Fortinet FortiGate Reviews

We mainly use the solution as a firewall. 

The solution is very user-friendly.

The collection of the integration of multiple nodes makes everything very easy. The fact that you can push, directly, one element, and you can leverage the distribution of the policy very well has been great. 

Honestly, the console is done very well. It's easy to use.

From a strategic point of view, I've seen, in recent years, a big challenge from Fortinet to recover some kinds of space with respect to the other two biggest players, Check Point and Palo Alto. That has happened much more since the beginning of the next generation file. I found Fortinet recovered much market space in the last year.

I'm not sure if it's something that they already have or are developing something, however, we need some dedicated features for container security. Other vendors have developed some kind of specific product to protection. Containers now are very common, especially in the cloud. It's an area that needs to be addressed.

I've worked with the product for three or four years, more or less. 

The stability has been great. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

We have more than 10,000 people o the solution. The scalability capabilities are enough. We haven't had a problem at all. 

It would be hard to rate technical support due to the fact that, up until now, we've never had to deal with them.

That said, from talking with colleagues, my understanding is that they are good, and they offer standard levels of support in line with other competitors. 

We've also used Palo Alto and Check Point.

The initial setup is straightforward, however, we have knowledgeable teams. We also use Fortinet to check the configurations and make sure everything is supported during implementation. 

It's pretty standard to deploy. We're also familiar with Palo Alto and Check Point and there is not much of a difference between the three.

We managed, with my team, the setup. We also engaged with Fortinet in terms of professional services in order to check the installation and offer some support.

That said, we have many people on our team certified with the biggest firewalls and security infrastructure vendors.

It's very difficult to discuss pricing as we have generally, in terms of pricing, at the end of the day, we have leveraged deals the existing contracts the client had in place. The client uses various technology vendors. I can't say that one is cheaper than the other. It's all in the same ballpark when you are speaking about comparable products.

We are partners with many vendors, including Fortinet.

Likely our engineers would know what version of the solution we are on. I don't follow those details. 

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten. It's stable, easy to set up, and easy to use. However, I have yet to see all of the features in play.

My company's customers use the solution for VPNs, specifically for SSL VPNs, IPSec VPNs, and other areas like web filters and application filters.

The most valuable feature of the solution revolves around SSL VPN. SSL VPN is good since I stay in a family where we use some other servers with port forwarding features, and so there is a lot of risk with it. Last time, my server got hacked with a ransomware attack. After that, we got a firewall and gave an SSL VPN to my client to connect to their servers, after which, such kind of activities involving ransomware attacks stopped.

Though the tool's GUI is user-friendly, it can be considered as an area with certain shortcomings where improvements are required.

I have been using Fortinet FortiGate for five years. I am a reseller of the solution. I work with Fortinet FortiGate 40F and 60F.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

The challenges faced by our company related to the product are associated with the activation part. Whenever my company tries to activate the product, there are some challenges. Previously, my company had given a new product to our customer who had used Fortinet FortiGate in the past. When my company tried registering the product on the portal and activating the trial license, we saw that only 30 days of use remained in the tool. We installed the product's license after all the trial licenses were activated.

I have seven to ten customers running medium-sized businesses using Fortinet FortiGate.

After connecting to Fortinet Firewall, I have not faced any complaints related to large-scale traffic or attacks.

The solution's technical support needs to be fast since whenever my company raises a complaint, it takes almost two to three hours to get a callback from the customer support team. I rate the technical support a seven out of ten.

Neutral

I don't have any experience with SonicWall because it is not very user-friendly. Fortinet FortiGate is more user-friendly than SonicWall, so we are currently working with Fortinet FortiGate and Sophos.

The product's initial setup phase is easy. I rate it as an eight, where one is difficult, and ten is easy. Sometimes, when configuring the SD-WAN policies, I have seen issues with the tool not working properly. After updating the firmware, the tool worked properly, but there was some issue with the SD-WAN part.

For the product's deployment phase, I configured LAN and WAN, followed by the web filter policies. If a customer requires it, you can configure the VPNs.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

The solution can be deployed in half an hour.

It is a bit expensive. On a scale of one being cheap and ten being expensive, I rate the tool's price as an eight. The price is justified for the features and capabilities offered by the product.

I can't describe how Fortinet FortiGate has been most effective for security posture since I haven't configured any security settings. It has a setting like in Outlook's configuration involving SMTP and POP. I didn't configure any security settings in the tool.

