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Fortinet FortiManager vs Fortinet FortiWeb comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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 FortiManager
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
64
Ranking in other categories
Network Management Applications (4th)
Fortinet FortiWeb
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
95
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

Fortinet FortiManager and Fortinet FortiWeb aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Fortinet FortiManager is designed for Network Management Applications and holds a mindshare of 5.3%, up 5.1% compared to last year.
Fortinet FortiWeb, on the other hand, focuses on Web Application Firewall (WAF), holds 8.2% mindshare, up 7.3% since last year.
Network Management Applications
Web Application Firewall (WAF)
 

Featured Reviews

HamedWasel - PeerSpot reviewer
Easy to set up with good integration capabilities but we've had troubles when moving devices
We've faced an issue when we need to move devices. Templates need to be recreated instead of having the policies, et cetera, cut and pasted over. Everything should just move over when we need to move devices instead of recreating everything from scratch. For the IPSEC tunnels, Fortimanager doesn't have all of the features that are available on Fortigate.
Kacem CHAMMALI - PeerSpot reviewer
Even if an attacker detects the IP address, they can't connect directly to the server due to FortiWeb
The xFF, or X-Forwarded-For feature, IP reputation, and protected hostname. We can block access using the IP address, so no one can connect to our web server or website using the real IP. They need to use the FQDN instead. Even if an attacker detects the IP address, they can't connect directly to the server due to FortiWeb and the option to protect the hostname. All traffic passes through FortiWeb. Machine learning capabilities in FortiWeb: I don't use machine learning all the time. In the initial phase of FortiWeb deployment, we use the learning process to detect the traffic passing through FortiGate to our website.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The product is easy to use and manage."
"FortiManager's most valuable features are web-based or web-rule-based policies, SD-WAN, and the ease of upgrading to new firmware."
"It's a scalable product."
"I pushed templates from FortiManager to our site, and they were deployed successfully."
"The centralized management of policies and certificates, coupled with the capability to handle multi-site deployments effectively, provides streamlined operations."
"It is easy to deploy to licenses."
"Stability is good within the product."
"The solution is very stable."
"SSL Offloading simplifies the public certificate handling and brings additional protection features."
"It is a good product. We have just blocked everything coming from some geographical locations or certain countries, and it has been working very efficiently when I look at logs, events, and incidents generated from the system. It is generating very good analytic reports about it. This is the most valuable thing about this solution. It has load balancing and almost everything that a web application firewall needs. It is very flexible and easy to learn and configure. It can be easily learned and configured by using the information available on different channels such as YouTube."
"What we like about Fortinet FortiWeb is it has all the features. We use all of them, so we have to turn on all the options."
"The most valuable feature of Fortinet FortiWeb is the reports and the AI-based features."
"Technical support is very good."
"One of the big advantages of using Fortinet FortiWeb is all the Fortinet family solutions use the same user interface and logic. This makes it easy to use, configure, manage, and understand if you have used one of their solutions before or are wanting to implement other Fortinet solutions in the future. Additionally, all Fortinet solutions can be managed with one application called FortiManager."
"When it comes to blocking unknown threats and attacks, I would give it the highest score possible. We first started using AWS and its Web Application Firewalls. That was okay, but it was quite a manual process to keep it up to date, whereas Fortinet is always up to date, and the default rules or the modules that you can turn on are very easy to use."
"One main feature we are very happy about is file security and upload functionality."
 

