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Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN vs Citrix SD-WAN [EOL] comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 12, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Fortinet FortiGate
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
581
Ranking in other categories
Secure Web Gateways (SWG) (2nd), Firewalls (1st), Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) (1st), Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) Solutions (1st), WAN Edge (1st), ZTNA (1st), Unified Threat Management (UTM) (1st)
Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
98
Ranking in other categories
Network Management Applications (5th), Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) Solutions (2nd), WAN Edge (2nd)
Citrix SD-WAN [EOL]
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Q&A Highlights

OT
Assistant Vice President - IT at Au small finance bank
May 08, 2020
 

Featured Reviews

Vasu Gala - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager, Information Technology Operation/Presales at TechMonarch
A stable solution with an intuitive interface and quick customer service
I have been working with Fortinet FortiGate, WatchGuard, Sophos, and SonicWall. I'm not as comfortable with SonicWall because of their UI and limitations. I prefer Fortinet above all other options. When it comes to configuration, I am confident in my ability to handle various tasks, including creating policies such as firewall rules, web policies, and application policies. Additionally, I can configure VPNs and implement load balancing, among other tasks. Overall, I feel much more comfortable working with Fortinet. Fortinet has made significant improvements by integrating AI with firewalls for threat analysis and prevention. In the past 2-3 years, they have launched FortiSASE and SIEM, and they also provide SOC services. Both Palo Alto and Fortinet FortiGate are excellent. While Fortinet FortiGate comes at higher prices, the functionality and support justify the cost. They promptly resolve firmware issues and inform all support providers about configuration changes.
ND
Network Manager at HPCL
Faced complex visibility and policy challenges but have improved basic traffic routing control
I have found some other solutions more insightful and user-friendly as compared to Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN, but the basic SD-WAN functionality is good enough. I am using it only because it was done as a pilot project, specifically for my 60 to 70 sites. For the majority of the sites, I am using Fortinet's Secure SD-WAN solution and I found that more viable and more in alignment with my requirements. For example, there is not any Internet Service Database available in Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN intrinsically. If I want to write a policy based on applications, I am not able to write it, at least in Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Viptela deployment that we have done, and that is fairly easy to do in Fortinet. The second issue is the logging capability. I think the visibility that Fortinet Secure SD-WAN has is not even comparable. Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN does not provide that sort of insight or control as far as traffic steering is concerned. With respect to the SLAs, I barely know which sort of SLAs are violated in Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN, so I do not have clear visibility on where the traffic is moving from at my spoke or hub locations. I believe Fortinet gives me a very clear picture of where the traffic is going. Overall visibility, whether it is data traffic or logs, is much better in Fortinet compared to Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN. The complexity of Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Viptela is noticeable and quite complicated to configure. If something breaks, you have to involve TAC and others to fix it. On the contrary, you can work with underlays. Even if your IPsec overlay tunnel is down, it does not impact your production. Thus, we find Fortinet's solution significantly better than Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN solution. I have used Application-aware Routing in Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN. However, I found it to be very complicated, especially regarding policy writing. For my breakout of VC traffic, we had to write a bunch of IP addresses for Zoom, Webex, and others. Presently, it can only identify Webex as an application, and I highly doubt whether there is any application identification for Zoom and other platforms, as we were not able to find it during our implementation. It is done through static whitelisting of the IPs, which is not a scalable solution since IPs can change at any time. Overall, the application-aware routing policies are not as flexible and scalable as the Internet Service Database feature of Fortinet provides. The struggles encompass policy writing, logging capabilities, traffic visibility, and complex configuration. There is also the issue of load balancing. We have faced considerable challenges with traffic load balancing between the links. Although the SLA targets are configurable, understanding how traffic flows is challenging, making troubleshooting exceedingly difficult. Overall, I find it a quite complicated solution with not that much operational usability.
Rohit Ghorpade - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud network engineer at Bajaj Allianz General Insurance Co. Ltd.
A scalable solution for MCN controller but lacks technical supports, upgrades
There are a few things that can be improved, are domain-based routing and the slowness of virtual parts, and it may be due to the wrong configuration, which we have been unable to find out. Previously, we faced some issues with the slowness part. Apart from that, feature like end gateway level antivirus. We are currently using a NetFlow proxy to establish a virtual position for the NetFlow. Our current environment has many use cases, but we are not using them on the Citrix SD-WAN. When I navigate the NCL part, it involves configuration. I want to highlight this disadvantage. Sometimes, when we push the configuration, it tries to push it to all branch locations. This process takes a lot of time, nearly 30 minutes, to push a single change from the NCL. Overall, I don't think Citrix meets our use cases what we have. This is based on my feedback after using it for the past year and working on this Citrix SD-WAN. However, from my experience, it is the worst solution I have seen. There's no domain-based routing, which is horrible. That's why we are moving to other products. We have checked our use case requirements with Fortinet, Palo Alto, and they meet them. I will consider the PoC or another OEM. There are many things in the area you need to be prompt, like the automation part. If any link or device goes down, alerting notification, etc. We need to perform and highlight so many things to your management. This should be improved.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The best feature of Fortinet FortiGate is value for money."
"Fortinet FortiGate positively provides my clients' organizations with a high return on investment."
"Allows for firewall rules to be programmed and named in a way that makes it “readable”"
"The initial setup is easy."
"Fortinet FortiGate is among the best options in the market."
"The most useful features are application control, web filtering, and SD-WAN."
"The usability of the solution is its best feature."
"The reporting you receive out of this appliance is excellent. You will not need an external management system."
"The availability of services and combining different connections is most valuable."
"I would consider Cisco support a 10 out of 10."
"Huge companies use SD-WAN. It is largely scalable."
"I like the feature that lets you transfer from old devices to new devices without changing the hardware and subscription."
"Cisco is an industry leader, so customers have a high level of trust with the brand more-so than with some newcomers that might have some more revolutionary solutions, but no name recognition."
"Cisco SD-WAN's collaborative features are unique and sustainable. I also like the protocols, which use two SD-WAN."
"SD-WAN provides a range of common benefits, including cost reduction, increased visibility, and scalability"
"Cisco SD-WAN's most valuable feature is the ease of transition."
"They have a zero downtime failover mechanism, where, when there's a link failure or a link weakness, or bad link conditions, they provide the ability to fail back seamlessly."
"The best feature is the backup capability, where all of the users' computers are tied into a central data repository."
"The main advantage of Citrix SD-WAN is that it enables fast communication between our branches and data centers. And, with its cloud management features, it also makes the process of adding new branches into our company network much easier."
"The solution is brilliant, the way it calculates its paths and trails is great."
"The scalability and stability are quite good in general."
"Downtime for branch offices is now almost zero. We have 100% real-time visibility into all of our lines. MPLS links have been replaced with lower-cost links, saving a larger percentage of line costs. Overall, I see SD-WAN as a must. And the Citrix SD-WAN product has delivered on expectations and exceeded them. (With later firmware updates we now have good firewall capabilities in the product too)."
"The SD-WAN solution as it is already is quite feature-rich and the upgrade process is very simple."
"It allows us to use additional VPNs, offering more options compared to other VPN solutions."
 

