Fortinet FortiGate Reviews

We primarily use the solution for the firewall for the most part. It's to help us with security on our network.

The solution has a very good set of rules.

The customization potential is quite impressive. It can be customized based on our licensing contracts.

The initial setup was pretty simple. We didn't find it to be overly difficult to execute on.

Technical support is rather helpful.

We find the stability to be pretty good.

We didn't have any trouble setting up the solution.

We find the pricing to be fairly good.

The ease of use could be improved. 

We've been using the solution for about five years. We have been continuously working with FortiGate itself throughout that time. It's been a while.

So far, the stability has been pretty good for us. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. I'd describe the stability as reliable.

I can't really speak to the scalability of the solution, as it isn't as aspect I handle. I've never tried to do it, so I'm not sure how it works.

We have about 50 users on the solution. About one third have access to it.

We only really had one issue in the past where we had to deal with technical support. We needed some restoration of some data. It wasn't a bad experience. We were satisfied with their level of service. They seem to be knowledgeable and responsive.

In terms of the initial setup, the process was not complex at all. We found it to be very straightforward and easy. We didn't run into any issues setting everything up.

We have one engineer that handles ongoing maintenance for us when we need it.

The pricing is fair. I don't feel that it is too expensive.

I've been good with using Fortinet. It's a fine tool. 

Overall, I would recommend the solution to other organizations.

I would rate it a nine on a scale from one to ten.

We primarily use the solution for a firewall plus as an overall UTM. We do not, however, use it as an SD-WAN.

The solution is very, very easy to use.

The user interface is very nice.

The product seems to offer pretty good customization.

The configuration of the product has been very straightforward and simple.

The reporting on offer is quite good.

The initial setup is straightforward as well.

We've found the pricing to be pretty good.

Technical support from the partner has been very helpful.

The integration with third-party tools may be something that they should work on. We haven't actually tried to implement that, however.

I've been working with the solution for close to ten years. It's been at least a decade at this point. It's been a while.

We haven't had any issues with the solution's stability. It's very reliable. It doesn't crash or freeze. I can't recall experiencing bugs or glitches at all over the time I've used it. 

The scalability of the solution seems to be pretty good. We haven't had any issues in that respect.

Currently, our organization has about 125 users on the product.

While I don't have a direct line to Fortigate, I have used our partner support. They have been excellent and we are quite satisfied with the level of service we receive from them. They are knowledgeable and responsive.

The initial setup is not complex at all. I found it to be very straightforward. This was due to the fact that we had this solution procured along back in 2007 or 2008, as a smaller firewall, a FortiGate 60C.

We don't have anyone that handles maintenance full-time. It's an on-call situation. If we have issues or need maintenance, we raise a ticket and it is dealt with.

The pricing of the solution is fair. We don't find it to be overly expensive.

I've never looked at other products and therefore would not be able to really compare this solution to anything.

We are just customers and end-users of the product. We don't have a business relationship with Fortinet.

I'd recommend the solution. It's very simple and easy to use. On top of that, it offers peace of mind.

Overall, I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

We've used this solution for the guest portal for our client and we also use it to secure the network of our firm. I am the IT infrastructure manager and we are customers of Fortinet. 

I like the fact that we don't have to use our IP address and that it roams. I also like the load balancing feature which allows you to attach several internet connections and load balance.

We have an issue with the license when it expires because we're unable to use the computers. We are in the hotel industry and there's an issue with vouchers when guests come in wanting to use them. 

I've been using this solution for five years. 

It's a stable solution. We had some issues after we upgraded but on the whole it's stable. 

We don't have scalability requirements so I can't comment. 

We had some issues with the local support, particularly with regard to purchasing the subscription. It took a very long time and at one point the license had expired and it took a while to sort out. 

The initial setup is simple and doesn't take much time.  

This is an affordable solution. 

FortiGate is the most effective solution for us and it's a cheaper option to Check Point or Palo Alto which we looked at. They are both very expensive. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

We utilize the services to ensure the stability of our network and clients protection from external treats. With the recent pandemic mobile working have increased in demand and Fortinet have easily bridge that gap to continue to support employee needs.

