Fortinet FortiGate Reviews

Fortinet FortiGate has many use cases: firewall, security, and wifi controller. We use the solution for our project's internet gateway.

My company operates a large data center with many useful applications, sections, and databases. We have to put the security function into FortiGate to protect the databases in the organization.

Fortinet FortiGate has many excellent functions and good security. The firewall is the most common function that we have used for a long time.

The Fortinet FortiGate firewall has been improved with many new functions. Fortinet is working to develop a new generation of firewalls with better security.

Fortinet already improved FortiGate, but in the current market, many brands of security devices have improved together. Fortinet still needs to catch up with market standards. 

Fortinet is lacking in features in comparison to competitors.

Fortinet FortiGate is very stable.

Our experience with Fortinet FortiGate depends more on the sizing of the customer. Fortigate is very scalable to serve our customers' needs.

We have scaled from fifty to more than a hundred instances of Fortinet FortiGate. Around 20 staff are required for deployment and maintenance, mostly engineers. 

We are not a distributor for Fortinet, so we will not actively promote it as a solution.

The technical support with Fortinet is good. We have our engineers required to have certification in Fortinet products. We provide training classes for our engineers.

We also implement solutions with Palo Alto Networks and WatchGuard.

Fortinet FortiGate is user-friendly to set up. The UI is fine. We still have concerns about security with Fortinet. 

The security could be improved compared with Palo Alto Networks equipment. Palo Alto Networks products have more technical issues than Fortinet.

Overall, Fortinet FortiGate is not complicated to set up. 

We had a team for implementing Fortinet FortiGate on these projects. We also have many business partners for service work as integrators. 

Our partner for the Fortinet FortiGate installation was one of the few consultancies that have exceptionally good service in the market currently.

We have begun Fortinet FortiGate training through the consultant company and now have many partners for service contracts. 

The pricing and licensing of Fortinet FortiGate are good if they stay the same. The price is not too high now, but license pricing still changes too much. 

Fortinet FortiGate is comparable with the other products in the current market.

We are not sole-distributors of Fortinet products currently. It is part of a portfolio of solutions that we offer our business clients.

The policy for integration and for configuring Fortinet FortiGate should be friendlier than in the version we are using now. Because Fortinet has been in the market for a really long time, and we are very experienced with Fortinet products, I would rate FortiGate with an eight or nine out of 10. I would rate it this score because of the experience that Fortinet has as a market leader for such a long time.

The product's basic firewall feature is one of the best in the market for network security.

The platform's compatibility with Wi-Fi equipment needs improvement. Sometimes, the Wi-Fi units don't work, or one of the networks stops working, and we have to reboot the FortiGate client's endpoint.

I have been working with Fortinet FortiGate for more than ten years now.

It is a reliable solution. I rate the stability a ten. 

Small-scale companies sometimes use the whole UTM solution, which includes antivirus and URL protection. However, enterprise clients usually use additional solutions for those kinds of things.

I rate the scalability a ten. 

The technical support team is responsive and helpful.

Positive

The initial setup is easy. Depending on the project, the deployment process can take several days.

The platform generates a good return on investment. 

The product pricing is reasonable. 

It is easy to integrate FortiGate into existing infrastructure. As a firewall, it's one of the best products available today. For other features, we sometimes prefer other vendors, but for firewalls, especially for SMBs, it is a great product.

I rate it a ten out of ten. 

The tool is a nice product and easy to handle. The software's user interface is also good. You can easily implement remote access in the solution. 

I would like to see improvements in the product's application rules. 

I have been working with the tool since 2015. 

The tool is stable. 

The tool is scalable. 

I did not contact the tool's technical support team because it is very strong and stable. 

The tool is easy to deploy. 

I would rate the product an eight out of ten. 

Fortinet FortiGate can be deployed on the cloud, hybrid, and on-premise. We use a combination of private and hybrid for the deployment.

We are using Fortinet FortiGate for parameter security, network isolation, and web filtering. 

The most useful functionality of Fortinet FortiGate is the user interface, multiple engines, and their cloud with the latest integrations. Additionally, the Security Fabric tool is very good.

Fortinet FortiGate can improve by integrating the web application firewall and the DDoS protection part of the solution. Having a WAF feature, web application firewall, and proxy together would be a good benefit.

I have been using Fortinet FortiGate for approximately five years.

Fortinet FortiGate is highly stable. It has high availability.

The scalability of Fortinet FortiGate is very good.

We have customers with 1,000 users using this solution and others with 100.

Engineers use this solution and all the end-users are connected to it. The whole organization is using the solution.

The technical support is very helpful. We had a very good experience with them.

The initial installation is straightforward, and the full process takes one to two days.

We have our own team that does the implementation of the solution.

The support subscription for the solution is annual. You are paying for support and there are two levels of support, professional and advanced.

I rate Fortinet FortiGate a nine out of ten.

The UTM (application control) features have been very important, because they have solved many issues that other firewall providers have not developed as Fortinet has.

A clear example of this feature advantages is blocking and allowing the Google suite. For example, without UTM, we would not have been able to execute some customer requirements like this one:

A customer asked us that some host on their LAN is going to be assigned to be a POS workstation. They needed that workstation to have permissions to some applications and some URLs, and they needed to block users from opening sites like YouTube, Google+, and Google Drive, but they needed to get in to some POS URLs hosted in the Google cloud. We were working with rules allowing some specified URLs, but it didn’t work because the subnetting IP address the customer needed to be allowed, sometimes matched the YouTube service. Google support engineers told us they rotate their IP addressing subnets to be more secure and they do not always attach an IP address to a domain name. So, sometimes the customer’s workstations were able to open YouTube sites too.

The way we could block YouTube and allow the customer POS URLs sites, was by configuring an application control sensor, where we were able to block some categories like this:

Another requirement was to allow some specified applications, so we configured the next sensor structure:

Another customer reported to us they had issues working with Gmail attachment files; they could not do it. Executing some packet captures and with the Fortinet TAC help, we found they were using the latest Chrome versions that use the QUIC Google protocol, which is not supported by Fortinet because it is not a valid protocol. We proceeded to block the QUIC protocol using an application control sensor.

After this blocking action, the customer was able to work without any issue.

It can block applications in level 7.

Even though other companies have latest-generation firewalls, FortiGate’s database is bigger.

They could improve performance with all the UTM features working.

Sometimes, we have seen that when you enable the antivirus sensor, customers report slow web browsing. We know this is normal, but we would like to know if it is possible to make feel the customer their web browsing is fast with not as much delay. The antivirus sensor analyzes all the protocols and packets we specified, and this is an important performance affectation. In my personal point of view, I don’t think it is a serious issue, but we receive many reports from users who browse the web with antivirus sensors applied to their firewall policies.

I have been using it for seven years.

It is working in route mode, with all UTM licences active; it has FSSO configured to give permission to the users. It is configured to provide VPN SSL service.

I have encountered stability issues only when we enable all the UTM features.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is 9/10.

We have been using FortiGate solutions for eight years. We have been upgrading when solutions in the family become unsupported.

The initial setup is easy; no issues with doing it.

My company did not evaluate other options. They decided to purchase FortiGate directly.

Work a lot with all of the UTM features because they can be very helpful right now with configuring firewall policies. The policies became very whole.

We manage FortiGate firewalls for our customers. We are working with 100F, 100D, and 60D.

All our FortiGates are installed on-premises, but we can manage our customers' firewalls remotely.

It is useful for protecting and segregating the internal networks from the internet. Most of our customers also use the FortiGate client to connect to their offices by using the VPN client, and of course, they usually activate the antivirus, deep inspection, and intrusion prevention services. They are also using it for web filtering and implementing various policies dealing with forwardings, NAT, etc.

A sandbox would be good in order to be able to inspect the emails containing spam and be able to validate the emails that contain malware, prior to delivering to the customer.

Its initial setup could be simpler.

I have been using this solution for about five years.

Its stability is great. 

We have not had the necessary size to experience extendability.

They supported us in many of our projects when we needed the expertise to configure the devices properly according to the customer's specifications.

It could be simpler. Sometimes, it is very difficult. Policies tend to mix up sometimes, and it can be difficult to have clear policies for one particular thing.

We recommend this product to customers with up to 200 or 250 people. This size is considered large by Greek standards. If a customer is located in one single building or two or three buildings, and they do not have a complicated architectural infrastructure, this product is ideal for them. It is not recommended for customers with a complex infrastructure and a lot of buildings.

I would rate it a nine out of 10. It is a fantastic product. It fits the customer requirements very well, and the vendor is great. We are very pleased with it.

We mostly use the solution for our internet-facing firewall.

The next-generation firewall features are the solution's most valuable aspect.