Cons

"The areas that need improvement are implemenation and support. In terms of implementation, it mainly needs clear documentation."
"The price is a bit too high."
"When we have a specific configuration pushed it does take some time to be deployed on the actual firewall."
"For the IPSEC tunnels, Fortimanager doesn't have all of the features that are available on Fortigate."
"You cannot integrate with other solutions."
"Fortinet is releasing quite a lot of new versions and I would say that most of the versions are not well tested before they're pushed out. Even the new versions sometimes are a bit buggy before it's all correct."
"The CLI could be enhanced."
"The scalability has room for improvement."
"The initial setup depends on familiarity with the product. It's manageable with the right expertise."
"They could integrate some kind of machine learning and AI facilities to automate workflows."
"Describing security rules should be improved. It's tricky to define new feature tools when you want to describe an attack pattern and want to block it."
"The F5 solution has more features than Fortinet FortiWeb, such as multiple load balancing."
"The automation piece can be improved. Although they say it can be automated very well, there is still manual work. Its usability should be improved in terms of automation because we want to build an infrastructure with code, but you can't do that easily with this solution. If they can give us APIs in the firewalls that we can tap into, it would be perfect."
"It costs too much."
"In terms of performance, it needs to be more robust."
"The support side of things can be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"FortiManager is reasonably priced - I pay around US$40,0000 per year, which covers fifty locations."
"Our organization pays a monthly license fee for the solution."
"The license model they use depends on the size and is not limited to the users."
"Fortinet FortiManager is not expensive at all if you compare it with other vendors like Check Point and Cisco. Fortinet products are the least expensive on the market in the category of firewalls."
"On a scale from one to ten with one being the highest price and ten being the lowest price, I would rate FortiManager's price at three."
"If you compare Fortinet and Palo Alto, Fortinet is cheaper, but if you compare Cisco and Fortinet, sometimes Cisco is cheaper because Cisco gives us more discounts because of the size. Cisco isn't cheap, but sometimes, we get a big discount from them."
"Fortinet FortiManager is a low-priced product."
"Fortinet is a high-end product and the cost is high. They should consider reducing the price, especially for existing customers."
"It is fine now. We had to earlier negotiate the price."
"If one is very cheap and ten is very expensive, I rate the product price as three or four."
"​The pricing is reasonable."
"The price of Fortinet FortiWeb depends from customer to customer because some customers are considering using other solutions, such as Imperva. The price of Fortinet FortiWeb sits well for the middle-sized customers that we deal with."
"FortiWeb offers these services at a price that SME customers can afford, but it's also suitable for large enterprises. Still, they need to put in more work to gain a greater share of enterprise business because they face stiff competition in this segment from F5, Cloudflare, and some others."
"Previously, for each project, the cost was $800 to $1,000 per application. Now, it's $100 to $120. For some of the applications, there is a 90% reduction, and for some of the applications, there is a 50% reduction. We're paying only $500 to $600."
"The price of Fortinet FortiWeb is expensive in our Ethiopian currency."
"When I use any other firewall, I have to take a license. It could be a perpetual license or subscription-based. In both cases, we have to pay some amount in advance, whereas in the case of FortiWeb, when using it as a service, I am paying half a dollar only for the domain name, and then I am paying based on the traffic or the number of requests."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Educational Organization
41%
Computer Software Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Government
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Fortinet FortiManager?
The most valuable feature is the centralized management console.
What needs improvement with Fortinet FortiManager?
The graphical user interface could use improvement as it appears complex and not user-friendly. Better integration of Fortinet ADC into FortiManager would be beneficial.
What do you like most about Fortinet FortiWeb?
The WAF profiles has been effective at mitigating web-based threats.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fortinet FortiWeb?
I would rate the licensing cost as seven out of ten, considering it good value for money. The price is affordable and reasonable for the features offered.
What needs improvement with Fortinet FortiWeb?
There is room for improvement in the portability on multi-cloud environments. Enhanced DDoS integration to make FortiWeb more unified with other Fortinet products could be beneficial.
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Black Gold Regional Schools, Amadeus Hospitality, Jefferson County, Chunghwa Telecom, City of Boroondara, Dimension Data
Lush, Barnabas Health, Options, Riverside Healthcare, Hillsbourough County Schools, Columbia Public Schools, Schiller AG
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, NetScaler and others in Network Management Applications. Updated: March 2025.
845,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.