The tool's VPN functionality supports our company's customers' remote workforce since we have given an SSL VPN connection to support those working from outside the company. After connecting to the VPN, one needs to connect it to the server directly as it is better for security.

Whenever you upgrade firewall firmware, the user interface doesn't really change. If I upgrade to a new firmware with other tools, the user interface has slightly changed.

On the portal of Fortinet, there are VMs that are available for FortiGate. Our company can give the solution to the customer on a trial basis to check how it is working, so that there are no issues.

I rate the tool a nine out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for security purposes. We use it as a firewall for protection. 

It helps protect our users, and we are able to initiate our own policies. It also provided good visibility and reporting. 

The management is very easy.

It offers very good security features. 

The reporting and monitoring are very good.

We can integrate the solution very well with other Fortigate solutions. 

It's stable and reliable.

The solution can scale. 

Pricing is reasonable. 

We do not need any other features.

We'd like more management across other integrations. It would be ideal if it could centralize the management, and we could therefore manage all solutions under Fortinet instead of managing everything individually.

In some cases, depending on the module and the age, performance could be better.

I've been using the solution for three years. 

The solution is very scalable and reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. 

We have 800 end users, approximately.

The solution is scalable. 

Technical support has been fine. However, we haven't really dealt with them too much. We haven't had any critical issues. 

We also use other Fortinet products, including the NFGW.

We also work with Cisco devices and solutions. 

We have worked with Palo Alto in the past. It has a pretty good performance. 

In the end, we moved to Fortinet as the cost was very good. 

The solution is very simple. The process is easy to understand. It's not complex at all. 

I helped deploy the solution. We had to integrate it with internal and external firewalls. 

We had the full functionality in place within five days. We had five people managing the deployment process. 

I integrated the solution myself without outside help.

The cost of the solution is reasonable. 

I'm an end-user.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

Fortinet FortiGate is used as a network firewall.

Fortinet has been a Perimeter Security which defends our network from Internet attackers, armed with zero-day exploits of common Internet services like HTTP and SMTP. We applied access-control lists to limit classes of VPN users' access to only what they need as a support team or solution deployers. We Shut off unused network services and defended critical resources first. We Build Internet-style perimeters for partner extranets. We also built secured wireless access.

Fortinet FortiGate UTM has many valuable features, such as application control, advanced persistent threat protection, Web and content filtering, IP reputation, integrated WLAN controller, intrusion prevention system, data loss prevention, and antimalware, antivirus, and antispam. It has security features that are in level with the Firewall technologies that are available in the market.

One of the features that I would like to have is endpoint protection, this should be integrated. For example, the firewall gets notified of any kind of forensic event that needs to be done, such as if there is a ransomware attack and how it originated, all those records have to be available from the firewall, which is not.

I have been using Fortinet FortiGate for approximately 6 years.

Fortinet FortiGate has high availability, which means that we have deployed two firewalls. In case of any failure of a device, the other one will continue to work. Our university stays online 100% of the time.

Fortinet FortiGate is quite robust. I haven't had any kind of hardware issue. The system has been running very smoothly with all the upgrades as far as I have continued my support with Fortinet. We keep renewing the support every year, which gives us the eligibility for all the updates.

I used the Fortinet FortiGate support a long time ago. There was a small feature that was not functioning as per the documentation. When they released the latest firmware and the issue was resolved. They provide prompt support.

I would rate the support from Fortinet FortiGate a five out of five.

Positive

The initial setup of Fortinet FortiGate is straightforward we had an right person in-house for deploying it. Moreover, If required, Fortinet has its support extended to us. We can approach them anytime and they can assist us with any kind of complicated configuration.

We implemented the Fortinet using an in-house Technical support team.

There is a subscription-based model to use Fortinet FortiGate. We pay annually for the solution along with the support. If you want to have all the updates, and security patches you will need to renew your support.

The price of Fortinet FortiGate is reasonable compared to other solutions.

I have evaluated many other solutions, such as Sophos. If you look at Sophos, it has its own endpoint protection. It keeps a record of each client, what are the threats that have happened on each client level, and if there is a ransomware attack. It blocks it and notifies the firewall. I would be able to see a single dashboard view of what kind of threat has happened and how to mitigate them all.

