Fortinet FortiGate Reviews

Fortinet FortiGate can be deployed on the cloud, hybrid, and on-premise. We use a combination of private and hybrid for the deployment.

We are using Fortinet FortiGate for parameter security, network isolation, and web filtering. 

The most useful functionality of Fortinet FortiGate is the user interface, multiple engines, and their cloud with the latest integrations. Additionally, the Security Fabric tool is very good.

Fortinet FortiGate can improve by integrating the web application firewall and the DDoS protection part of the solution. Having a WAF feature, web application firewall, and proxy together would be a good benefit.

I have been using Fortinet FortiGate for approximately five years.

Fortinet FortiGate is highly stable. It has high availability.

The scalability of Fortinet FortiGate is very good.

We have customers with 1,000 users using this solution and others with 100.

Engineers use this solution and all the end-users are connected to it. The whole organization is using the solution.

The technical support is very helpful. We had a very good experience with them.

The initial installation is straightforward, and the full process takes one to two days.

We have our own team that does the implementation of the solution.

The support subscription for the solution is annual. You are paying for support and there are two levels of support, professional and advanced.

I rate Fortinet FortiGate a nine out of ten.

We use FortiGate to protect our company network. We have a wireless plan (WLAN) environment.

The user interface is very good.

FortiGate is very simple to manage and easy to use.

This is a secure solution.

FortiGate should have a better way of detecting and managing the system memory because otherwise if the memory is too low, a system restart is required.

I have been using FortiGate and other products in the Fortinet suite for approximately two years.

It is used on a daily basis and in general, stability is okay.

There were two instances where the memory was full and the WLAN was blocked. The system had to be restarted. This may not have been a problem directly related to FortiGate. It may be that I didn't have enough to support the product. Perhaps a larger model would solve this issue.

We have approximately 80 employees that are protected by FortiGate. We have approximately 20 that work in the office, with a total of about 50 PCs.

It has not been necessary to scale beyond that.

I have never been in touch with technical support.

Prior to FortiGate, we were using Cisco for our firewall and our switches were from HP. Every five or six years, we upgrade our devices. The last time, we decided to buy Fortinet products because of a suggestion from our vendor.

Our vendor suggested Fortinet because the security is good, it's simple to use, and the price is good.

I have an external technician that manages FortiGate for the company. This person was responsible for the initial setup.

I do simpler network changes myself, such as altering ports on the firewall or the switch.

I am very satisfied with this investment. It's a good device and works very well to protect us.

This is not a cheap solution but it isn't expensive, either. It's a good solution for the right price.

FortiGate is regularly updated and my last update was within the past couple of months.

In our company, we have not needed to use any special features, so it is difficult to consider what new features I might want to see in the future.

Overall, this is a very good solution and I personally haven't had any problems with it. I would recommend that my colleagues buy Fortinet devices because they are good.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for security.

The security on offer is very good.

It's very simple to use.

They have a very good technical center.

It's, overall, a very good product.

The solution is stable.

The initial setup is straightforward.

The scalability could be better.

I've used the solution for three years. 

It's a stable solution. The reliability is good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.

The product can be scalable. However, it could be better. You are limited by the hardware.

We have more than 100 clients using this solution.

I've dealt with support in the past. I've also dealt with Palo Alto support. I find them to be very good. 

We also used Check Point and Palo Alto. Fortinet, however, scores very high against security threats, when you compare the three.

The initial setup is great. It's not complex or difficult. It's pretty simple, pretty straightforward. 

We installed it within a day with no issues. It doesn't take much time. 

We have five to six technicians that can handle deployment and maintenance responsibilities. We are all engineers that are managed centrally.

You do need to purchase a license in order to use the product.

I'd recommend the solution to other companies that want to try it out.

I'd rate it at an eight out of ten. We don't have any real challenges with it at the moment. 

I like its interface. It is a simple solution. As compared to Sophos, its interface is easier. It is easy to create a policy, and you can easily understand it. 

The integration with Active Directory is one of the good features. Most of the customers are now looking for the Single Sign-on feature. So, being able to integrate Active Directory with the firewall is useful. It is also easy.

Its reporting and pricing need improvement.

I have been using this solution for five years.

Its stability is good. It has 90% stability.

Its scalability is good.

It is more expensive than Sophos. Fortinet is overall more expensive than Sophos. The small range of Fortinet, such as 60F and 80F, is more expensive than the small range of Sophos. Sophos is cheaper. In addition, if you jump from 80F Series to 100F Series, the price doubles.

I would rate it a nine out of 10.

Most organizations use the Fortinet firewall as perimeter security at the gateway level.

FortiGate has threat protection, antivirus, and even SSL encryption and decryption. So FortiGate is primarily used for security purposes. And a few customers also use this firewall for web filtering and application control. So these are the two features for which people use FortiGate.

FortiGate is primarily a gateway,  but customers also use web filter threat protection and application control. And some people use it as a special VPN for remote access. I recently deployed one virtual firewall where they're only using the FortiGate firewall for VPN. I can't say one feature is the most valuable because it's a bundle solution. So no one uses FortiGate for just one single feature. 

