offices or companies that are sized between 20 users and 300 users, it's okay. It's good for them.

When I contacted technical support a few times, they were good.

Previously, we worked with Check Point.

They are both good products that are easy to use and have good support.

They're both good. I use them both, it depends on the customer, and what their requirements are. It also depends on which would give you the best value for the money at the time. I don't know how to say which one is better as a firewall. 

The initial setup is easy.

It's an expensive solution. The price should be lower.

In the beginning, I would be the one who would install them, but later it will be our technicians.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Unlike Cisco, which is expensive, or Sophos, which has performance issues, Fortinet offers a good product with no bottlenecks.

The UTM and security features are the solution's most valuable aspects.

It's very fast and easy to configure.

The solution is extremely user-friendly.

The graphical interface is great.

Now, we are able to optimize the bandwidth. We have the level of control to be able to block specific sites - like YouTube, Facebook etc.

The performance and speed are aspects of the solution that could always be improved upon.

We've been using the solution for the last two years.

The solution is very stable. We haven't experienced any issues in the last two years. It's reliable. There aren't bugs or glitches. It works well.

We have 400 users covered under the firewall and 50 employees. We've never had issues with scaling. It shouldn't be a problem. However, it's not something we actively measure.

We plan to increase usage and to continue to use the product for another three years. After that we may upgrade to a new Fortinet product or seek out a new solution, depending on the landscape at that time.

We haven't really faced any technical challenges. We just install it and it runs perfectly. Therefore we don't really have any experience with technical support.

Previously, maybe five to seven years ago, I had Cisco. We moved firewalls due to the fact that the renewal cost on Cisco was so high. At the time, we moved to Sophos. It was very good on the UTM side. However, there were performance challenges. That's why we switched to Fortinet. The internet speed is okay and there are no bottlenecks or major challenges.

The initial setup is not complex. It's pretty straightforward. 

It's pretty simple for us as we're very familiar with the product. Every year we do a minimum one or two million dollars of business with Fortinet. At this point, my team is very experienced. 

It's very easy to migrate from other solutions and we can migrate within one day.

It's pretty plug-and-play. You can handle everything in an hour or two and then you can do the testing. It's very easy.

We handle the implementation for our clients as we're Fortinet partners and well versed in the product.

We received this solution for free because we are one of the leading and exclusive partners for Fortinet in Uganda.

We're partners with Fortinet.

I'm not sure of the exact version of the solution.

Overall, I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. It's offered us a very stable VPN and we can access it from anywhere in the world. We're not facing any challenges whatsoever.

I'd happily recommend Fortinet to other organizations. It's one of the best products out there.

We primarily use this solution as a firewall.

It's our main firewall, but we're planning to replace it with a pfSense for reasons I will discuss.

It's super reliable. I don't think I've ever had a reliability issue with it. Within the four years that I've been using it, maybe two or three times, resetting the firewall was what solved the problem. It's been super, super solid. I never have to think twice. If I ever experience a problem, the firewall is the last thing I think about. I never need to check it because it's never the problem. It's just super solid. It's also pretty robust. I know that there are more robust solutions out there, but not by a lot.

In the enterprise proprietary world, Fortinet, in my experience, considering its cost and reliability (maybe they could bring the price down or maybe they could make more plans), I honestly don't think that there is much room for improvement. I think it's a pretty good solution for anyone who is looking for a proprietary solution. I wouldn't look anywhere else.

Cisco, for example, is probably way overpriced. Fortinet on the other hand, one of their strong sides is that they have an all-encompassing solution with a very reasonable price point. Cisco and other brands are a little bit more modular — to get everything you'd have to buy a lot of different packages.

An automated guide feature or templates that you could pick and choose would be a nice addition.

It's definitely not as easy to look at traffic as I would like. Sometimes when I'm trying to see what traffic has been blocked or what traffic has been passed, it's not as easy as I would like to filter it out or to monitor bandwidth.

The monitoring is not as good as it could be. It could be a lot easier to understand. For example, I was trying to figure out, in a given timeframe, how much was downloaded off of a certain interface and I didn't really understand how I could get that information or if it was even available. I was searching the documentation online and I couldn't even figure it out. Monitoring and reporting could be better; It's very good, but there's definitely a lot of ways to improve it.

I have been using Fortinet FortiGate for four years.

Fortinet FortiGate is super stable, one hundred percent. Just works 24/7 without any issues like you would expect from an enterprise product.

I know that it's scalable, but I don't actually have any experience regarding scalability. It's probably not as scalable as pfSense because pfSense is based on open hardware platforms. I definitely know that proprietary platforms usually tend to be less scalable because they're more constrained with licensing. The scalability in my opinion would be decent, satisfactory, but I believe pfSense is probably more scalable. I know that there are a lot of big corporations like Google and others that use pfSense. I don't know the details. I'm just giving my educated guess.

I personally prefer pfSense as it's open-source and you only have to pay a minimal fee for support. But for people who want that platform, I think it's a great solution. If I wasn't using pfSense, I would definitely go with FortiGate.

The two products are completely different. If you're using pfSense, you're basically using the entire open-source world — so you're based on FreeBSD, you're using Snorts, everything is open-source. It's very easy to make modifications and to figure out what's going on. You're not dependent on your single company's documentation, there's a huge user base. It's very easy to modify and extend. You can see what's going on — it's very transparent in that sense. It's probably a little bit more manual. With pfSense, You have to put in a little bit more effort to get things done, but, in the end (aside from the huge cost savings), you get all the features that are available in an enterprise firewall for just the price of support, which is also very minimal.

