Fortinet FortiGate vs ShieldX comparison

Why PeerSpot?

The compared Fortinet FortiGate and ShieldX solutions aren't in the same category. Fortinet FortiGate is ranked #1 in Firewalls , with an average rating of 8.5, and holds a 13.0% mindshare in the category. ShieldX is ranked #11 in MS , and holds a 2.6% mindshare. Additionally, 92% of Fortinet FortiGate users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of ShieldX users who would recommend it.

Fortinet FortiGate

Read 595 Fortinet FortiGate reviews

94,366 Views
66,056 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

ShieldX

Read 4 ShieldX reviews

1,427 Views
442 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Fortinet FortiGate

ShieldX

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 16, 2024

Fortinet FortiGate and ShieldX both compete in the network security category. ShieldX appears to have the upper hand with its advanced features, justifying its higher price.

Features: Fortinet FortiGate offers comprehensive threat management capabilities, robust performance, and extensive firewall features. ShieldX has advanced micro-segmentation, automation, and ease of integration with cloud environments.

Room for Improvement: Fortinet FortiGate could improve its reporting features, VPN configuration simplicity, and address basic usability concerns. ShieldX should enhance scalability options, add more automation features, and work on expanding its scalability potential.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Fortinet FortiGate is noted for its straightforward deployment process and efficient customer service. ShieldX has a more complex setup but provides detailed support documentation and effective customer service.

Pricing and ROI: Fortinet FortiGate is known for lower initial setup costs and better return on investment for small to mid-sized businesses. ShieldX, while more expensive, is seen as worth the investment due to its advanced features and longer-term benefits.

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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

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

595

Ranking in other categories

Secure Web Gateways (SWG) (2nd), Firewalls (1st), Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) (1st), Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) Solutions (2nd), WAN Edge (1st), ZTNA (1st), Unified Threat Management (UTM) (1st)

ShieldX

Average Rating

9.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Microsegmentation Software (11th)

Mindshare comparison

While both are Network Security Systems solutions, they serve different purposes. Fortinet FortiGate is designed for Firewalls and holds a mindshare of 13.0%, down 20.6% compared to last year.
ShieldX, on the other hand, focuses on Microsegmentation Software, holds 2.6% mindshare, up 0.5% since last year.

Firewalls Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Fortinet FortiGate	13.0%
Cisco Secure Firewall	8.0%
OPNsense	7.2%
Other	71.8%

Firewalls

Microsegmentation Software Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
ShieldX	2.6%
Illumio Segmentation	21.9%
Akamai Guardicore Segmentation	18.5%
Other	57.0%

Microsegmentation Software

Featured Reviews

reviewer2859012

Network engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Unified security platform has simplified daily network protection and accelerated troubleshooting

Fortinet FortiGate is generally easy to manage, but there are a few areas where it could be improved. The interface can become complex when managing a large number of firewall policies, and better policy search organization and reporting would be helpful. Firmware upgrades can also require careful planning and testing, especially in production environments. Troubleshooting some advanced issues may require deeper CLI knowledge or assistance from Fortinet support, and more advanced automation and AI-assisted troubleshooting within the management interface would be beneficial, such as clear recommendations for policy optimization, configuration issues, and security events. These improvements could make day-to-day administration even more efficient. More AI-driven capabilities for day-to-day administration would be valuable, especially for troubleshooting, policy optimization, and identifying potential configuration issues. More intelligent recommendations based on traffic patterns and security events could help administrators respond faster. More advanced reporting and dashboards that can be easily customized for different teams and management requirements would also be helpful, while better automation for routine tasks, firmware planning, and configuration validation would further reduce manual effort.

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MichaelProcyshyn

IT Director at park holidays uk

Proactively monitors, blocks, and reports what it has blocked; and self-updates meaning there is zero maintenance

The most valuable feature is the automatic scaling. With its microservices, it scales both up and down, depending on traffic and throughput. The traffic through our website depends on holiday bookings. It's very quiet in November through January, and then our traffic picks up quite rapidly and, at our peak, we will take in excess of a million pounds of business a day through our website. The UI was also one of the huge selling points. My web development manager was blown away with the detail and the granularity that you can get out of the UI. It is a very strong and informative UI, with the amount of data it provides. Uptime on the system has been 648 days and we do very little to it because it self-updates and alerts. It does everything that we need it to do, so the administration side of it is zero. One of the beauties about ShieldX is that it's such a good "fire-and-forget" product.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I like Fortinet's cloud management, as it allows me to manage all my devices in different branches for three cloud accounts, and even though I use on-prem devices, I can manage everything on the cloud."

"Stateful packet inspection is valuable. It also does SSL packet inspection. It is able to provide a VPN for remote users with secure connectivity."

"Their web interface to manage it is excellent, even compared with other providers."

"The solution is stable and reliable."

"We have heard that other companies are being attacked, but we are not since we installed FortiGate."

"The scalability is easy with switches and access points that are basically plug-and-play for the most part."

"The IPsec tunnels are very easily created, and quite interoperable with devices from other vendors."

