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Cisco Prime [EOL] vs Fortinet FortiManager comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

Customer Service

No sentiment score available
Sentiment score
7.4
Fortinet FortiManager's support is satisfactory but challenged by slow responses and varying technician expertise, needing regional improvement.
After that, I was allowed to work with another engineer who was very good. He was very good both technically and his methods.
We've found them to be very helpful and have been satisfied with their level of support.
We get our support from Fortinet in Belgium, so we can communicate directly with a technician in Belgium.
 

Room For Improvement

No sentiment score available
Sentiment score
4.3
Fortinet FortiManager needs better documentation, support, stability, integration, and performance, especially in configurations, GUI, and monitoring.
There are many features that are not mentioned in the documentation.
If I'm defining a subnet, I need to define it in two different locations.
Instead of paying separately and having all of these licenses, it would be nice to centralize everything and maybe reduce the price for a bundle.
 

Scalability Issues

No sentiment score available
Sentiment score
7.7
Fortinet FortiManager is highly scalable for managing many devices, though costs can rise with increased scalability needs.
We can add a new instance of FortiGate with a simple click.
If they have, for example, 50 devices and suddenly need 100, they just need to scale up.
It has been designed for a large environment.
 

Setup Cost

No sentiment score available
Sentiment score
6.3
Fortinet FortiManager is competitively priced, scalable for large deployments, with varying perceptions on costs and additional feature fees.
Fortinet products are the least expensive on the market in the category of firewalls.
Although there is a cost associated with Fortinet FortiManager, its price is undoubtedly justified by the value it provides in terms of the purpose it serves.
It isn't like other solutions where you need to pay for SD-WAN or additional bandwidth.
 

Stability Issues

No sentiment score available
Sentiment score
8.1
Fortinet FortiManager is highly rated for stability and reliability, though occasional reboots and minor bugs are reported.
There are no bugs or glitches.
On a scale from one to ten, I would give stability a ten.
I rate the solution's stability ten out of ten.
 

Valuable Features

No sentiment score available
Sentiment score
8.3
Fortinet FortiManager excels in automation, centralized management, and ease of use, enhancing network security and performance efficiently.
FortiManager also delivers the industry’s best scalability to manage up to 100,000 Fortinet devices.
With Fortinet FortiManager, we can manage multiple firewalls and devices from a central point.
The most valuable feature is having one object on all networks, which allows for implementation only once.
 

Categories and Ranking

Cisco Prime [EOL]
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
35
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Fortinet FortiManager
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
62
Ranking in other categories
Network Management Applications (3rd)
 

Featured Reviews

ZeeshanAli1 - PeerSpot reviewer
Robust, cost-effective, and provides good visibility, but the scalability could improve
We are extremely satisfied with the reliability and robustness of Cisco Prime Infrastructure, which we have been using for many years. Compared to newer products such as DNS centers or others, it has proven to be much more stable, which is important for large-scale operations. Stability is a primary concern for us, and we are glad that Cisco Prime Infrastructure meets our expectations in that regard. Furthermore, in regards to Legacy Plus new hardware, Cisco Prime has proven to be a reliable and adaptable solution thus far. Not only can it support older hardware, but it also has the capability to handle new features with the latest updates. If we consider new solutions such as DNS Center, we may have to sacrifice some legacy features that we still rely on. We may need to continue using these legacy features for a few more years due to various reasons such as budget constraints or the site not being a high priority. However, if we switch to a new product at this stage, we may lose a lot of the monitoring and other capabilities that we have with Cisco Prime. We have a close relationship with Cisco and understand that they are not prioritizing investments in Cisco Prime as they are encouraging customers to adopt the Cisco DNA Center. This means that we don't anticipate many new features to be added to the product in the future. While we know that we will eventually have to transition to a new solution, in the meantime, we plan to do a quick refresh of our legacy products.
HamedWasel - PeerSpot reviewer
Easy to set up with good integration capabilities but we've had troubles when moving devices
We've faced an issue when we need to move devices. Templates need to be recreated instead of having the policies, et cetera, cut and pasted over. Everything should just move over when we need to move devices instead of recreating everything from scratch. For the IPSEC tunnels, Fortimanager doesn't have all of the features that are available on Fortigate.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
18%
Government
13%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Educational Organization
6%
Computer Software Company
20%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Cisco Prime?
The most valuable features of Cisco Prime include its comprehensive functionality as a one-stop solution for basic SNMP port management.
What needs improvement with Cisco Prime?
The product's performance monitoring feature could be more intuitive.
What is your primary use case for Cisco Prime?
We use Cisco Prime for centralized configuration management backups and monitoring.
What do you like most about Fortinet FortiManager?
The most valuable feature is the centralized management console.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fortinet FortiManager?
On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a six out of ten.
What needs improvement with Fortinet FortiManager?
The graphics interface between Fortinet FortiManager and any Forti products should be standardized. Doing a configuration change directly in the UTM is not the same as doing it via FortiManager for...
 

Also Known As

Cisco Prime Infrastructure
No data available
 

Learn More

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Mohawk Industries, Universidad EAFIT, Halton Healthcare
Black Gold Regional Schools, Amadeus Hospitality, Jefferson County, Chunghwa Telecom, City of Boroondara, Dimension Data
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco, HPE Aruba Networking, Fortinet and others in Network Management Applications. Updated: October 2024.
816,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.