It has provided us the ability to work remotely during the pandemic. It opens a secure connection to the office for an employee working remotely from home.

The web filtering feature and the intrusion protection system are the most valuable.

It is a resilient appliance.

Its reporting capabilities can be improved. Some out-of-the-box reports needs to be able to provide usable data for example for web monitoring and reporting or browsing patterns and details.  Some customers does not require any forensic type reporting and may not want to invest in all the features offered by the FortiAnalyzer.

I have been using this solution for the past seven years.

It is stable. 

It is scalable. There are no issues. In terms of the number of users who use FortiGate, we have only about ten users for remote working. Only selected users utilize this remote capability.

Technical support is good. If I have an inquiry or request, it is usually addressed within the same business day or within the 24 hours period as per the vendor's support agreement.

I was on a Check Point platform, and then I migrated to FortiGate. Migrating from the Check Point environment to the FortiGate environment was new for me. We rely on a vendor for support. The vendor was kind of phasing out the support of the Check Point product. That's why we switched. 

We are currently on 80D, and it was a direct upgrade. The deployment didn't take that long because it was a direct replacement or upgrade from an older appliance 60D to 80D. It was easy for the vendor to deploy because they saved the policies and other things that were in use for the older appliance and had to be migrated over to the new appliance. It was done within maybe a day or two.

We outsourced it to a local vendor, and it was deployed by the vendor. We do our own internal monitoring, and the vendor does the actual set up. So far, our experience with the vendor has been excellent in terms of response. Their technical staff is also very knowledgeable.

We just pay an affordable flat monthly fee to the vendor for the monitoring and support.

I learned about different options and their benefits and listened to vendors' proposals for migration. We evaluated pfSense, which is open source. We were trying to determine whether to go for open source as opposed to an industry-standard and proprietary product. I also engaged other vendors who offered Sophos technology and SonicWall. I trusted the vendor-supported product and considered the cost associated with the migration. The current vendor could upgrade it with no implementation cost, and we just had to pay a monthly service fee or rental. 

Based on the research, FortiGate seemed like a reasonable firewall, and it is also more or less recognized and trusted all over, so I trusted FortiGate. Overall, I was happy with the performance of the FortiGate, so I kind of stuck with that one.

I would definitely recommend this product, but there are other products in the market, such as Sophos and SonicWall, that are just as effective. 

We will be using this solution for at least the next three years. We renewed the license for three years in August of this year. We are thinking of upgrading to a newer appliance before that.

I would rate Fortinet FortiGate an eight out of ten. I am pleased with this solution and the features it offers right now. It just needs minor adjustments in terms of reporting and staying up to date with industry standards.

We use it as a firewall for securing our HQ and branch.

The product is easy to use and is stable. The SV1 functionality is a benefit. 

A feature for bandwidth monitoring and the ability to have more bandwidth testing would be useful to include in future releases.

I have been using the solution for just about a year.

We have approximately 40,000 employees and the product is very scalable. The different hardware units are quite good and are an appropriate size for enterprise-sized businesses.

They're very prompt and responsive, and very helpful. In our experience, they responded on the same day and the next day for fixes.

The installation was super easy, we were up and running in less than 50 minutes.

We did it the implementation ourselves. We used an in house team of four to do the deployment. 

Some of the software stability could improve.

I would recommend FortiGate to others.

I rate Fortinet FortiGate an eight out of ten

Our primary use case of this solution for our clients is for protecting internal networks with data center firewalls, internal segmentation and next generation firewalls. 

We are a gold partner of Fortinet.

SD-WAN, Security fabric integration, two-factor authentication, ADVPN, Dynamic routing, single pane of glas managements are great features. FortiGate is very easy to use, and to configure.

I think some improvements could be made in vulnerability scanning. I'd also like to see additional features in the authentication. They support RADIUS, LDAP  but the solution doesn't have API integration with other solutions. They have API in FortiAuthenticator, but not in the firewall and not all customers want to buy another solution. 

I've been providing this solution to clients for seven years. 

This is a very stable solution. 

This solution is scalable. They have now built hyperscale firewalls and it's very easy. Also VMs, for example, is very easy to scale, you just need to adjust the licensing. 

Technical support is very, very good. They respond quickly and provide the solution to the problem. 