"I like that you are able to manage FortiGate from the FortiManager to create a more centralized environment."

More Fortinet FortiGate pros

"Once you install it you can virtually forget about it; it's very low-maintenance and high-protection."

"ShieldX has been designed from the very beginning to work well in cloud environments. It understands autoscaling, automation, and auto-configuration. These are the things which are important in today's operating environment."

"ShieldX makes it a lot easier and a lot simpler to define your policies and define your rules, and that greatly reduces the opportunity for user error."

"The most valuable feature is the automatic scaling. With its microservices, it scales both up and down, depending on traffic and throughput."

"Very often, when new challengers come in, what they do is they end up coming in at a lower cost with more functionality."

"The UI was also one of the huge selling points. My web development manager was blown away with the detail and the granularity that you can get out of the UI. It is a very strong and informative UI, with the amount of data it provides."

"It has helped us tighten our security posture. Now, staff can only access things that they should be accessing."

"For other security professions who are looking for something which is low in cost that does microsegmentation, they should look at ShieldX."

More ShieldX pros

Cons

"The integration with third-party tools may be something that they should work on."

"The customization is a little bit difficult because we have to customize everything."

"The search tool needs improvement."

"FortiGate may include AI capabilities and integrate external threat intelligence. However, version management and backup/restore operations could be improved."

"At the moment, the main concern is the pricing and the type of licensing. Fortinet offers different types of licensing, and my idea is that the best approach is to have only one, two, or a maximum of three types of licensing."

"We have to worry about debugging, and it would be ideal if they had some sort of GUI interface for troubleshooting and diagnostics, as FortiGate has only CLI-based diagnostic capabilities and sometimes it becomes very difficult to do all this troubleshooting."

"They could simplify their deployment process, especially when customers have existing devices."

"The UTM filtering control could be improved."

More Fortinet FortiGate cons

"We are having some issues with their LDAP and integrating it with the Active Directory. We can't seem to set it up."

"They need to be consistent in performance and capabilities over time, given the fact that this is new and I want to see where this goes in the next year or so."

"With any kind of tool like ShieldX, where you're in the cloud instead of a traditional firewall, you're using CPU resources in those environments to provide the protection. So there's a cost associated with CPU resources. I'm pressing upon them to make the product much more efficient and use less CPUs to do the same thing."

"There should be a bit more customer care, with regular review meetings on it or regular reports. It would be nice to have a quarterly or biannual review of what ShieldX has blocked."

"They need to be consistent in performance and capabilities over time, given the fact that this is new and I want to see where this goes in the next year or so. As the vendor continues to evolve and add future functionality, we want to make sure that we are still keeping up with the integrations, etc. Time will be the key factor here. The proper support for some of the latest technologies, Docker containers, etc. They need to keep up with threat landscape, so we will see how the security get layered. This is what we are going to be keeping an eye on."

"I would like better reports and in-depth reporting."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing of Fortinet FortiGate is average, not cheap or overly expensive compared to other firewall solutions in the market. It's effective and affordable for customers."

"Compared to other firewall products, it's a little cheaper in terms of pricing."

"Before choosing a piece of equipment you have to take into account the cost-benefit offered by each one. Sometimes it is not worth paying a very cheap price to have a minimum level of security."

"The solution's price is average."

"Licensing for Fortinet FortiGate is on a yearly basis. Pricing for it is a bit high. It could be cheaper."

"We are on an annual license to use Fortinet FortiGate."

"It has a competitive price."

"The product pricing is reasonable."

More Fortinet FortiGate pricing and cost advice

"For a three-year deal we paid £55,000 plus tax... But, and this is a big "but," this was over two years ago. ShieldX had only just hit the market. We were the first company in Europe to buy ShieldX."

"ShieldX ensures that we can have the separation needed for our environment to avoid drastically increasing the cost on the licensing side. From this perspective, it's been very positive and helpful."

"We are actually expecting our costs to drop in the coming year, but it is just a matter of the licensing expiring. That is going to happen in the next six months or so. Then, we will start to see a decrease in overall spend."

"We are very happy with the pricing and licensing. It's about getting a site-wide license. One of the challenges that we've had with our previous vendor had been the cost of licensing."

"ShieldX also enables us to migrate to cloud environments faster. That is an important part of it for sure because it takes the exact same policies that we would apply to our on-premise environment and enables us to simply apply them to the cloud. It becomes one policy for both on-prem and for the cloud."

"Security policies are now applied as applications are going up. Because it's automated, we don't have the three to four week delay. The insertion of applications in the cloud for us dropped from an average of three to four weeks to a couple of days."

"For other security professions who are looking for something which is low in cost that does microsegmentation, they should look at ShieldX. It might not be the big name out there, but it does everything that you are looking for in microsegmentation at a very low price."

