Fortinet FortiGate Reviews

I used this solution while working with my last organization. I handled plain firewall deployment as well as SD-WAN deployment. 

I was providing consulting services to various Telco customers. It helped customers save on the cost of highly expensive MPLS links. With the help of Secure SD-WAN, they were able to utilize broadband or even LTE connectivity, which saves costs. That's the flexibility that Secure SD-WAN gives to various customers. In addition to saving costs, they are also able to utilize active-active load balancing, where you can have two parallel links: primary and secondary. The secondary one used to sit idle in traditional scenarios, whereas now, the solution gives you the flexibility to configure both links as active-active, so you can prioritize critical traffic from link one and other traffic from link two. At the same time, you also have the option to maintain redundancy.

Secure SD-WAN is a great way to manage your entire organization network, especially the WAN network. Customers don't have to hop to multiple places. Fortinet has a solution called FortiManager. With the help of that, you can monitor, configure, and maintain your entire organization's network. It's a very convenient option. It's a single pane of glass from a customer's point of view. They don't have to log in to individual devices, and they can see the real traffic. They can see what's coming into the network, what sort of alerts or logs are there, and what sort of applications are being consumed.

Secure SD-WAN doesn't help with tool consolidation, but it's a secure way or mechanism they provide so that if branch users are accessing the internet, they can directly break out from the branch location rather than coming back to the data center. In that way, it improves the user experience while also giving security at the highest level.

I have not interacted much with Secure SD-WAN in terms of API integration or third-party integrations. However, they have pretty good integration with the RADIUS, LDAP, and AD servers. In that way, they have everything in-built. You can make the firewall a DNS server or some sort of DHCP server. Such features are included there. From a security standpoint, they have open API integration with their own SIEM or SOAR solutions. Third-party API integration is also possible, but the API details that are exposed are very limited.

The integrated application protection provided by Secure SD-WAN is a cool feature. They have real-time scanning of the application with the help of SSL inspection. You get to see the real-time traffic of applications, and you can protect your network from harmful websites. They have a signature database for that. This data also gets refreshed. It's a direct feed that the device takes from the central intelligence.

When you have Secure SD-WAN in place, you are more secure from the outside internet. They have a flavor of SASE, but I have not worked on it.

When you have a granular view of your entire network including users and security features being enabled, you get more visibility into your network. You get to know what's coming in and going out. If an administrator sees that some traffic is being hit repetitively from a particular location, functionality is available to block a region, country, or even an IP or domain.

In terms of Secure SD-WAN reducing our mean time to resolve, in the case of issues specific to SD-WAN, I've seen instances where customers can look into the dashboard and inform the support team that this is the issue they are facing. This helps them to have some visibility into these firewalls and isolate the entire issue from the technology perspective; for example, when a wireless client is facing some sort of challenge accessing the internet, whereas some of the wired users are able to access the internet. The testing tools given in the FortiGate GUI dashboard come in handy during troubleshooting. With the very user-friendly interface, it becomes very obvious and easy for any IT guy to simply follow the workflow to resolve any day-to-day operational issues.

The security features that they have are quite good. On top of that, their licensing model is quite nice where they don't charge you anything for the SD-WAN functionality for the firewall. The routing and firewall features are also good.

The unified view that they have built into this firewall is good. Within the same dashboard, you get to see the security profiles, the type of traffic that's passing through, the top applications that are being consumed, etc.

It's also very easy to use.

I was not looking after the operations part, but sometimes, I did get engaged in some critical activities related to operations. There are some caveats in every product. Tunnel flapping was one of the major things I had seen wherein your internet link remains but your VPN tunnel is down. However, since I got a fix from the TAC team, I have not noticed it, but the customer complained a few times that they couldn't access the internet because of this problem. There were tunnel issues where there was already established connectivity, but at the kernel level, there were some issues. For example, there's a feature for auto-site connectivity wherein whenever it automatically creates a new tunnel, at the kernel level, it also creates an interface. