Fortinet FortiOS Reviews

The solution is great for data protection in our company, including site too site and SSH.

The stability of Fortinet FortiOS is great.

The product needs a feature that allows users to create another site on a VPN.

We have used this solution with our clients for two years and are currently using version 11. Additionally, we deploy this solution on-premises.

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable. We have a large number of clients using this solution with their users.

We have had a good experience with customer service and support. They are very fast.

The initial setup was very easy to configure.

We implemented it through our in-house technical team.

I rate this solution a nine out of ten. The solution is very good but needs a feature that allows users to create another site on a VPN.

The fact that is it has a UTM, a Unified Threat Management feature is the most valuable aspect for us. It's an all in one product. It's like our one-stop-shop to the internet.

The complexity of the VPNs should be improved. Certain versions of the operating system don't function with our current Fortinet unit. For instance, we've got a 60D FortiGate at our branch offices and the 60D FortiGate doesn't support the latest version of the 40 OS. Because of this, certain Wi-Fi access points that depend on those operating systems don't function so well. So that has room for improvement. I'd like to see that happen.

My impression is the solution is very stable.

I find the solution scalable. With my current employer, we have a high available cluster. You can extend it and also extend it with Wi-fi access points because the controller of the Wi-Fi access points is also in the 40GB range. We've got about 300 personnel in the offices and we've got about 1,000 or more employees in the trucks and they all use it, at different times.

Technical support has been pretty good. At one point, because we've got a lot of drivers - we're a transportation organization - those drivers have mobile phones and at one point we implemented a new mobile phone which uses the Wi-Fi network. The new phones couldn't connect with the Wi-Fi access point and Fortinet pretty much came in quickly with a patch for the Wi-Fi access points.

The initial setup was straightforward. It comes with a quick book, a manual, and without any experience from day one, I implemented successfully without any help. It was pretty straightforward.

I implemented the solution myself.

Seven years ago I was looking into Palo Alto Firewalls.

It's a good reliable product. I'd rate it as a solid eight out of 10. It has room left for improvement.

We'd chosen the solution because of the price and the support contract, but just a few years later the support contact pricing was all of a sudden pretty steep. They increased it by 20% to 30% from one year to another year, and it's hard to explain why.

The best aspects of the solution are the wire signature and VPN, secure VPN encryption, and bulk packet monitoring.

It is a stable product. 

The product is scalable and easily expands. 

Setting up the solution is easy.

We like the technical support on offer. 

It should be controlled in the local environment as well. Its gateway security is more powerful. However, it should also manage the local DSCP network, so the policies, local LAN policies, and other stuff should be there.

I've been using the solution for the last two years.

The stability is good. 

It's running in many places and in different organizations. There's a huge market.

 I found the solution to be scalable. 

We use it in more than one location. We have more than four or five people using it at each location. 

Technical support's good. When we register a ticket, they are always prompt in their response. There are two types of support. It's paid or unpaid support, depending on the service we are using.

Positive

We've also used SonicWall. 

The initial setup is straightforward. It's not complex, You should know where it exists in the OS. Then you can work with it easily. Otherwise, the complexity is something you have to contend with for a new user.

We have witnessed an ROI. 

You need to repurchase a license every year or two. Costs are negotiable and sometimes they offer promotional prices. A yearly subscription might be around $20,000 to $30,000.

We're a customer and end-user.

We would recommend the solution.

Fortinet is a good product. However, other products are good as well. It really depends on the customer experience.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten due to the cost of quality of services, and due to the fact that we know other firewalls are more powerful than Fortinet. That said, Fortinet is very economical and gives us an appropriate solution based on what we require.

We're using it for web filtering, intrusion prevention system (IPS), intrusion detection system (IDS), and VPN. We are also using it as DSCP.

The information security features are the most valuable. 

It would be great if they can push the Microsoft updates through Fortinet OS and provide a centralized patch management system.

They should also include the data loss prevention (DLP) and data leakage prevention features. They could also add network monitoring more effectively.

We have been using Fortinet FortiOS for nearly seven years.

