Fortinet FortiGate Reviews

We are selling FortiGate 60E and 200E. I mostly look after imports and finance, and my sales team and my corporate manager look after the business. Currently, we are buying renewals for our customers from a local distributor.

Customers are more inclined towards FortiGate because of application control, web filtering, and anti-spam features. The support from the FortiGate team is good, and price-wise, it is affordable.

They are doing good, but they can improve the distributor assignment. The availability of the product and the timeline of delivery are the main things. The distribution should be swift, and the distributor should not reach out to end customers directly. They should work as a distributor. There should also be one more local distributor. Currently, there is only one distributor in Pakistan, and the rest of them are in UAE. It is difficult to work with only one distributor. Sometimes, you don't get along with the same distributor, and that's why they should have one more distributor. 

Their licensing should also be improved. The activation or renewal of the product should be done from the date of renewal, not from the date on which the license expired.

I have been using this solution for almost two years.

It is 100% stable.

It is scalable. We have more than a thousand users. 

The support from the FortiGate team is good. My engineers never complained that they are facing any problem with Fortinet in terms of support.

It is very easy to install. It is way easier than Cisco.

The deployment duration varies from customer to customer. It depends on what features they want to utilize, what is their scenario for IP addressing, and what security level they want to implement. It also depends on the policy and the planning of the technical teams. My engineers and the customer's engineers sit together, and they plan the activity and take care of everything. After that, they decide what to implement and how long it will take. Sometimes there are physical, logical, or IP addressing problems, so it all depends on the customer and our implementation planning. I have three guys for deployment. 

Its price is affordable and lesser than Cisco. Cisco is expensive.

In terms of licensing, there is only one issue. If a customer's license has expired a month ago and they do the renewal after one month, Fortinet renews the license from the start of the previous month. The activation of the product is done from the previous month, not from the date of renewal. The customers usually shout and complain that because they are paying today, the renewal should start from today. The support contract renewals or licensing should be renewed from the date of renewal, but Fortinet starts from the day it had expired. It is a loss for customers. They might have had some problems because of which they did not take the license one month before. Fortinet should work on this. Cisco doesn't do this. Cisco always starts from the day they apply for the license.

We plan to keep selling this solution. Fortinet has launched new partnership levels. They have removed the silver partnership. We were a silver partner previously, and we have now become a premier partner or something like that. So, we have to improve our partnership on new levels.

I would definitely recommend this solution. We always support customers and recommend buying Fortinet. It is a better, more stable, and relatively cheaper product than Cisco. We supply Cisco only when a customer forces us to go for Cisco.

I would rate Fortinet FortiGate a nine out of ten.

I primarily use the solution for network security - especially for the VPN connection, the remote site connection. 

The solution is very easy to install.

The services from Fortinet products are very, very good. The WIFI that Fortinet provides for us, for example, is fantastic. 

The VPN tunnel is very stable and there is more than one option for the tunnel, which is helpful. 

We can customize the product well.

There's a very intelligent solution that they gave us in order to make the VPN connection easy. It is a very, very, very useful tool. 

The stability of the solution is excellent, as it is with other Fortinet products.

Fortinet is a very big product. It has FortiGate, FortiWiFi, FortiSwitch, email security, etc. Due to this, they have some weaknesses in the ISPs, the services. They could improve these aspects. Hotspot services especially could be a lot better. 

There are just some services that aren't available. For example, the Ethernet or point-to-point protocols. They could add these services to their product offering - especially services for ISPs.

I've been using the solution for about three years at this point.

The solution is very stable. That's not a problem at all. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's quite reliable.

The solution can scale well. If a company needs to expand it, they can.

I have various clients that use the solution and they have a user base that can range anywhere from five users to over 10,000.

I do plan to continue to use the solution in the future, however, I can't speak as to if my clients will expand their services or not.

Technical support, by and large, is very good. Fortinet has a very fast response time for their support tickets. It doesn't matter if the help is coming from the local distributor, or from web support. I don't face any problems with their level of attentiveness. I'm quite satisfied.

I use a wide variety of products in my shop. For example, I also work with Sophos UTM, Cisco, HPE, and Aruba products. 