I have previously used Check Point and Cisco ASA. In terms of cost and security features, Fortinet has the advantage and it's also easy to implement. Cisco and Check Point are a little bit more difficult in that aspect. 

The initial setup is simple, as with all Fortinet technologies. Deployment time depends on the situation. For small customers it takes about one to two hours. For larger companies with different kinds of firewalls in their infrastructure, it may take a day or two, it depends on the complexity of the network, the infrastructure and the size of the business. The solution is suitable for any size company. Maintenance depends on the contract with our customers, but Fortinet includes support with every license. If a customer wants support from us, we provide it. 

Fortinet offers four types of licensing - Advanced Threat Protection, Unified Threat Protection and Enterprise Protection and 360 degree Protection.  Licensing costs are dependent on the VM  or Hardware model, not per features. For example if vm or Hardware model supports 200 IPsec tunnels you can setup 200 IPsec tunnels, it doesn't matter what kind of license you have. 

I would definitely recommend this solution. 

I would rate this solution a 10 out of 10. 

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.

The purpose of this solution is to provide intrusion protection and more robust endpoint security for small offices. We are providing an enterprise solution for a small business by adding endpoint protection coupled with Intrusion Detection and Protection.  For small offices needing HIPAA compliance, we need to make sure we are providing robust protection instead of the default modem gateway provided by the ISP.

The Fortinet product provides enterprise capabilities in a small footprint at a price point that is more attainable for a small business. The product meets the IPS/IDS/Endpoint protection that small organizations need for their HIPAA and PCI compliance.  While the end user may not understand the true capabilities, the managed service provider can more easily deploy and maintain this small footprint product.

The main reason why I purchased the particular unit was based on other reviews and leadership in this space. Being able to have a VPN solution as well as integrated access points is a plus. For me, it's all about simplicity. When you look at my particular model for a managed service provider, it's basically to help simplify, protect, and remain compliant. When you're trying to implement something, it's about making sure it is simplified. This seems to fit the bill.

The product has enterprise capabilities, which means there are a ton of configurations possible.  What I'd like to see in the product is more of a branch in the box wizard deployment for those that are not as well versed in firewall and routing.  For a small business, the firewall should be able to self-configure for a Unified Threat Management configuration with 2 SSIDs for protected wireless network for internal gear and a guest wireless network for employee cell phones and guests.  I'd like to open the box, plug in the router behind the cable modem, and check a few boxes, and the rest is done automatically.  I don't want to have to build a configure VLANs, SSIDs, security protocols for each port, and try to figure out and understand all the layers in an effort to deploy a solution.  It's great to have those capabilities in case you need them, but for most of the offices I am trying to deploy these into--it should be a branch in a box.

I've only been using the solution for a few weeks. It's very new for us.

Stability has been fine. I've had no questions about the stability of it. It seems so far it is staying up. I haven't had any issues to speak of.

I haven't really pushed this product from a scalability perspective. Certainly, if you look at the performance metrics, the F series appears to have really expanded the capacity and capabilities beyond past models. If you look at 40E versus 40F, there's a fairly substantial difference. For a small office, it's going to be just fine.

I haven't reached out to technical support and therefore can't speak to their level of responsiveness.

N/A

The initial setup is complex for me due to my lack of experience with the Fortinet FortiGate product. The complexity can be a good thing, however, as there's a lot of really good features associated with it. Where it could be simplified is in having that easy deployment option, and then you can start going down and trying to get into the nitty-gritty and figure out when do you need the extra features.

Right now, I'm just in a test environment getting all the firmware up and tested. Then, once I have it tested, I'll take it to the client location and yank out their WiFi mechanism, their WiFi router, and put this in.

I'm currently handling the implementation for a client.

ROI is somewhat difficult to measure when you are mostly talking about deploying a product for endpoint security.  If your environment stays protected, then it was a good return on investment.

When you look at these endpoint security systems and firewalls, these products a few years were way too expensive for a small business. Now we have enterprise level security in a footprint that is less than $1,000.  For offices that have 10-25 computers needing protection, this is a better solution.

The good news is that Fortinet does have a good support network as well as their education academy to help someone get up to speed on their product.