It is very much stable.

It is very scalable. We have a global presence in more than 23 countries. 

We are satisfied with the support. They provide fantastic support. They provide online support, and on priority, they also provide a remote session.

It is extremely easy to set up.

We deployed it ourselves.

This particular solution will be in a firewall. It's not a firewall, but it is a unified threat management (UTM) box. It acts as a firewall, plus it has many features like web filtering, VPN, DSCP, IPS, and IDS. It also has the high availability (HA) feature. You are getting a very good solution with all these features combined into one box.

I would rate Fortinet FortiOS a nine out of ten. We will surely keep using Fortinet FortiOS because it is a great and very secure product. We intend to only go with this product.

FortiOS is just an operating system. That's it. It's a firmware FortiGate is running. 

FortiOS is the foundation of the Fortinet secured fabric.

You can have virtual domains. On top of each virtual domain, you can see the independent system. When comparing Fortinet with other vendors, the good part is you can set different priorities. It depends on different VDOMs. In my case, I have two VDOMs. One is called a VPN VDOM; the other is called a web filter VDOM. Usually, for other vendors, no matter how many domains, just one primary device is always a primary one. However, for FortiGate, you can separate them. In my case, I have machine one, and machine two. FortiGate one, Fortigate two. And for each FortiGate, we can have multiple VDOMs. In my case, I have two VDOMs. If you want to save money, you can split the workload, and this capability helps us save on costs.

It's very flexible firmware. 

I really like it overall. It really meets lots of my requirements.

The initial setup is easy.

It's easy to use. 

The solution is quite stable.

Right now, all the features meet my requirements. It's not lacking in any way.

I have more than ten years of experience with the solution. 

The stability is good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It is reliable. In terms of hardware. We are in a cycle right now to handle hardware replacement. We've been using the hardware for seven years now. 

I have more than 400 stores nationally in Canada. I have it in every  different location. For each store, for business continuity purposes, we have two internet connections. One is the primary internet connection; the secondary is the LTE. 

LTE is expensive, so we always use the primary, like cable or PPPoE. Unless the cable or PPPoE fails, then we switch traffic to LTE. Even for LTE, we control the traffic. For example, we have backup traffic. For LTE, we don't allow the backup traffic to go through LTE since LTE is for business continuity purposes only.

For redundancy, you build up the HA environment, meaning, at a minimum, you have two devices to work together. The secondary is always just sleeping there, dormant. When the primary fails, then you switch over to secondary.

However, for Fortinet, on top of this, you can have multiple VDOMs.

I'm a very senior tech guy, and therefore I would rarely need their services. However, I will say they have been much better, and we find them helpful. 

I've had previous experience with Cisco products.

The initial setup is very good. I'm a Cisco guy; I'm used to the command line interface. Therefore, right now, from my command line point of view, I like it. The hierarchy of the command line is very clear and it's very easy to change as needed.

The license is based on the machine itself, not on how many users. That's why we backhaul all the internet traffic to my head office, so in my head office, I only need to buy one license. To access the internet, we have a VPN tunnel. 

I'm not sure of the exact costs. I didn't purchase it, I just use it. 

I've compared the solution to Palo Alto and Cisco. 

Right now, more and more services are moving to the cloud. In terms of the cloud, the IP address changes so frequently. Today you see this IP for this service, the next day, without notifications, they may change IP to other IP addresses. So, originally, all firewall rules were based on the IP address. Now, it's not based on the IP address; it's based on the service. I can see Fortinet has already worked on this. For example, they provide internet service, which I remember, even though I haven't tried it yet. There's an internet service called Office 365. You just use this; you don't need to know the exact IP address or something; you just use this name. In the background, Fortinet updates this, updates all the information about this group, so you don't need to. The firewall keeps retrieving all that information from Fortinet, so you don't have to worry about the frequent change on the cloud side.

So far, I'm very satisfied with this device. Compared with other vendors, like Palo Alto and Cisco, I'm delighted with FortiGate, to be honest.

I'd rate it ten out of ten.

