Fortinet FortiGate Reviews

We use Fortinet FortiGate out of fear for malware on the internet, to protect our users from malware. We also use FortiGate to prevent connections to the internet.

We mainly use Fortinet FortiGate to prevent infections of technology on our network devices. We use it to auto-scan for viruses, worms, and malware.

The feature that prevents internet connections, the filtering, is the most valuable feature because we did not have any internet protection before.

Fortinet could improve the windows opener or the virtual IP solutions for opening windows. The virtual IP settings need improvement as firewalls are trending in new development directions.

Fortinet FortiGate is very stable. We use it for 20 hours a day only. It is a firewall so it cannot be shut down.

Fortinet FortiGate is scalable, but it is not a requirement for us. We only have 25 users. They are general users, not engineers. I am the only engineer needed to maintain FortiGate.

We didn't need Fortinet customer support because FortiGate was already configured.

We started with Fortinet FortiGate. We weren't previously using another solution. 

The initial setup of Fortinet FortiGate is not so difficult. We got the instructions for the installation from Fortinet online.

The majority of the work was implemented by our vendor. The deployment took about two days to complete.

The installation of Fortinet FortiGate was implemented by our vendor. They are a third-party selling company, not the original manufacturer.

Fortinet is reasonable in pricing and licensing. Overall, FortiGate is affordable. The licensing fee can be a little high, depending on the budget for your project.

Other products are not so popular in Taiwan, but the IBM IPM solution is a major competitor to Fortinet FortiGate for firewalls.

Fortinet FortiGate is a stable and affordable product. I would rate Fortinet FortiGate an 8/10. So far, Fortinet FortiGate has been enough for our business requirements.

The main use is to protect from outside attack, from any side. Because we work with sensitive data, we have to protect our work. We use it mainly for security, not only for content control.

We have peace of mind. We do work in a very dangerous environment, the internet, and this device gives us alerts. It gives us the opportunity to know what is going on.

The filtering that you can do with the firewall.

I would like to be able to do segmentation, for a specific user, with more priveledges. I would also like to see an easier user interface to implement that.

Sometimes we found that the traffic to the internet froze, I don't know exactly the reason. The only way to get it to work again was to turn it off and then run it again, a hardware reset. Overall it is a very stable platform but sometimes there is this problem.

The scalability is fine. The problem is the licensing. To do more you have to pay for it. In this market, where you can find a lot of devices to do the same things, to charge for them in the license is very difficult. Also, sometimes Fortinet changes their products, they drop devices from the market very quickly.

We have guys who are certified to work with Fortinet, so right now it's fine with them. We never really have serious problems, something to escalate to Fortinet. Only when there is a very difficult issue with the performance or something like that have we had to go to Fortinet, but it has been great.

One of the main reasons we're considering switching from FortiGate is because many companies have a lot of features and you don't have to pay for. If you compare side by side, you find a lot of things that new brands do as well for fewer dollars.

When selecting a vendor the most important factor is the prestige of the vendor. Also the cost, renewing licenses. Our customers are looking for more features for less cost. We have to look at what is going on in the market, who the main players are, who is doing well, and who has a good reputation.

I was not involved in the initial setup of the devices. I only had to check it out and make sure it was working fine. But I saw the guys working with the configuration. Occasionally they had to reference the manual but had to find the answers on Google.

Fortinet and Sophos are the main players for this type of solution.

I would rate FortiGate at seven out of 10 because, although they are doing well, the problem is the licensing, the cost is too high, and how they support their own devices needs improvement. They have to focus on more features with less cost for the customer. If you see the market, where it's going, there are a lot of players offering more features for less cost. FortiGate is a great product but they have to look out.

My advice would be, look at the time on the market. FortiGate is doing well, but right now they have many competitors that are doing well.

The solution improved the security posture and overall management's TCO.

One of the valuable features is a standardized OS.

It claims it does DLP, but the degree and level of controls are very basic. We recommend that our clients supplement it with other products.

There were no issues with stability.

There were no issues with scalability.

Customer Service:

Customer service is excellent.

Technical Support:

Technical support is excellent.

We did not use a previous solution.

We implemented in-house.

Work through partners for the best pricing.