There's a lot of problems in, maybe, let's say, Sophos products. Especially in their support. They have very weak support. Cisco has good support, on the other hand, and a very good product, however, it is too expensive. HPE is a very nice product and has good support, however, it's not a UTM. Therefore, often we end up recommending Fortinet options.

The initial setup was not complex. It was pretty straightforward.

How long it takes to deploy the solution depends on the company and the configurations required. Sometimes I am able to do it in one day, whereas other times it takes more than one month to complete.

I'm just a customer. I'm using the latest version of the solution. I'm using the F-series. Previously, I used the E-series.

We use the on-premises version of the solution as Fortinet does not yet support the cloud.

I am not an organization, I am in IT support. I have my own agency for installing such devices. I use it for some universities which is more than 10,000 students in some cases. I also use it in some factories which have four to five users. It works just as well for small and medium-sized companies as it does for enterprise-level organizations.  

I would recommend the solution to others for sure.

Overall, I would rate Fortinet's solution at a nine out of ten.

I see several benefits of using Fortinet FortiGate. When it comes to deploying the solution, it is easy. It allows customers to quickly get up to speed with their day-to-day tasks, minimizing mundane requests. Additionally, the support regarding upgrades and hardware failures has been above par.

Fortinet FortiGate helps to remediate threats more quickly. 

Fortinet FortiGate helps to reduce the mean time to respond when it is properly integrated with proper tools. For example, with email and other automation capabilities, it has reduced to under an hour for me. 

Fortinet FortiGate helps to consolidate tools and applications by offering web control, email protection, routing, firewalling, and extending to switching and wireless on the same management platform.

Fortinet FortiGate is good for helping you secure and protect mission-critical data. It is also good for protecting your edge.

When it comes to security, Fortinet is excellent in terms of how updates are done when there is an incident globally or there's a new variant of any IOCs. It is quite up-to-date.

I find application control, logging and reporting, and ease of use valuable. I find the ease of configuring specific policies to be the most valuable feature of the Fortinet FortiGate firewall.

The solution could be improved by addressing limited local reporting. It requires obtaining the FortiAnalyzer for proper visibility because you can't do much from a reporting perspective with just the firewall alone.

In terms of convergence, it is a good solution, but it can be better. FortiGate has the capability to support their switching and wireless platforms. They are quite excellent on their wireless side, but I found a couple of gaps in terms of how FortiGate integrates with their own switching platform. There are some gaps there.

My experience of working with Fortinet FortiGate is approximately 10 years.

It caters to all with different units, such as from five users to a model that supports telcos or huge enterprises. Depending on the size of your organization, you end up getting the correct fit of the model, and they have the same capabilities. The variation comes in terms of the interfaces and throughputs, but from a security perspective, you get the same benefit, irrespective of whether you have an entry-level unit or an enterprise.

Their support is quite effective. I would rate technical support from Fortinet a nine out of ten.

Positive

I've had a chance to do a couple of deployments on the cloud. I've done deployments on private and public clouds. I've deployed it on-prem as an edge firewall or as a data center firewall. 

In terms of maintenance, like all firewalls, there is an aspect of upgrading based on new features and getting the latest updates from the signatures and IPS uploads that come along with it. That happens effectively in an automated way. Software upgrades are catered to during the support window.

The FortiGate firewall has helped to reduce the total cost of ownership.

It provides value for money and is quite competitive compared to other vendors, allowing you to achieve the proper ROI from investments.

The pricing or licensing of Fortinet FortiGate is quite effective as it offers different bundles that aggregate most required features, while also allowing clients the option to select specific components alone.

The typical use case for Fortinet FortiGate as a firewall is because of the commercial aspects. It is competitive from a pricing perspective. There is ease of use compared to other vendors and effective vendor support for any issues.

Anyone considering purchasing FortiGate's data center firewall should go for it because data centers require stability and proper performance, which the platform provides. I would recommend getting the latest unit for a longer shelf life as clients often buy nearly end-of-sale products, limiting their usability.

Overall, I would rate this solution 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.

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 primarily use the solution for its security features and performance. We enable features that assist with web filtering, application consoles, and IPS.

The performance of the solution is very good.

The product offers very good security.

It's pretty easy to install the solution.