The implementation and deployment are pretty simple.

The pricing is very good.

We've found the solution to be pretty stable.

The solution isn't really lacking features per se.

The product does need better support in the cloud environment. It's not exactly cloud-native right now.

The solution needs to do more on the deployment in the multi-cloud. For example, clients have GCP and AWS. How do we deploy FortiGate in a cloud environment? Right now, there's no solution for that.

We're worried that the scalability isn't as good as it could be.

We've been using the solution for about two years or so. It hasn't been an extremely long time, however, it's been a while.

Stability, in our experience, is quite good. It doesn't run a lot of unexpected downtimes or anything of that nature. We haven't encountered any serious problems. There have been a few minor items here and there, however, by and large, it's quite good.

The solution isn't exactly scalable, especially when it comes to the public cloud environment. We'll need to scale up, so we will have to figure out how to do it effectively.

We primarily work with medium and large enterprises.

We find the solution to be pretty straightforward to set up and deploy. We didn't have any difficulties with implementation. 

The deployment takes less than a week. It's a pretty quick process.

We provide maintenance services for our clients.

We actually provide deployment services to our customers that need it. We can handle this aspect for customers.

The solution is on the cheaper side. There are other products that are competitors that are much more expensive.

That said, the pricing isn't just based on licensing costs. There are add-on costs as well a company will need to consider.

We are more of a solution integrator. We are not a straight reseller. We are partners, however. We recommend people to use products. That said, we don't actually resell the actual boxes.

We use different versions and deployments of the solution. It really is dependant on the client and their needs.

We mostly work with Fortinet. It's the main solution we recommend and use.

I'd recommend the solution to other organizations. We've had a pretty good experience.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

Our primary use case of this solution is for intrusion detection and prevention.

We use a southern institution that's audited for IT security and the reporting that automatically comes off the unit makes it much easier to meet compliance standards and makes it easier as far as the amount of time that has to be spent to compile that information. If you get your reporting set up correctly when you initially set it up, you just select the one you want and hit print. The auditing trail on it is the best features.

There's an all-inclusive appliance where all of the logs, registers, and everything is customizable as far as the way reporting comes back.

They should make the rule sets more understandable for the end user. When you're trying to explain to somebody how a computer network is secured, sometimes it's difficult for an end user or customer to understand. If there was a way to make the terminology more accessible to the end user, the set up could be easier. They should translate the technical jargon to an easily relatable and understandable conversation for the end user, the customer. Particularly in an environment where the IT structure is audited regularly, there's always pressure from the auditor to up the standards and up the security and you get your USCERT's that come out and there's a warning about this and the customer will want to lock out so much so when you apply it they run into issue where they can't search the internet or print to their remote office. Of course they can't print to their remote office, they just locked it up. They should make the language more understandable for the customer. If there's a product out there that made the jargon understandable to John Q. Public, I would buy that.

There's a link off of the reports that you can click and make suggestions, which is pretty awesome because it seems like somebody is reading those and doing something about it. If I could save reports on a format where I could save space and not have to reprint them and move information down from letterheads and that sort of stuff that would be great. Formatting reports is the only thing I would change about that product right now.

It's solid. It's a rock solid solution.

Scalability is excellent. Across three locations we have 120 users.

Their technical support is excellent.

We did use a different solution. We switched primarily because of the audit trails because the user interface, what you saw on the screen and the options you were presented with were difficult to configure and we ended up spending a lot of time trying to get the information that we wanted. 

For the product that it is, the initial setup was straight forward but not so simple. The Dell EMC product is simple, this is more complicated than that but it wasn't incredibly difficult. We rolled that out on a test network initially and to try to get our rule sets correct so that we didn't run into issues and did testing for about a week. The initial set up time took around an hour and a half, and it was on a virtual network with a bunch of virtual machines. We just tested it for about a week just to make sure that we weren't going to run into a lot of issues switching from the old IDS to the new one.

I installed it. I did the product research and was involved in the purchase decision but I did not purchase the product, I was not a vendor of the product, and I did not make any money on it.

As far as the licensing goes for the small product that we have, the pricing was pretty competitive. It wasn't as simple and as cheap as a SonicWall but for the service we would get it was a good price.

There's a setup guide on the Fortigate website that is a video that is far better than the written manual that is provided. If you've set up other products before, that may get you through, but the training on their website was far more useful to me than the user manual.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.