Fortinet FortiGate is a good solution overall. It is very user-friendly and all the policies are very easy to deploy. I would recommend Fortinet FortiGate to any new users who want to have a secure infrastructure.

I rate Fortinet FortiGate an eight out of ten.

There are some better industry-standard solutions out there in the market, and compared to them, Fortinet FortiGate has to be more flexible enough with their solution to be more competitive.

We use Fortigate, and we have a relationship with Fortinet. We are working with the Fortigate 100F firewall. It is mainly for firewalling, but we would also use them for network demarcation as a DHCP or NAT router. We're also working with our Fortinet account manager to try and push further forward using an SD-WAN controller.

In terms of deployment, it comes through to the build lab. We configure it and then ship it to our customers. We are reviewing how to obviously do zero hands with FortiCloud, but what we've done so far has been conventional configuration and shipping.

Fortigate represents a really scalable way of delivering perimeter network security, some level of layer 7 security, WAF, and also a way to create a meshed ADVPN solution.

Usually, we sell the bundle with the UTM or threat management piece with IPS, IDS. Other providers, such as Palo Alto, are ahead in terms of safe functionality. So, for me, delivering truly safe service is probably something that still needs to be improved.

Anything they can bring around safe service would be brilliant. At the end of the day, when we talk to customers about deploying, split tunneling, and looking at endpoint security, remote access or safe type of features would be useful.

I've been selling Fortinet technologies for over 10 years.

It is stable.

It is scalable. It is quite straightforward. Moving from, for instance, legacy 200D to 100F has proved not to be an issue. It is quite straightforward.

I am not a hundred percent sure. Our third-line guys deal with them quite a lot. In terms of escalation, for example, when one of my customers had a query about secure authentication on the portal, it has taken some time to get feedback from the vendor or the manufacturer. So, I am unsure. I've not had a great experience, but I can't really answer that one properly.

It is reasonably straightforward if you've got the management portal in terms of FortiCloud. With that, migrating from one firewall, as it reaches the end of support, to an upgraded firewall is fairly intuitive. You should be able to easily reverse out a script and configuration and apply that to the new firewall, following proper governance as a managed service.

We're a managed service provider, so we would probably put two to three PS engineer days to follow the appropriate protocol. From a lead time perspective, a new high availability firewall deployment should not take more than 10 working days from the config test, deployment, and failover test perspective.

If you are a mid-market business, Fortigate presents a solid proposition for the mid-market. If you are getting to enterprise-level, for me, Palo Alto is still a more viable product when you get up to what I call financial services, enterprise-level service customers. 

I would rate it an eight out of 10 for its ease of deployment and its ubiquitous approach to network security. 

Our primary use case is mainly for firewalls. We tried FortiClient as well and FortiToken, but we mainly use it for the firewall.

The solution is deployed on-prem. We are using the latest version.

The most valuable feature is the interface, which is very user friendly. We are utilizing most of the features, like content filtering. The firewall is powerful.

The renewal price and the availability could be improved. We faced a lot of delivery issues because of the pandemic situation. We are a customer, but sometimes we have sister companies, so we deliver or order a few extra boxes. In these cases we are facing some delays, like three or four months. There are a massive delays in deliveries and they're saying that it's from the vendor itself. I don't know how long this will last or if it's just temporary.

We have been using this solution for six to seven years.

The solution is stable. The only issue is the renewal price, which is always higher compared to the purchase price.

We have two people for maintenance from network and security.

We have up to 100 users, and we are pretty satisfied. It's stable. We have never had to scale up because of the newest model. We go with C, E, then F, but at the same level, we never had to upgrade the hardware itself to a higher or a bigger model.

We raised a few tickets and issues, and they replied to us. It was pretty good. We have never faced any problems with getting our issues resolved.

It was straightforward. We didn't face any issues.

We implemented through a reseller and it took couple of days. There were some modifications and configurations that took more time, but the core configuration took a couple of days.

The renewal price is always higher compared to the purchase price.

Fortinet is one of our top products, our main products. They have 75% market share, so we cannot ignore the fact that they are in the market, but I need an alternate solution. I don't want to depend on only one vendor, so I think Sophos will be a good option for us.

I would rate this solution 8 out of 10.

We are a system integrator and Fortigate is one of the firewalls that we implement for our clients. I am a solution architect.

Our primary use for this firewall is the IPS.