Currently, FortiGate is providing SSL VPN. But they're missing some features that are available in Palo Alto's SSL VPN. Palo Alto provides a compliance check along with the VPN, and they have a very broad checklist. So Palo Alto's global protection can scan and check multiple things, and we can choose what access users can have based on compliance with policies. So I think this is one area where FortiGate can improve. Also, multi-factor authentication isn't native to FortiGate. If you want to incorporate multi-factor authentication, you have to add a secondary or third-party solution. 

I've been using FortiGate for around five years.

Before version 6.0, FortiGate's firewall performed well enough, but lately, they've introduced so many features. After that, its stability has been somewhat lacking. This is because they're constantly updating their firmware. So it was pretty stable, but nowadays, it's not that stable.

I haven't worked on the scalability side because most of the time, the pre-sales tools are relatively bigger devices. So right now, I haven't faced any issues with scalability. They have some larger devices for the data center. So if we talk about their hardware, I think they're capable of handling around 10,000 to 15,000 people on a single device. But if you go with the virtual environment, I don't think there is a problem. Fortinet has a single OS that we can deploy on whatever hardware capacity we want to configure over there or through virtualization.

Fortinet support is good. They resolve tickets relatively fast. So we've had no issues with that. And I don't know about other regions, but in my region, the salespeople working with Fortinet are strong. They're aggressively working on the sales part. So in the Pune region and the rest of Maharashtra, they're winning more contracts, and people are using FortiGate Firewall.

The management console is pretty simple, so anyone who understands networking can initially deploy the solution. But you need some good hands-on experience for advanced configuration. The amount of time required to deploy depends upon the project and also the organization. So it takes around four to five days to deploy a smaller device. And for the largest device, it takes around a maximum of two months. We do the deployment on our own. So we have a sales team, a pre-sales team, and a deployment team. Our sales team gets this and handles the sales end. After that, we come into the picture. So we do the whole migration, as well as the new implementation and everything. It should take no more than two people to deploy. If we want to migrate from one Fortinet device to another, then we use the command line. They have some script in their firmware, and we can migrate the script directly from the older firewall to the new one. So it isn't too complex.

I'm somewhat aware of the pricing, but most of the time, the pre-sales staff only defines their requirements. And we get the licenses at the time of implementation, then register and activate them. But I think Fortinet has multiple packages. They sell licenses for a period of one, three, or five years. They also have special add-on licenses for various things. So, for example, if you want to get a security rating for the firmware configuration and everything, you need to purchase an additional security license. And if you want to do some IoT-related security, you also need to purchase separate licenses. 

I rate FortiGate eight out of 10 based on the performance, stability, performance, management, rights, and features. So most people lack SSL encryption and the certificate part. Those servers are running behind the FortiGate firewall. And most of the people I've seen are not using SSL encryption over there. And even for internet purposes, they're not using deep scanning.  So my suggestion to people thinking about using FortiGate is to prepare a plan before implementation and implement those things in inbound inspection and outbound inspection. This is recommended. And also, if you have multiple band links, then you must use SD-WAN. They have SD-WAN options in the FortiGate firewall. It's a pretty good feature. So you can use that to improve your stability and performance.

Our clients' main use case for Fortinet FortiGate is for the firewall on the outside perimeter to the internet. Some of them have started using it for SD-WAN.

We are software integrators. 

Our clients like the packaging because it's an appliance. It has specific chip sets to accelerate different features in the product.

Additionally, it's inexpensive compared to some of the other technology out there.

In terms of what can be improved, they do have certain features that you can only configure through a CLI and there's no GUI interface for it. That's a pain. But it's nice that the user can do everything one way or the other.

They sometimes hide some features and if you want to enable them, you have to go in the CLI, enable the feature and configure it through the CLI. Customers, typically, like everything to be done by the GUI.

I have been using Fortinet FortiGate for at least the last 12 months.

Fortinet FortiGate is pretty stable.

It is hard to judge this year because of everybody working from home. Everybody is using up a lot of bandwidth so I'm not sure if that is a cause for some of the instability with the Forti client. The only place we've seen instability would be updating Forti client with their software called EMS.

So pushing out the client with EMS, like a client update to remote users, has proven a pain in the butt. But that could be because the end users' VPNs are maybe a little bit unstable just because of the high bandwidth demands. It is hard to determine. Maybe it is because some of these users are in remote areas, or non-urban or smaller towns, as opposed to being in an urban area where bandwidth is a little better.

We never jump ahead and say, "Oh, yes. 6.5 just came up. Let's jump on that." We'll probably just wait six months and see what goes on first. And I guess that's probably what a lot of people do because it's protecting your intellectual property and everything which that company owns.

I'm not saying that there's no instability. People will generally just wait and not jump out unless they're testing in the lab. They're not going to jump out and put the first revision that comes out on their firewalls.

In terms of scalability, it scales very well.