We evaluated Palo Alto, Check Point, and Cisco.

I highly recommend Fortinet as a leader in integrated suite information security capabilities.

• Flexibility
• Flow tracking
• B2B VPN

It's good for what it is. I could achieve the same results with a pfSense firewall. This one just comes in a nice hardware package.

Better documentation about usage of the CLI. I learned most of what I know in diagnostic functionality through saving SSH sessions with the customer support staff while in WebEx sessions.

I have tried looking up the manuals. They are OK in some respects, but I feel exhaustive documentation about the CLI "with examples" should be there, and I feel it's not.

I'm saying, hey lets consolidate some of the primary real world scenarios like:
Section A: - Troubeshooting B2B VPN peering with a business partner or client when initially setting up the VPN tunnel.

Inevitably, there are always quirks and nuances between the fortigate vendor versus peering with a Palo Alto or an ASA firewall or even a Juniper SSG.

Imagine providing all steps, command line syntax, and GUI (if available) and how to take steps to debug the flow and see what's failing.
Sometimes it's super hard to figure out what's wrong with a fortigate VPN unless you know the commands on the CLI to see the flow and how to interpret it.

If they had all the methods / syntax and the "how's and why's" for a scenario; even possibly an instructional video showing how via the CLI and gui alongside the documentation. It would be like the pearly gates had opened and I had gone to heaven.

I have used it for three years.

I never encountered any stability issues. It is a very stable product.

Scalability's not been an issue for my org. We only utilize it for certain applications.

Technical support is excellent, although it can be a bit difficult to understand the tech. As with most support staff from almost all vendors now, the support comes from somewhere across the pond.

On the site where the FortiGate is stationed, it's never been changed out.

Initial setup was straightforward.

Buy the support package! Upgrades, advice about upgrade paths, and troubleshooting help is paramount. There have been some times where, without it, I'd have been dead in the water.

This was an in-place firewall when I integrated the site to my org.

Figure out what features you want, and what policies you want. Look up how to do it in advance, and create an implementation plan.

Plan for policies, routing, NATting, etc. Create a step-by-step process in advance, possibly create the environment in a DEV sandbox, test it, then implement.

It has a good feature set. However, sometimes you are forced to solicit technical support to get it working.

Also, I find the web interfaces sometimes do not display things properly.

• Performances
• VDOM
• UTM
• Consolidated Management
• FortiGuard

• Endpoint control of mobile devices with Security Profiles compliancy checking, captive portal redirection, Antivirus, IPS and Web Filtering enabled on outgoing traffic (coupled to FortiClient solution)
• Identity-based policies used to authenticated and profile users and guests whatever the media used to access the network (ie. Wired and WiFi)
• Dynamic BGP routes injections to divert traffic requiring UTM inspection or DDOS mitigation
• Two-Factor Authentication VPN SSL for itinerant users (coupled to FortiToken solution)
• Active/Active cluster load-balancing http/https traffic
• GTP tunnels inspections over GPRS backbones for pure-player telco operators
• Distributed WiFi infrastructure with UTM enabled and managed from the central console like signatures and firmware updates
• Classical IP/IPv6 Firewall with consolidated-management

• Fix all pending bugs present in 5.0.x branch
• Improve the testing process of newly published firmware like using real and representative configurations submitted to consequent traffic load during a while
• Support SNMPv3 INFORM requests
• Uniform the scheduled backup between FortiGate, FortiManager and FortiAnalyzer
• Integrate graphical troubleshoot tools for policies based on devices or user identities

4.5 years

Some few non-blocking bugs present in the latest release and which are now solved. In the past I encountered serious bug regarding SCTP and GTP supports. Fortinet helped me to qualify the bug, implement a temporary workaround and then published appropriate patches rapidly.

No. I always used the latest qualified-stable firmware recommended by Fortinet and check by own testing methods the stability of HW and SW before deploying anything into customer premises.

With design and dimensioning parts well achieved I never encountered scalability issue. However it happened I had to troubleshoot some slowness and latency issues on existing projects already running live. Most of the time they were due to some design issues and non-optimized configurations like for instance “in” and “out” ports not handled by the same NP, policy rules non-optimized and non-used features enabled.

Very good.