If you need to make any tweaks, you can do it all yourself. If you need to tweak ciphers for SSL for compliance (for PCI, for security compliance) it's not a difficult thing to do; it's a fairly trivial task.

I didn't set it up initially, but I did set up a lot of things from scratch. I think it could be more simple. When you're looking at a proprietary solution, usually it's aimed for end-users and they just want to do point and click. I believe in certain aspects, pfSense was simpler. I think there's maybe just a bit of a learning curve, but I guess you would experience that with any platform.

I think that the pricing is fair.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Fortinet FortiGate a rating of nine.

Other than the price and the lack of extensibility and transparency (which is inherent in any proprietary platform); if you're going to compare it to pfSense, then I would not give it a nine. I would give it an eight, and I would give pfSense a 10. pfSense has its drawbacks, but not that many, in my opinion. 

Take the time to learn the platform and you won't run into trouble later. That's my advice.

Other than that, it's super solid, super reliable. It does the job.

We are system integrators, and this is one of the products that we implement for our clients.

The primary use case of this solution is as a firewall, with advanced capability features for sandboxing, for preventing ransomware and other related threats. 

The most valuable features are the possibility of having one fabric for switching on security.

They have the feature where the fabric and the security fabric can be extended. That gives us visibility as a single pane of logs for many of the activities.

I would like to see a more intuitive dashboard.

Technical support can improve in knowledge sharing and they can implement better.

The dashboard appearance needs to be more refined. It has to be smoother and more customer-friendly.

As the cloud is more prominent and more are moving towards the cloud, people are used to certain ease of doing things, and less complicated.

I understand that a firewall is a technical product, but we can try to make it a better customer experience which will increase usability with good results.

I have been working with this solution for three years.

Fortinet FortiGate is a stable solution. We have not experienced any issues.

It's a scalable product.

Technical support is fairly good. We are able to get our message through, they look into our issues and provide us with a solution without any hassle.

I would rate technical support a seven out of ten.

To be better, they would need responsive pre-set activities to be more refined. They need to be in a position to give more modular solutions or more pre-defined solutions that are present.

We did not have any problems with the implementation. 

The initial setup was straightforward.

The Indian market is different than the European and American markets. When you compare, they need to be a bit more aggressive on pricing.

We would recommend this firewall at any given point in time.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We have both on-premises as well as virtual firewall servers. We have quite a few FortiGate firewalls as part of our infrastructure. We are using Check Point more from the perimeter perspective. It is only there on the perimeter.

The virtual firewall feature is the most valuable. We have around 1,500 firewalls. We did not buy individual hardware, and the virtual firewalls made sense because we don't have to keep on buying the hardware. 

FortiGate is easier to use as compared to Checkpoint devices. It is user friendly and has a good UI. You don't need much expertise to work on this firewall. You don't need to worry much about DCLA, commands, and things like that.

FortiGate is really good. We have been using it for quite some time. Initially, when we started off, we had around 70 plus devices of FortiGate, but then Check Point and Palo Alto took over the place. From the product perspective, there are no issues, but from the account perspective, we have had issues. 

Fortinet's presence in our company is very less. I don't see any Fortinet account managers talking to us, and their presence has diluted in the last two and a half or three years. We have close to 1,500 firewalls. Out of these, 60% of firewalls are from Palo Alto, and a few firewalls are from Check Point. FortiGate firewalls are very less now. It is not because of the product; it is because of the relationship. I don't think they had a good relationship with us, and there was some kind of disconnect for a very long time. The relationship between their accounts team and my leadership team seems to be the reason for phasing out FortiGate.

I have been using FortiGate for the last four to five years.

It is stable.

I currently have about 36 to 40 devices that are being used. We use a certain number of devices from business to business.

We were not getting proper support from Fortinet. That's the reason we had to phase out FortiGate.

We implemented it on our own. It took around one hour. We have one or two engineers for its deployment and maintenance. 

We installed FortiGate four or five years ago. We are just phasing out FortiGate and not doing new installations of FortiGate. Whichever model is getting end of life, we're just replacing it with a Palo Alto device. We can use it in the future, but I don't see any presence of Fortinet in my company at this time. I see a lot of push from Palo Alto, Check Point, and other vendors, but I don't see Fortinet around at all.

With the current COVID situation, I don't know how FortiGate behaves when working from home, which is an entirely different concept. In other firewalls, we create HIP profiles and similar stuff, but I am not sure how FortiGate works in such an environment.

I would definitely recommend this solution, but I think Fortinet has to first create a presence. That is more important. Nobody says anything bad about the product. The product is still widely being used.

I would rate Fortinet FortiGate an eight out of ten.

Fortigate's threat intelligence service has improved how our organization functions.

Fortigate's most valuable feature is that it doesn't need a push policy when writing rules.

Fortigate's hardware capacities could be improved. In the next release, Fortigate should include SSL decryption.

I've been using FortiGate for almost seven years.

Fortigate's stability is good.

The initial setup was easy and took around half a day.

Fortigate's pricing is competitive.

I would give Fortigate a rating of eight out of ten.

My primary use of FortiGate is for general enterprise modeling.

The most valuable features are the enterprise modeling and the simple interface.

The cloud features and integration could be improved. There are also sometimes problems connecting the endpoint protection to the firewall.

FortiGate is a stable product.

FortiGate is scalable.

FortiGate is very easy to set up

If the customer is looking for SD-WAN, it comes free with FortiGate.

I would give this solution a rating of nine out of ten.