I am using Fortinet FortiOS in conjunction with a firewall for our network security.

This solution has helped our organization prevent multiple attacks. It has been beneficial having geographical visibility of what threat is being blocked in real-time.

The main features I find useful are intrusion prevention and web filtering. Additionally, the solution is easy to manage.

The solution could improve the log retention and reports.

I have been using Fortinet FortiOS for approximately eight years.

The solution is stable.

Fortinet FortiOS is scalable.

We have different size organizations using this solution and when determining if it fits the organization's it depends on their use case.

We have been satisfied with the technical support.

The initial setup is straightforward.

I have found Fortinet FortiOS to be a good investment.

The price of Fortinet FortiOS has been reasonable.

We have evaluated other solutions, such as SonicWall, Palo Alto, Cyberoam, and Check Point before choosing Fortinet FortiOS.

I would recommend this solution.

I rate Fortinet FortiOS a nine out of ten.

We use the on-prem deployment model of this solution. We use the standard model for our clients. 

In terms of what needs improvements, the troubleshooting could use improvement. When we work with other products like Cisco ASA, Palo Alto, and Check Point, we see a big difference in the troubleshooting. It's not easy to find a report. In order to overcome the problem, you have to install FortiAnalyzer to help you find the troubleshooting problem. FortiOS has its limitations.

I work with many products but this is the most stable OS I have seen. With Cisco, for example, if you do an upgrade, it's not guaranteed that the production will be stable. The upgraded release will release many bugs. FortiOS isn't like this. 

There is something called Fortinet Fabric that helps you to enforce your security by connecting all of your products with FortiGate. For example, if you install FortiClient on your PC it will help you use the VPN and the antivirus. When there is an issue, if you have 1,000 users with FortiClient will send a message to FortiGate. I have many projects and I use FortiManager to manage them. It helps my team minimize implementation time.

We have thousands of user using this solution. Only one person is required for the deployment. 

Their technical support has its positives and negatives. If you contact them, they are responsive and interactive and they have good solutions to the problem. The issue is with the support documents. When you need to do something advanced, there isn't good documentation for it. For basic tasks, there are plenty of videos and information but for advanced tasks or solutions, there is not.  

The initial setup is easy. It's the easiest firewall installation process on the market. I work with three or four other products and this one is the easiest. 

The time it takes to deploy will depend on the needs of the company and how complex they are. A basic installation will take one hour. 

It's important to have 24/7 support because the documentation is poor and you will need the support. It's important to have a support team and a support contract. 

I would rate it a nine out of ten. Not a ten because of the troubleshooting. Other solutions have a mechanism to find your IP network. Cisco has something called Packet Tracer which is very advanced that helps you test your configuration. It really helps the engineers to test without affecting the product environment.   

Our company is a partner and we install the solution for our customers as a firewall for remote VPN use. 

We also use the solution to protect our own company that includes more than 1,000 users. 

The solution constantly adds features that are useful and user-friendly such as the ability to tweak firewalls through the CLI. 

The solution's graphic interface could be a bit more responsive and include notations when changes are made

I have been using the solution for seven years. 

The solution is stable. In seven years of use, I've only encountered two or three occasions where a bug affected the firewall's behavior. 

I rate stability an eight out of ten. 

The solution is very scalable and it is quite easy to add users. 

I rate scalability a ten out of ten. 

Technical support has issues with knowledge base at the first tier. It sometimes takes hours of explanation before support fully understands and can troubleshoot or escalate problems. 

Response time could also be improved. 

I rate support a six out of ten. 

Neutral

Our company has always used the solution and is not interested in other products. 

The initial setup is easy, it only requires one engineer, and the main interface is self-explanatory. 

Users who are familiar with the solution can always dig further in the CLI to change the properties. 

We deploy the solution for our company and our customers. 

One engineer spends about two days configuring, testing, and deploying. 

The solution is easy to configure and has good performance. 

Anytime I have thought of a possible feature I'd like added to the solution, it seems the developers are on the same page and it is available within a few months. 

I rate the solution a nine out of ten.