One of the things I like best is the ease of configuration.

Management-wise, it is very good.

The most important feature, normally for small business customers, is link load balancing.

The firewall throughput is very good. Most of the customers in this region use FortiGate for their data center firewalls, and the main reason is because of its high throughput.

Fortinet is good in terms of security and threat prevention, but they are not leading. For example, the signature database can be improved.

If they had better integration with security products, such as Cisco ISE or Rapid Threat Containment, then it would be an improvement. Customers that have ISE implemented are able to provide inputs based on malicious traffic, and then ISE will automatically block it.

We have been working with Fortinet FortiGate for the past two years.

Stability-wise, they are good at the job of a data center firewall. For a perimeter firewall, it is for smaller customers, preferably.

The scalability depends on the design and how it was done. You have to think about the next five years. We get lots of new updates on the older versions and if the product is still in support then the new features will be included.

The responsiveness of the support depends on the level of support that you have. If you have premium support then you will get immediate access to them. Otherwise, you have to wait for some time, perhaps an hour, before they get back to you.

On the technical details, there are different levels of access. Once you have engineer access then most of the cases are going to get resolved, or otherwise, they will go to their development team.

In addition to FortiGate, we are using Cisco SFR.

The initial setup is straightforward. We have field configuration guides that we follow and you don't need to have much in-depth knowledge to set it up initially. However, performing the fine-tuning requires that you have proper training on the device.

Deploying the firewall for a new customer will be completed within two to three days, or perhaps a week at the most.

Compared to vendors like Cisco and Palo Alto, FortiGate is the cheapest. However, they only have a small segment of the market. Fortinet is trying to appeal to small and medium-sized customers, and I think that their prices should be a little lower for this segment.

On the high-end devices, it is fine. However, the problem is that their subscription price is very high. If you purchase a one-year subscription with the hardware and then you want to renew for the second year, it is very costly. Your whole price ends up being very high.

As a system integrator, we sell a lot of similar solutions from a variety of vendors. We have found that the Fortinet firewall has a much better throughput than that of the other vendors.

If a large customer is looking for a perimeter firewall then we suggest another vendor, such as Check Point or Palo Alto.

FortiGate is a product that we recommend and we have migrated many customers from other vendors. FortiGate is a better option, although small customers don't care much about security. They only care about basic security. There are only a very few who are really concerned about it and most of them don't have a proper IT group in their company. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We have been using it for our internal infrastructure, but mainly, we are providing it as a service to our customers.

In one of the use cases, a customer is using FortiGate, and they also use FortiAP. To collect the usage and monitor the traffic, they use FortiAnalyzer. So, they have FortiGate, FortiAP, and FortiAnalyzer. It is not a very big deployment. It is a midsized company with less than 50 people.

The UTM feature is quite good. FortiAP is easy to deploy because both Fortigate and FortiAP are under the same brand. Otherwise, you need to do more work on the configuration.

Price, of course, can always be more competitive or better.

If a customer has a requirement for firewall, security, WiFi, and analytics, it is good if we can propose a solution from the same vendor, but we have found that no distributor in Hong Kong has sufficient knowledge to deploy Network Access Control (NAC) solutions. They have a wide range of products, but apart from the popular ones, such as a firewall or an AP,  there is not sufficient support here in Hong Kong for NAC solutions.

I have been using this solution for more than 10 years.

It is reasonably stable.

Our customers are mainly small to medium businesses. I really didn't have a chance to scale it up. We have a customer with two subsidiaries on the same floor. They are changing from traditional features to SD-WAN features. Based on what I heard from my colleagues, migration work is quite smooth, and there are no big issues.

I'm not doing hands-on work for the projects, but from my colleagues, I haven't heard of any delay or incompetency in support.

It is quite easy. The duration depends on the complexity. If you are using a firewall from one brand and WiFi from another brand, then you probably would need more time to do the setup. Overall, the saving is around 25% in terms of labor hours.

Their licensing costs are annual. The UTM feature license along with their support is called FortiCare. We include that as a part of the annual maintenance cost. Palo Alto or Juniper also have an annual subscription charge for UTM.

Price, of course, can always be more competitive, but it is not the most expensive product. The price-performance ratio is quite high for FortiGate.

I would recommend this solution to others as well as to our existing customers who are not using FortiGate. I would rate it an eight out of 10.