The cloud management should improve. There are other manufacturers that have better management cloud solutions. Aruba, for example, is very good at this aspect. Fortinet could look to them as a model of how to do something interesting with management solutions.

Fortinet across the board needs to improve the LAN aspect of their products.

The solution lacks multi-language support.

They could offer access points to small companies and firewalls at those access points. Aruba, in that sense, is much better for smaller organizations as they provide this possibility.

We've been using the solution for a few years at this point.

The solution is quite stable. You don't have to deal with bugs or glitches. You don't have it freezing on you. It's reliable.

The solution is pretty scalable. It's flexible. It works with the organization and allows you to expand it as necessary.

In my company, we use FortiGate across several locations. The location with the most number of users has maybe 400 to 500 employees. That said, there is another FortiGate that manages the traffic that goes to the internet for all of the users across locations. We must have around 900 users.

We do plan to continue to use it going forward.

The solution does have different levels of support. If the problem is critical, you can escalate it quite well and even get telephone support.

That said, in terms of telephone support, they need to have support provided in the Spanish language. Right now, this is not the case.

While we concurrently use both Sophos and Fortinet, we're working towards just using Fortinet. I find that the performance of Fortinet is much better than Sophos.

The solution's initial setup is not complex. It's pretty straightforward. In my case, I have many years of expertise working with FortiGate and therefore it was not difficult. It's quite good and easy to manage.

How long it takes to deploy the solution, depends on what the customers ask you to do. More or less, however, it might take maybe one day to make the initial setup of the unit and the configuration that the customer requests. It may take another day or two to put it on service and check that everything is working properly, once again, based on the requirements of the customer.

I work mostly with firewalls and network equipment including firewalls, switches, and routers. I don't just work with Fortinet. I also work with Sophos, Cisco, and Aruba.

We're using the latest version of the product currently.

Overall, I would rate the solution ten out of ten.

We have both on-premises as well as virtual firewall servers. We have quite a few FortiGate firewalls as part of our infrastructure. We are using Check Point more from the perimeter perspective. It is only there on the perimeter.

The virtual firewall feature is the most valuable. We have around 1,500 firewalls. We did not buy individual hardware, and the virtual firewalls made sense because we don't have to keep on buying the hardware. 

FortiGate is easier to use as compared to Checkpoint devices. It is user friendly and has a good UI. You don't need much expertise to work on this firewall. You don't need to worry much about DCLA, commands, and things like that.

FortiGate is really good. We have been using it for quite some time. Initially, when we started off, we had around 70 plus devices of FortiGate, but then Check Point and Palo Alto took over the place. From the product perspective, there are no issues, but from the account perspective, we have had issues. 

Fortinet's presence in our company is very less. I don't see any Fortinet account managers talking to us, and their presence has diluted in the last two and a half or three years. We have close to 1,500 firewalls. Out of these, 60% of firewalls are from Palo Alto, and a few firewalls are from Check Point. FortiGate firewalls are very less now. It is not because of the product; it is because of the relationship. I don't think they had a good relationship with us, and there was some kind of disconnect for a very long time. The relationship between their accounts team and my leadership team seems to be the reason for phasing out FortiGate.

I have been using FortiGate for the last four to five years.

It is stable.

I currently have about 36 to 40 devices that are being used. We use a certain number of devices from business to business.

We were not getting proper support from Fortinet. That's the reason we had to phase out FortiGate.

We implemented it on our own. It took around one hour. We have one or two engineers for its deployment and maintenance. 

We installed FortiGate four or five years ago. We are just phasing out FortiGate and not doing new installations of FortiGate. Whichever model is getting end of life, we're just replacing it with a Palo Alto device. We can use it in the future, but I don't see any presence of Fortinet in my company at this time. I see a lot of push from Palo Alto, Check Point, and other vendors, but I don't see Fortinet around at all.

With the current COVID situation, I don't know how FortiGate behaves when working from home, which is an entirely different concept. In other firewalls, we create HIP profiles and similar stuff, but I am not sure how FortiGate works in such an environment.

I would definitely recommend this solution, but I think Fortinet has to first create a presence. That is more important. Nobody says anything bad about the product. The product is still widely being used.

I would rate Fortinet FortiGate an eight out of ten.