Fortinet FortiGate Reviews

I use the solution primarily for the VPN connections in local area. In some cases, I use it at universities in order to secure the local network in the university, such as servers and backup devices.

I have also used the solution as a load balancer and the EMS functionality, which I use as a controller for wireless devices.

The PPPoE server protocol with a connection to a Radius server is used a lot by ISPs and not so much by the end user. I think it would be great to see this solution with the protocol developed for ISPs.

I have been using the solution for more than two or three years.

The solution is scalable.

There are some problems that support cannot give you a logical reason as to why it happened. For example, I had a case where I was dealing with a WhatsApp application that was giving issues. Technical support gave more than one reason it could be giving issues, but none of them solved the problem. Eventually I solved the problem, but it was far from the solutions that support had given.

Before choosing Fortigate, I was using Cisco and pfSense.

The initial setup was very easy and straightforward.

The time it takes to setup the solution depends on the case. It may take less than a day or more than two months, it depends on the technology that is being used. For example, a hospital I am working with has 20 switches with two firewalls, but there are issues in the physical place and not in Fortinet. In this case, the environment limits the speed of setup.

I would rate FortiGate a nine out of ten.

The typical next-generation firewall use case is to restrict access to the users by using a firewall.

It is very flexible to use.

It is stable, but its stability can be improved. 

I have been using this solution for maybe four or five years.

Its stability is just okay. It should be better.

The scalability of the device is limited.

Technical support is okay. They could be more knowledgeable and faster.

I was using Sophos. We switched because it was very unstable in terms of both software and hardware. I found a lot of vulnerabilities. Even though they provide a lot of features for a minimum cost, these features don't do what they are supposed to do.

The initial setup was easy. The deployment duration depends on the situation. I have done the installation in one to three days.

I installed it myself. You just need one technical guy to maintain and manage the firewall. It is a small product for 200 to 500 users.

It has a competitive price. 

I would recommend this solution. We plan to continue using it. Even though it has a few stability issues, its price is competitive. 

I would rate Fortinet FortiGate an eight out of ten.

We use it for our paralegal security, our internet operations, and network zone segmentation.

It could be more stable and secure. They can improve the ability to make changes, change requests, and provide more rounded monitoring in terms of security and potential threats.

My team has been using Fortinet FortiGate for a few years.

Fortinet FortiGate appears to be stable. 

Fortinet FortiGate appears to be scalable. 

We previously used Palo Alto.

The setup is pretty complex and not easy to implement. 

Implemented by our in-house team. 

I would give Fortinet FortiGate a seven out of ten.

Our primary use case of this solution is for the UTM it offers and the access to VPN. We have branches in Rio, Singapore and the UK. I'm an information security manager and we are customers of Fortinet. 

The most valuable features for me are the web tutor and the automated rules by schedule - the VPN itself. 

Fortinet is huge in today's market and they've become quite expensive. I think there are products at the same level as Fortinet, but with better prices. They've changed their subscription plan and are now forcing companies to subscribe 24/7. 

I've been using the solution for around five years. 

We never had any issues or problems related to stability. 

There are other products on the market that are a little better than FortiGate in terms of scalability, but in general it's a good solution. We have about 200 users in the company. 

We didn't need to contact technical support very much. We had a local partner and if there were problems we contacted them directly.

The initial setup was straightforward. We were implementing on a large project and it took a weekend to completely deploy with all the features, connections and everything. 

They have very good documentation and if you've had experience with other products I'm pretty sure that you'd be able to deploy just by reading the documentation.

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

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 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.

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.