Fortinet FortiGate Reviews

The primary use case of this solution is for the integral firewall, monitoring, and all types of security.

The most valuable features are security and vision, and all of the UTM functionality.

The user interface needs a bit of upgrading.

Pricing could be better. 

Customers are looking for 24/7 protection, but it's not as critical in the end. The pricing is preventing them for adopting it so they should be competitive.

I have been using this solution for approximately six years

I am working on the most up-to-date version.

It's very stable, it can take a lot.

It's scalable and we have not had any problems at all.

Technical support is very good. I have no issues with them.

Previously, we were using another solution. Fortinet FortiGate IPS, was recommended to us, and once we tried it we liked it and we stuck with it.

I am not happy with WatchGuard.

For me, after using it for six years, the initial setup is easy.

They are more expensive than others.

If you are looking for a lifestyle solution, then FortiGate is my choice.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We use it to protect our or our customers' full environment by using features such as IPS signatures, VPN, endpoint protection, and antivirus.

The application control features, such as Facebook blocking and Spotify blocking, are the most valuable.

The license renewal process, annual renewal price, and the web application firewall features should be improved.

I have been using this solution for two years.

It has been very stable and reliable. We are comfortable with its stability.

It is good enough for us. We have about 15 employees who use this solution.

I would rate them a nine out of ten.

The set up was a little complex, but the interface and the process are user friendly.

The license is too expensive to renew. The license renewal process is also complex. 

I would advise others to use the documentation. The official documentation is very comprehensive and complete. I use the Cookbook Reference Guide.

I would rate Fortinet FortiGate an eight out of ten. 

We use this firewall as part of our security solution.

The most valuable feature is the ease of configuration.

There are a lot of known issues in some newer versions of the FortiGate operating system, so there is room for improvement with that. One of the problems I was having was with user mapping, and it is an issue for which I have escalated tickets with Fortinet support.

Having the newer features work in the older, more stable versions of the product would be great. Some of the new features might really help a lot, but there are problems with stability.

I have been working with FortiGate for approximately two years.

There are a lot of new features built into newer releases, but there are not very stable. 

The Fortinet technical support is awesome. They're handling my problem quickly and doing it well.

The price is okay.

I have compared solutions from other vendors including Palo Alto.

This is a good product, however, there is always room for improvement.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

This firewall is an antivirus, protects against spam, and is an IPS.

The most valuable feature is the web filter.

The performance is fine.

Some of the features in the graphical user interface do not work, which requires that we used the command-line-interface. We have problems with that.

Log retention should be greater than 24 hours.

I have been using FortiGate for about eight years.

The complexity of the initial setup depends on the implementation. There are some that are very simple, whereas others are complex.

I would rate this solution a ten 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.

We primarily use the solution for network security and security next-generation firewalls.

The solution is quite user-friendly. 

We find that the system interface is simple to navigate.

The initial installation is very straightforward.

There are some cloud-based features that could be much more flexible than they currently are.

It's my understanding that they are currently working on improving the cloud solution quite substantially.

I've been using the solution for five years.

The solution is very stable. It doesn't have bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.

We find the solution to be quite scalable. If your organization needs to expand this solution out, you shouldn't have any problems doing so.

We have two or three different locations and have between 50 to 200 users amongst those locations.

The technical support is very good.

Most of the time, whenever a ticket is opened and we reach out to support on behalf of our customers, they offer good advice and are very responsive. We're satisfied with the level of service we're provided. 

The implementation is not complex. It's very straightforward to set up and does not take a lot of time to deploy everything.

That said, I did not handle the implementation myself, so I can't speak to more technical aspects of the job.

We had four or five resources that assist in network security and they all helped with the deployment.

I don't handle the pricing side of the product and therefore can't speak to anything in regards to the licensing or costs.

Although we largely handle on-premises deployment models, we have suggested cloud versions to our clients recently.

We are a solution-providing company, and we are offering products to our customers.

Although we really enjoy the solution, there's a lot of very interesting competition in the market. The competition is huge. As a partner of the product, we get a lot of questions we have to answer, and, to be honest, this solution isn't as strong in some areas as others.

That said, we would recommend the solution to others. 

Overall, I'd rate the 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.

Typically, we use Fortinet FortiGate with edge devices for businesses. 

We also use them to integrate with a SIEM product and we use it for detailed analytics.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the analytics.

Quality control on their firmware versions needs improvement. When they introduce new firmware, there tend to be bugs.

I would like the licensing price to be better. It would be nice if it were less than 25 percent of the hardware costs.

I have been using this solution for fifteen years. We are an MSSP.

The stability is good.

With respect to scalability, it's good.

We have 15 people using this solution in our organization.

We contact technical support almost daily. They have good support.

The initial setup was not straightforward but not too complex. It's a bit of both.

For our organization, the licensing costs are approximately $7,000 per year.

Before choosing the Fortinet FortiGate, I evaluated other solutions.

I would rate Fortinet FortiGate a nine out of ten.

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 used FG-90D as UTM device to protect some users and servers, and also to enable inter-vlan routing with advanced security policies inside our lab zone. Also used FG-500D in transparent mode in front of Cisco ASA for advanced and high performance protection by applying IPS, AV, AntiSpam, App.Control and DoS-protection profiles.

We have better manageability: opening and closing ports/services, adding addresses is done very quickly (can be done in single page of the web GUI).