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Comparison Review

it_user216600

Senior Technical Consultant with 51-200 employees

Jan 3, 2016

Sophos UTM vs. Fortinet FortiGate

I have used both Sophos and Fortinet products in production and I have found the Sophos UTM appliances (hardware and virtual) to be a better fit most of the time -- with a few caveats which I will touch on below. In both instances, the transition from TMG will be mostly straightforward. The main…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Comms Service Provider

10%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

Outsourcing Company

Construction Company

21%

Insurance Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	374
Midsize Enterprise	138
Large Enterprise	195

No data available

Questions from the Community

Which is the better NGFW: Fortinet Fortigate or Cisco Firepower?

When you compare these firewalls you can identify them with different features, advantages, practices and usage at large. In my opinion, Fortinet would be the best option and l use Fortinet too...

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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 the firewalls change every 5 to 7 years as stated but you really do need to upg...

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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 good. The most valuable features for me are their web and email filtering. I wou...

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Comparisons

Cisco Secure Firewall vs Fortinet FortiGate

Compared 15% of the time

Sophos Firewall vs Fortinet FortiGate

Compared 13% of the time

Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls vs Fortinet FortiGate

Compared 6% of the time

Netgate pfSense vs Fortinet FortiGate

Compared 3% of the time

OPNsense vs Fortinet FortiGate

Compared 2% of the time

More Fortinet FortiGate Competitors

Check Point Cloud Firewall (formerly CloudGuard Network Security) vs ShieldX

Compared 23% of the time

Check Point Quantum Force (NGFW) vs ShieldX

Compared 19% of the time

Illumio Segmentation vs ShieldX

Compared 11% of the time

VMware NSX vs ShieldX

Compared 8% of the time

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs ShieldX

Compared 6% of the time

More ShieldX Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Fortinet FortiGate

October 2026

Download Fortinet FortiGate product report

Buyer's Guide

ShieldX

September 2026

Download ShieldX product report

Also Known As

Fortinet FortiGate Next-Generation Firewall

APEIRO, ShieldX APEIRO

Overview

Fortinet FortiGate is a versatile network security tool offering features like VPN, firewall, web filtering, intrusion prevention, and scalability. It is known for its performance and integration with other Fortinet products, making it a preferred choice for robust cybersecurity.

Fortinet FortiGate stands out as a comprehensive cybersecurity solution with strong performance and ease of configuration. It delivers unified threat management, integrating features such as dynamic routing, SD-WAN support, and centralized management. Despite its strengths, improvements in the web interface's stability, pricing structures, and reporting capabilities are needed. Users seek better integration with third-party tools and automation advancements to enhance the experience further. These enhancements, alongside improvements in bandwidth management and the reduction of licensing costs, are points of interest for users looking to capitalize on FortiGate's extensive capabilities.

What are Fortinet FortiGate's key features?

VPN: Ensures secure remote connections.
Firewall: Protects against unauthorized access.
Web Filtering: Blocks malicious sites and content.
Application Control: Manages and controls applications.
Intrusion Prevention: Detects and prevents vulnerabilities.
SSL Inspection: Enhances security by inspecting encrypted traffic.

What benefits should be considered when evaluating Fortinet FortiGate?

Affordability: Offers cost-effective security solutions.
Reliability: Known for consistent and stable performance.
Integration: Seamlessly integrates with other Fortinet products.
Comprehensive Protection: Provides broad threat protection capabilities.

Fortinet FortiGate is widely implemented across industries as a primary firewall system for securing internet gateways and safeguarding data centers. It supports businesses in achieving SD-WAN integration and enhances cybersecurity by providing essential features like antivirus, web filtering, and application control. Enterprises utilize FortiGate for securing remote connections and ensuring compliance with security standards, making it adaptable for different network sizes and industries.

Fortinet

ShieldX offers advanced, scalable security for cloud and data center environments, addressing dynamic threats with precision. Its robust framework enables efficient threat detection and response, safeguarding critical infrastructure.

Specialized in delivering comprehensive security, ShieldX is designed for organizations looking to protect their cloud assets and on-premises data centers. It integrates seamlessly within existing IT frameworks, providing multi-layered defense against cyber threats. ShieldX uses machine learning and AI to detect anomalies and respond to potentially malicious activities, ensuring data integrity and availability while maintaining regulatory compliance.

What are the most important features of ShieldX?

Dynamic Security Policies: Automatically adjust security measures based on current threats.
Micro-Segmentation: Provides granular control of traffic between workloads.
Automated Threat Detection: Leverages AI to identify and mitigate threats instantly.
Comprehensive Visibility: Gain insights into network activities across all environments.

What benefits should users look for in ShieldX reviews?

Scalability: Easily adapts to growing security needs without disrupting operations.
Cost Efficiency: Reduces overhead by streamlining security management processes.
Enhanced Compliance: Supports adherence to regulatory requirements with minimal effort.
Increased Uptime: Minimizes downtime by preemptively addressing threats.

ShieldX is widely implemented in industries like finance and healthcare, where data protection is critical. Its versatile security protocols are tailored to meet specific sector needs, fostering a reliable defense against sector-specific threats. Organizations in these fields leverage ShieldX to ensure client data confidentiality and operational continuity.

Fortinet

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

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We monitor all Firewalls reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.