They have different models for different sizes. Obviously, if you buy too small and you have to upgrade, then it's a box swap. Some other vendors can just add another unit and you cluster them together. In their case it's more of just switching the box out for more performance boxes if you go too low.

Their technical support is very good.

Every time we've had to open up a case or get their help, if we surpass that person's ability, it gets escalated right away. So it's very good. It usually gets resolved within a day or two.

The initial setup is fairly straightforward.

In terms of ROI, they're inexpensive. Because they're inexpensive, they're just everywhere, in the Federal Government, schools, everywhere where budgets are fairly tight. And it is a very good product. It's a product that's built that if you need to you can add a different box and remove that feature from your main FortiGate and just run it on a different box.

So if you need to expand, you can always do it that way too.

They have good integration if you have multiple firewalls and it allows you to be able to push out policies to all of them at the same time.

Fortinet FortiGate's pricing is pretty hard to beat.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give Fortinet FortiGate a 10 out of 10.

We deployed Fortinet FortiGate SD-WAN into one of our customers, and they are satisfied. We utilized Fortinet FortiGate's data center solution; we took in three units: FortiGate ADC 1101 and 2600, and we deployed them into a customer, with no issues so far. The impact of these services on data center protection at scale is still on the launch side; the production will be up maybe this month, but so far, there are no issues.

The best features I have already seen in Fortinet FortiGate are the automatic updates, the easiness of deployment, and the capacity. These three features are the best.

A shorter response time when we have questions could improve Fortinet's first-level support quality. The knowledge base is comprehensive, so that is okay. For additional features that could make Fortinet FortiGate even better in the future, they have the SD-WAN, but I do not know if they have quantum VPN. 

I saw one brand that has a quantum random number generator, so maybe that could enhance security, along with a smaller version of their product to fit into the budgets of smaller departments.

I have been dealing with Fortinet FortiGate since April.

I think Fortinet FortiGate is overall stable.

There are a lot of people using it, maybe more than a thousand.

The technical support by Fortinet is okay; they are very responsive, and they know what they are doing. If you ask them questions, they can easily answer.

I have no experience working with any other firewalls before using Fortinet FortiGate.

I was not a part of the technical team that deployed Fortinet FortiGate for integrating SD-WAN capabilities. I am actually with the research team, and I relate the feedback I get from their experience with Fortinet FortiGate.

The pricing of Fortinet FortiGate is a little pricey from my perspective. It is expensive comparatively to its competitors. The brand has its own price concerning the licensing model of Fortinet FortiGate.

We are dealing with other vendors besides Fortinet; we are constantly searching for brands and comparing their features side by side. Besides Fortinet, we are currently dealing with Palo Alto, Sophos, and my friends also did Check Point and another Korean brand. For Sophos, we are mostly dealing with firewalls. The Sophos products we are dealing with are firewalls. For Palo Alto, we are in the same category with firewalls.

I would recommend Fortinet FortiGate to others, specifically for larger companies but not for smaller companies because of the price-sensitive Philippine market, where you would not find a lot of companies buying premium products. I do not know if I can see room for improvement in Fortinet FortiGate because I am not so techie myself. I would rate Fortinet FortiGate as a product an eight out of 10.

Our standard practice involves tailoring deployments to meet specific customer needs. Typically implemented at the network edge, FortiGate SWG addresses diverse security requirements. Use cases include securing online services, protecting internal servers in a DMZ for LAN user access, and employing a segmented approach where different firewalls safeguard distinct zones, collaborating to manage and pass traffic for unique security needs. One of the firewalls also serves as the primary filter for internet traffic.

Web filters, particularly web application controls, grant us the ability to regulate user access effectively. Among the various features, I find web application control and IPS to be the most valuable.

There's room for improvement in the interface, especially following their upgrade to version nineteen. The issue arises from the increased complexity, where tasks like defining the NAS require navigating a separate window, and regular policy configurations are done in a different window.

I have been using it for seven years.

I would rate its stability capabilities nine out of ten.

Regarding scalability, I would rate Fortinet highly, giving them eight out of ten due to the effectiveness of their new hardware, which greatly enhances scalability. We've carried out installations for a variety of setups, spanning from small to medium-sized deployments.

I would rate its technical support services seven out of ten.

Neutral

WatchGuard deserves credit for offering multiple options, including a client base and a comprehensive reporting feature, all within a unified license and toolset.

I would rate the initial setup six out of ten in terms of complexity.

The deployment can take up to a week but typically can be done in a couple of days.

We essentially customize implementations based on the customer's chosen appliance. The cost varies depending on the specific appliance they purchase. We provide coverage for whatever they acquire, and throughout the year, we pay different amounts to various vendors. The cost has increased since the update so I would rate it eight out of ten.

In terms of reliability and security, FortiGate stands out. WatchGuard excels in additional features, offering the best reporting and various configuration options. While Sophos is also strong in security, I would rate it slightly lower than FortiGate. Overall, I would rate it nine out of ten.