It offers outstanding reporting tools when coupled with FortiAnalyzer (Fortinet's log collector and reporting tool) help meet compliance (there are PCIDSS, HIPAA and many more report types).

Better security posture: safe web surfing, less spam and viruses in incoming email messages, very granular AppControl, blocking vulnerability exploitation attempts and traffic anomalies by IPS, preventing DoS attacks by DoS policies.

Good VPN, both IPSEC and SSL (web-mode, tunnel-mode). An engineer/network administrator has tools to debug VPN issues that can occur during tunnel setup with other vendors' equipment.

SD-WAN feature at no cost. This is really great feature for remote locations (branch offices) and HQ, application steering between many ISP links becomes a simple task. Steering can be done dynamically by measuring link quality (latency, jitter, packet loss, available bandwidth).

Wi-Fi and Switch controller at no cost. FortiSwitch and FortiAP can become a kind of port extender of the firewall, all its ports can be referenced in firewall policies. When you have such management plane consolidation it gives you a simpler way to operate.

Security Fabric Framework is helping in analyzing sudden and rapid changes in whole infrastructure, and gives the ability to simplify daily operations (e.g. address objects synchronization between all firewalls in Fabric, estimating overall security rating, single-sign-on for admin access and many more)

Single Sign On support with deep LDAP integration (several variants for environments with different scales), RADIUS authentication.

Can work as transparent and explicit web-proxy, the last option supports Kerberos authentication which requires no agents installed on any windows server.

Human readable firewall policies with editable security policies and
addresses in single page. This is very useful and time saving feature.

Firmware upgrade process is very simple, even for cluster configurations it is fully automated by default.

Straightforward SNAT and DNAT; you may work in two ways: with Central NAT rules configuration and by applying translation directly inside firewall policies.

Bulk CLI commands are uploaded via gui in script file (portions of config file).

VDOMs are very useful when you need to grant admin role to clients separately. VDOMs in FortiGate can be represented in FortiAnalyzer's ADOMs (administrative domain), which can have different log storage policies, event handling and alerting configurations. You can create one VDOM working in NAT/Route mode, and another VDOM working in Transparent mode.

If you don't want to create and use second VDOM you can still transparently inspect traffic at layer 2 level while having only one VDOM in NAT/Route mode. This is achived by configuring Virtual Wire Pair ports that work like a separate bridge.

Ability to capture packets going through any interface of device (and VM too). You can set number of packets, filter out packets by IP and port number for particular troubleshooting purposes, then download a .pcap file from web gui and analyze it in your favorite programm.

Advanced routing (RIP, OSPF, BGP, PBR). It gives you a seamless and simple integration into a large network.

IPS, AV, Web Filter, AppControl profiles are working very well.

SSL Inspection and CASI (Cloud Access Security Inspection) profiles.

Rich logging options allow you troubleshoot most problems.

Straightforward HA with different redundancy schemas.

IPv6 support.

I think there could be more QoS features in GUI. FortiGate has Traffic Shaping feature that is enough in most cases when shaping egressing packets, but sometimes I just need 802.1p prioritizing (Class of Service) of incoming packets and manual ingress queue assignment. This is what would be nice to have, but I realize that such a job is more efficiently done by L4 switch standing before firewall. Fortinet has a FortiSwitch that can do it, and it also can be controlled by FortiGate via FortiLink protocol.

[Firmware version FortiOS 6.2 update]: There are a lot of improved and newly added things, so it is very hard to imagine any additional features.

Four years.

Small models (up to FG-90) are build on SoC (System on a Chip), so they need to be mounted in places with enough airflow and right temperature, otherwise they could hang, slow down traffic processing, but more often you just can't log in to the device's web-interface (reboot won't help you until it cools down). Actually, that's not an issue. It is a technical requirement for operating environment to be 5-40 degrees (but at 35 degrees with poor airflow there may be issues mentioned above).

For large scale deployment I would suggest to look at FortiManager, a central management point for large amount of FortiGates. I have tested the solution and found it quite useful. I could download configuration from any device and install edited list of policies to several devices simultaneously through a couple of clicks. Also I liked functionality of clearing out Address objects list from unused entries. It can be configured to be a central repository of firmware and updates, and a local rating server (url and antispam rating services) which can improve rating lookup latency value.

Technical support is good (in average).

We used an old IPS from Cisco. We switched because of End-of-Support on that device.

Initial setup in plain networks is very straightforward. For large environment you should prepare beforehand, because FortiGate is a highly-tunable and feature rich product, so you must have a plan with many considered details.

We did not engage a vendor team. Documentation is good enough to implement with an in-house team.

Setup cost may be not so low, as you expect, because it depends on different factors, but TCO for 5 years may pleasantly surprise you.

Palo Alto, Cisco ASA, CheckPoint

Many interesting things are hidden in CLI, they can help you in different situations. Web-interface (GUI) is primarily intended for day-to-day routine.

Don't underestimate FortiAnalyzer. It can give you a better understanding of what is going on in your network. When FortiGate sends logs to FortiAnalyzer, FortiAnalyzer inserts received log data into database. Predefined and customizable data queries, charts and reports can significantly help you by visualizing problem points, so you can thoroughly investigate security events and traffic behavior anomalies.

FortiGate is a constantly evolving product, so pay attention to FortiOS version it runs.