Fortinet FortiGate Reviews

Our clients use it to protect their network. They're into public safety. They're police, fire, and EMS, and they're very concerned about security and what gets in and what doesn't get into their networks. We have got another client for whom we're deploying 30 firewalls in HA pairs over a huge network. That, of course, is a Cisco setup, not FortiGate.

Everybody is cranking up on security to find new ways to block and protect not just the inbound but also the outbound traffic. They want to protect what goes out. They also want to protect DMZs and all that kind of stuff.

It is simpler to configure. It is not like Cisco Firepower, where you go crazy trying to follow the Cisco documentation to figure out how to configure one little thing. Unlike Cisco Firepower, where you can't do everything through the web interface and you have got to do some command line stuff, Fortinet FortiGate SWG is simpler. There are four different things in Cisco to get in, which is not the case with Fortinet FortiGate SWG.

It is one of my favorite solutions to work with. I would much rather work with it than Cisco Firepower, for example. Even though I've got 20 years of Cisco experience with different firewalls, I would much prefer this solution.

Their technical support could be improved a little bit in terms of responsiveness.

I have been using this solution for almost three years.

For me, so far, it is fire and forget. You just set it up, and you really don't have to mess with it. It has been really reliable. It hasn't gone down, and I haven't had any outages.

It is scalable.

Technical support is okay. It, of course, depends on the kind of contract that you have. I've had better support from Cisco than from Fortinet when I'm having a problem that I can't figure out. Fortinet support is not bad, and they do get to the solution. However, they can be a little bit more responsive. That's the nice thing with Cisco. When you've got a network down issue, and they can get people on the phone immediately, and they stay with you until it is done. I find Fortinet's documentation better than Cisco's documentation.

We didn't have anything before, so this was brand new.

It is fairly straightforward. The only complexity to it is that it has a little bit longer setup than the old generation firewall thing, where you slap an IP address on the outside and the inside interface and turn it on, and you're going to have a basic firewall. You have got to go through several configuration steps to get it to a good base setup.

It is less expensive than a Cisco solution.

If you are brand new to this solution, you're going to want to read the documentation and follow it while setting it up because otherwise, you will miss something. To use this solution, you've got to know what you're doing. You can't just take someone who is a decent network guy and expect him to figure out what he has to do. It isn't that simple.

I would rate Fortinet FortiGate SWG an eight out of ten.

We use it for routing and restricting user access.

We use the filtering feature the most. It has filtering and inbuilt securities. We can create customized rules to define which users can access a particular type of site. We can create policies inside the firewall.

The visibility of the network can be better. The GUI can be improved for better visibility of the network flow. Other solutions have better GUI in terms of network visibility.

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

It is stable.

You can have the availability features. All the traffic goes through this firewall for access to the outside world.

Their technical support is good.

We were using some open-source solutions, and then we directly moved to firewalls.

The initial setup was straightforward. It was completed in a month or so.

We implemented it on our own. We are a small team, so a person with a few other duties also manages this solution.

It is not a very costly product if you compare it with other products. The return on investment is also good. If you compare the return of investment and money that you are spending on this product with Palo Alto, Cisco, Check Point, and other solutions, the investment is very less. We are happy with this solution.

The optional licenses are there, and you can choose which one you want and which one to avoid.

It is a fine solution. We have been using this solution for some years, and we are happy with it. We will continue using it unless the FortiGate solution is running itself in some other ways with new features.

I would recommend this solution. It is working fine for us. 

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.

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.

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.

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 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 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.