We performed a comparison between Fortinet Fortigate and Cisco SD-WAN based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison of Results: Based on the parameters we compared, Fortinet Fortigate seems to be the superior solution. All other things being more or less equal, our reviewers found Cisco SD-WAN rather expensive to purchase, not as secure as it should be, and somewhat difficult to deploy.
"I like creating policies. This way, we can better utilize our WAN circuit and get better rates. Its GUI is user-friendly, and the CLI is also great."
"The most valuable features, application awareness, and failover resilience, stand out as key considerations for users."
"The solution is great at aggregating the traffic and then sending it in one direction."
"It has a very good GUI."
"The user experience is pretty good."
"I have found the solution's main features are its ability to be customized, network traffic classification, and has a wide range of features that can be set."
"The integration of Layer 3 and application routing is great."
"It's very easy to manage and monitor the network's health and security using the solution."
"The notable features that I have found most valuable are that it includes the antivirus, and also IPS, and even SD-WAN."
"This is an easy solution to deploy."
"You can create multiple Virtual Domains (VDOMs), which are treated as separate firewall instances."
"It is user friendly, and has all the features you need."
"The network security and cloud security are most valuable."
"We were looking for the VPN feature and controlling the inflow and outflow of all the traffic within the site and across the sites. We are also using it for the VPN and VLANs."
"The product is easy to use and is stable. The SV1 functionality is a benefit."
"The most valuable feature is the policy routing and application control."
"Since most user-data is going through the solution, we are concerned about security, as all the information is in the cloud and not on-premises. The user data authentification should be higher to better prevent malicious attacks."
"It should also be much more affordable for a larger number of customers."
"The product's application delivery feature needs improvement."
"The initial setup is really complex."
"The client portal needs to be improved in order to make the solution much better."
"This solution is expensive so pricing is a concern."
"The initial setup was not very straightforward, but it gets easier the more deployments you complete."
"The deployment is complex."
"The scalability could be better."
"The support system could be improved."
"A couple of things I've seen that need improvement, especially in terms of a hard coding. The driver-level active moment really is out-of-the-box and we have to have contact the customer support and sometimes it is difficult to resolve."
"Fortinet FortiGate could improve by having more capabilities for troubleshooting VPN connections. For example, I do get some feedback about the current status, but I could use some history and logging of important events. The information is logged in our Syslog server, but I could use that information from the device. If they could provide a GUI to have some more insight on what's going with my VPN would be useful."
"The integration with third-party tools may be something that they should work on."
"I would like to see more advanced developments of a wireless controller in the future."
"They need faster serviceability and more security features."
"The biggest "gotcha" is that if the client purchases what they call the UTM shared bundle, which has unified threat management on both, it's not as easy to manage if you have more than one firewall."
Cisco SD-WAN is ranked 1st in Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) Solutions with 86 reviews while Fortinet FortiGate is ranked 2nd in Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) Solutions with 306 reviews. Cisco SD-WAN is rated 8.0, while Fortinet FortiGate is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Cisco SD-WAN writes "A solution for integrating services to enhance up-time, performance and lower costs". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Fortinet FortiGate writes "It's a reliable solution that's easy to install and cheaper than competitors ". Cisco SD-WAN is most compared with Meraki SD-WAN, VMware SD-WAN, Juniper Session Smart Router, Versa Unified Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) Platform and Cato SASE Cloud Platform, whereas Fortinet FortiGate is most compared with Sophos XG, Cisco Secure Firewall, Netgate pfSense, Meraki MX and OPNsense. See our Cisco SD-WAN vs. Fortinet FortiGate report.
See our list of best Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) Solutions vendors and best WAN Edge vendors.
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