Cons

"I wish that they could integrate zero-trust technology into Fortinet FortiGate. I am not sure whether it has been done already, but if they could implement that, it would help significantly."
"The IPS monitoring can be improved."
"Monitoring could be improved."
"With the addition of some features, it is possible that FortiGate can be used in all verticals."
"The cloud management and automation capability could be improved."
"The area that Fortinet may improve is customer support."
"The pricing could be a bit better, especially when you consider how they have the most basic offering priced."
"The advanced models are expensive."
"Cisco needs to improve the technical support for this solution."
"The inexpensive Viptela hardware may be replaced with overpriced Cisco routers. This would be a tragic mistake for Cisco as the lightweight commodity platform built by Viptela is the reason to own this solution."
"Cisco products are a little bit complicated, so making them a little bit easier would be an improvement."
"Cisco can improve Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN by simplifying licensing and platform integration with other Cisco products such as Catalyst Center or solutions with Meraki. A license needs to be permanent for me. The client feels that it is very expensive."
"When you buy the equipment, they should already put it into your cloud account. It should already be set up so that we can manage with vBond. We came across an issue where it wasn't resolved in the DNS. We are using Umbrella, so we need to create a VPN IPSec tunnel to Umbrella to enable the users to browse. I would really like to see an internal built-in firewall so that we don't have to go to Umbrella. This functionality might already be there. We are quite new to this solution, and we are still learning about it."
"The product needs to have more understanding staff in their support team. The tool needs to provide support in every stage of deployment. We did not get the expected support from their team. The product is also not easy to use."
"The solution could be a bit cheaper."
"Cisco SD-WAN could improve on the ease of integration, the configuration should be easier. At the moment the process is more command line based and it would be better if it was able to be done through an interface."
"I am happy with this product. If anything, its price can be reduced. It is a bit expensive."
"Citrix SD-WAN does not have the SD-WAN with one optimization in a single license. Other competitors have this option and it should be added to this solution."
"The reports need to be improved. We need to have them customized but they don't have that right now. I would like for them to have better system predictions. We don't have that right now. My system may be working fine right now but after making some changes, that can change."
"I would like to either see the price reduced or have it packaged with other products to give better value for the money."
"The only improvement for Citrix SD-WAN would be to lower its cost."
"Given that Citrix SD-WAN solved all our problems by providing us with everything we needed to unify communications with our branches and data centers, I cannot suggest anything further in terms of improvements."
"There are a few things that can be improved, are domain-based routing and the slowness of virtual parts, and it may be due to the wrong configuration, which we have been unable to find out."
"Overall, network security and next-generation firewall features are areas that they can improve on."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"If we have an older version, the support costs get quite high."
"It's not the cheapest, but it's value for money. Given everything we've got out of it: the DMZ port, the VPN, and the high availability, it's a pretty reasonable price."
"It's a year based license."
"It cost us around $73,000 for three years."
"It's expensive, but compared to the competition it's okay."
"The initial setup is super straight forward and as far as the licensing goes for the small product that we have, the pricing was pretty competitive. It wasn't as simple and as cheap as a SonicWall but for the service we would get it was a good price."
"There is a need to pay for a license for the product."
"I rate the pricing an eight and a half on a scale of one to ten, where one is low, and ten is high."
"In the Russian market where we operate, this solution is expensive."
"Licensing is on a subscription basis."
"The price of the solution is the only negative factor, it is much more expensive compared with the Cisco Meraki SD-WAN solution."
"You can get subscriptions for three or five years."