Very good.

• CISCO ASA: Too expensive, performances issues, non-consolidated management between traditional ASA and inspection ASA CX, not the best security engines
• Checkpoint: Very expensive but good solutions, not the leader in UTM segment
• Juniper: Expensive but good solutions, not the leader in UTM segment
• Cyrberoam: Attractive prices but not yet tested, looks like promising
• Arkoon/Netasq: Obsoletes (Stormshield not yet tested)

It was quite simple if you have at least a minimum of experiment with Firewalls integration. It is now even simpler thanks to the FortiExplorer application.

In-house.

Taking into account the price criteria, nowadays Fortinet always wins offers in front of competitors like CISCO and Checkpoint. Mixing this key-point with other success keys like UTM features and performances.

Contact Fortinet or Fortinet’s partner and ask for a POC.

It offers a proxy and a firewall.

It has a better processor than CheckPoint.

It's not intuitive, as the rules will be in the last place you look. You can look for a report for an hour, eventually getting a blank page. User experience for the administrator is basically not good as it needs to be more proficient.

I've used it for two years.

I have five ISPs, and it was hard to connect the LAN to the WAN. It did not go well and I had do to a roll-back.

The product is so stable I don't need to have a cluster.

I use a service given by the integrator and it's better than Fortigate’s. The integrator gives me a guarantee that they will immediately replace my machine if a problem occurs.

I use a service given by the integrator and it's better than Fortigate’s. The integrator gives me a guarantee that they will immediately replace my machine if a problem occurs.

I used an open-source product name Squid.

It's straightforward, and was transparent for the users.

We did it in-house.

It costs $200,000 and is only a bit better than the open source solution, which was free.

You don’t have to buy the Fortigate analyzer, as you can also get the reports using Fortinet.

It's fine as a firewall and as a proxy. You need to configure the rules right or else it will be hard to keep up with the logs.

We use Fortinet FortiGate as a network firewall.

The reporting in Fortinet FortiGate could improve. Customers are having to purchase additional reporting components. in  Fortinet FortiGate you have to use additional tools to have the features needed.

We need to use FortiAuthenticator to have additional bandwidth. Fortinet should include more features in the solution instead of having separate tools.

I have been using Fortinet FortiGate for approximately three years.

Fortinet FortiGate is a stable solution from my experience.

The scalability of Fortinet FortiGate is good.

The technical support from Fortinet FortiGate is 24 hours a day seven days a week, and 365 days a year. The support is good from Fortinet, and local distributor partner support has been helpful, we highly recommend them.

I have previously used pfSense, Sophos Firewall, and other endpoint solutions.

The initial implementation of Fortinet FortiGate is not complex because the GUI environment is easy to use. We can do a lot of things in the GUI. If the configurations engineer, network administrator, or network engineer has knowledge about firewalls, the process will not be complex. It can easily be managed.

The price of Fortinet FortiGate when compared to other solutions is high. However, my knowledge of the price is from third parties and I am not sure how accurate it is. I typically work in the technical area of my organization.

I rate Fortinet FortiGate a nine out of ten.

I am primarily using FortiGate to provide a hardware VPN or an equipment base of VPN to a central office. I am only using a small fraction of its capabilities, so I'm not pushing it at the edges.

Using this product makes the VPN seamless and almost invisible to me in the sense that I don't have to think about it.

Once it is in use, it is intuitive to use. Once it's in place, it doesn't require any further interaction.

The initial setup and configuration are not intuitive and require training.

I have been using Fortinet FortiGate for approximately four months.

The stability has been rock-solid, and I haven't seen any glitches or bugs at all.

With only two people in the company, we haven't needed to scale. Our roles include software development and providing technical support for various clients.

I have not needed to contact technical support.

This is the first firewall product that I have used.

The initial setup is fairly technical and it's not something the untrained person would want to do. You need to know what you're doing in order to set it up.

The price of FortiGate is reasonable. In terms of the market, it's not a cheap product, but it's cost-effective.

I purchased this product because this is the one that the central office supports.

In summary, this is a good product, it works, it doesn't need any attention, and I'm satisfied with it. Although the initial setup is slightly complex, security is a complex question and I'm not sure that it can be simplified.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.