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 have used the solution as a perimeter firewall. We are using it as an anti-ATP solution also.

The firewall features are pretty good. 

The solution has very good threat and content filtering switches.

The initial installation is fairly easy.

I'm from the sales side and therefore I wouldn't really know if there are features that are lacking.

It's my understanding that more of the current generation features could be brought in. There could be more integration with EDRs, for example.

I've been using the solution for two or three years. It hasn't been too long.

The solution is stable. It doesn't have any issues with bugs and glitches. It doesn't crash and freeze. It's very reliable.

Since we are integrators, this product gets sold to people who have a minimum 25 and up to 600 users.

At the moment, we don't plan to increase usage.

The technical support is very good. We're satisfied with their level of support. They are quite responsive and knowledgeable.

We were previously using Sophos and Watchguard.

The initial setup is not complex. It's pretty much a straightforward implementation. There aren't really any surprises.

The length of deployment differs based on the kind of policies a client would like to implement. If they are very simple policies, then there isn't a lot of work to worry about. However, if there are complex policies or multiple policies, it does take some time to get things up and running.

I didn't handle the installation personally, as I am in sales.

We have three or four people in our organization who handle maintenance.

We have a systems integrator in-house that handles the deployment.

The solution isn't too expensive.

We're integrators. We help our clients with this solution.

We're using the latest version of the solution.

I'd recommend this solution to other users. 

Overall, I would rate the solution nine out of ten.

I'm primarily using the solution for security purposes, and also for managing the network for various companies. I am deploying it for uniting management statuses, in order to be able to manage everything inside and to control security policies. It can fight against attacks to the system or for email searches. It is basically a central management security appliance.

We find it's good for managing the network and offers good defense against attacks.

Technical support is great. It's really fast.

Overall the solution is pretty user-friendly. It has a good dashboard and is pretty easy to navigate.

The pricing is excellent. It's much less expensive than Cisco.

The only thing is sometimes you have to learn with CLI. For those not familiar with CLI it can be an issue. It would be ideal if we could avoid using CLI. If you make a mistake in the command line, it's harder to detect. It would be much better if they had a user-friendly GUI.

The initial setup is complex.

I've been using the solution for five years.

The solution is very stable. You don't have to worry about bugs or glitches. I tend to wait and not upgrade to the latest version right away to ensure this is the case.

The solution is scalable. If you need to expand it, you can. We have it at a variety of networks and sites with no problem.

We have 120 users that are connected to a minimum of 80 computers and a minimum of 15 servers, which is great. The solution is working and it is still stable even across all of these devices and servers. We have multiple networks inside as well, so we are not only on one network. We set them separately, which is why the initial setup for us was quite complex. We're through with that though.

The technical support is pretty good. they're pretty knowledgeable and responsive, especially when you get to the Level 3 techs.

We previously used CheckPoint. Unfortunately, they didn't have a very good service, especially in technical support, and therefore we decided to switch.

For our organization, the initial setup was not straightforward. It was pretty complex. That's due to the fact that we had many networks to set up and many sites to take into account.

We set up the solution ourselves, although we did work closely with Fortinet as part of their bundle package.

The licensing is paid on a yearly basis.

I evaluated Palo Alto. They didn't have the complete solution we wanted. Neither did Juniper, which we also looked at. We looked into possible having Cisco, however, Cisco is too expensive. 

When we looked at Cisco, we also evaluated Meraki, which is a part of Cisco. It did not have what we needed either. 

We are using the 200E in our environment. We had 200D before.

We're not using the latest version of the solution, which is 6.4. I like to wait on new versions to see if it is stable before deploying it. I like to take my time and avoid headaches where possible.

I would recommend the product to other organizations. It's got great bundle options which make it a very good choice - and it's much cheaper than Cisco.

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 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 is a popular firewall in Turkey due to its widespread use and strong performance. Technical experts can easily be found for FortiGate, which is very important. Almost every company uses FortiGate internally. FortiGate is user-friendly and reliable, offering good performance at a reasonable cost.

You can integrate certain other services with FortiGate and use additional threat intelligence services because they allow you to combine various solutions, enhancing your overall security.

FortiGate may include AI capabilities and integrate external threat intelligence. However, version management and backup/restore operations could be improved.

I have been using FortiGate Next-Generation Firewall as a reseller for 15 years.

With high availability, this FortiGate allows one device to take over for another seamlessly in case of failure.

I rate the solution’s stability an eight out of ten.

FortiGate is scalable because it supports various models that can accommodate different dimensions. It is suitable for all types of businesses.