"Cisco's pricing is not entirely satisfactory when you compare the SD-WAN solutions in Asian markets — like the South Asian market in Sri Lanka — because there are several competing brands including Fortinet and Citrix, who provide much the same product for a generally lower price. And when it comes to firewall vendors like Palo Alto and SonicWall, they're also selling here. It's the same with VMware, too; they have much the same features."
"Cost-wise, Cisco SD-WAN is comparatively high."
"The pricing is fair, and it's on par with the market vendors. But based on the competition, Cisco could work on the pricing, go deep on discounts and provide more commercially viable solutions to customers."
"It is much cheaper than other solutions. Most of our clients are the top 500 companies, and they all have a corporate contract."
"As NetScaler is now, I find it quite pricey."
"The price of the subscription should be cheaper."
"It is a bit expensive. A cheaper product would be good, but everybody likes things to be cheaper. We bought the devices up front, and then we pay for the annual support."
"I believe that Citrix SD-WAN is a good investment, but I do not have the information to be more specific."
"It depends on the scale. In our case, it would have been better if we had known about the life cycling steps, but otherwise, it is worth the money."
"The price is relatively expensive."
"I'm not quite sure of the price ranges. Roughly, the hidden devices can scale up to $20K for one appliance. However, the branch CPs are USD $1,000 to $2,500."
"It would be helpful to have a demo license available for customers who want to prove the concept and conduct a proof of concept (POC) before committing to the solution. This is particularly important for customers in Egypt who often require a demonstration of the solution's features and compatibility with their needs before making any investment or incurring costs. Providing a demo license would allow customers to assess whether the solution would meet their needs or not."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
12%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
6%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Computer Software Company
11%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Educational Organization
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business357
Midsize Enterprise133
Large Enterprise189
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business44
Midsize Enterprise15
Large Enterprise44
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise10
 

Questions from the Community

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What is the biggest difference between Sophos XG and FortiGate?
From my experience regarding both the Sophos and FortiGate firewalls, I personally would rather use FortiGate. I know...
What are the biggest technical differences between Sophos UTM and Fortinet FortiGate?
As a solution, Sophos UTM offers a lot of functionality, it scales well, and the stability and performance are quite ...
What do you like most about Cisco SD-WAN?
When considering the most valuable features of Cisco SD-WAN, the decoupling of self-monitoring stands out significant...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco SD-WAN?
The pricing of Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is rated between eight and nine out of ten, where ten is the most expensive.
What needs improvement with Cisco SD-WAN?
I have found some other solutions more insightful and user-friendly as compared to Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN, but the bas...
What needs improvement with Citrix SD-WAN?
The solution's licensing model could be improved. Citrix SD-WAN is a good product from a technical point of view. How...
What advice do you have for others considering Citrix SD-WAN?
If a customer already has Citrix NetScaler and is not looking to change anything in their existing environment, we pr...
 

Also Known As

Fortinet FortiGate Next-Generation Firewall
Cisco SD-WAN
Citrix CloudBridge, WOC, NetScaler SD-WAN
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, IBM, Cisco, Dell, HP, Oracle, Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, Vodafone, Orange, BT Group, Telstra, Deutsche Telekom, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, CenturyLink, NTT Communications, Tata Communications, SoftBank, China Mobile, Singtel, Telus, Rogers Communications, Bell Canada, Telkom Indonesia, Telkom South Africa, Telmex, Telia Company, Telkom Kenya
Doyle Research, Ashton Metzler & Associates
AIDS Healthcare Foundation, Cornerstone Home Lending Inc., Dallara, ecVision, Essar, Eurofred, Groupe Promutuel, HMSHost Corporation, Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines Ltd, Royal Caribbean International
Find out what your peers are saying about Fortinet, Cisco, Check Point Software Technologies and others in Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) Solutions. Updated: January 2026.
881,821 professionals have used our research since 2012.