I rate the solution’s scalability a nine out of ten.

The initial setup is easy. The firewall setup involves more than just physical installation and basic configurations. It includes customizing specific policies and configurations tailored to the customer's needs, which can take up to two or three days for a single firewall. This process is resource-intensive both in terms of cost and time.

I rate the initial setup a nine out of ten, where one is difficult, and ten is easy.

The product is cheap.

FortiGate Firewall offers advanced threat intelligence capabilities. It allows integration with various threat services, such as Cisco Talos. If you are a customer of both FortiGate and Cisco for threat intelligence, you can integrate Cisco Talos with FortiGate, which enhances security effectiveness through Intelligence.

I recommend FortiGate for every company. It's a highly effective solution that can significantly enhance firewall security. You can easily find technical guides to help you understand its capabilities. FortiGate is known for its reliability and robust features.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

We use this product to provide network security functions to our customers.

This solution has a unique range of features that are not available with any other product.

We also appreciate that this solution is easy to maintain and manage.

We would like to see an improvement in the consistency of the product's performance levels.

We have been using this solution for around five years.

The stability of this solution has been good, in our experience.

We have found this solution to be easily scalable.

The technical support for this product is very good; they always respond to us quickly when we raise issues.

Positive

We switched to this solution because it offered the best range of features in its category.

The initial setup of this solution is very straightforward, and deployment only takes between 30 minutes to an hour.

I would rate this product a 10 out of 10, and I would recommend it to any business that is in the market for a security solution.

Our company's technical team handles the reselling part of the tool. I haven't heard of any problems related to the product.

My company's clients use the solution. The tool is not majorly used to monitor the network traffic or intrusion, so it is purely for protecting the network.

The tool is expensive for small businesses, making it an area where the tool can improve the product by making it available at a cheaper rate.

I have experience with Fortinet FortiGate IPS. My company operates as a reseller. Sometimes, we purchase products to help our company's clients who need to renew the licenses of certain solutions.

My company never had any complaints about the tool in terms of performance or stability.

My company's clients are usually small businesses, so they don't spend too much time on security and protection, meaning they use the tool to meet their bare minimum needs.

Though I have never contacted the solution's technical support, I feel that the tool offers good support since I have never heard any complaints about the product's technical team from my company's team members.

I rate the technical support an eight out of ten.

Positive

I think that my company has been using Fortinet FortiGate IPS for at least four to five years. My company has not been using the rest of the products in the market, so it is not possible for me to compare Fortinet FortiGate IPS with other solutions. So far, my company has been happy with Fortinet FortiGate IPS.

The product's initial setup phase was pretty easy because my company is familiar with the product.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

The solution can be deployed in an hour.

The tool is a bit pricey for small businesses, but it is still bearable in terms of cost.

Fortinet FortiGate IPS is used alone, so there is no need for any integrations.

The tool is not majorly used to monitor traffic or intrusions, so it doesn't provide much visibility in such areas. I am not sure whether Fortinet FortiGate IPS can be used easily for monitoring, considering that our company has many firewall tools over different networks. I am not sure whether it is possible to use the tool to log in or sign in individually.

I rate the overall tool an eight out of ten.

We use it as a security solution.

Fortinet FortiGate SWG's content is its most valuable feature.

Fortinet's licensing is high compared to other products.

I have been using Fortinet FortiGate SWG for ten years.

The product is stable, and I rate the solution's stability a nine out of ten.

A few private and government companies use Fortinet FortiGate SWGs. It is popular among enterprise customers.

The customer service team is helpful. They have good technicians.

The initial setup is easy.

Fortinet FortiGate SWG can be expensive for some customers. We recently had a project for a customer where we could not protect the cost, so we had to look elsewhere.

I recommend this solution. Fortinet FortiGate SWG is better than the market alternatives. It's easy to install and manage, and I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

We use Fortinet FortiGate SWG for firewall, antivirus, scanning, and web filtering.

The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiGate SWG are IPS and scanning. Fortinet FortiGate SWG is also easy to use.

The solution’s stability could be improved.

I have been using Fortinet FortiGate SWG for six years.

I rate Fortinet FortiGate SWG an eight out of ten for stability.

Around 60 users use Fortinet FortiGate SWG in our organization.

The solution’s initial setup is straightforward.

We implemented the solution through an in-house team.

Fortinet FortiGate SWG is an affordable solution.

I would recommend Fortinet FortiGate SWG to other users.

Overall, I rate Fortinet FortiGate SWG a nine out of ten.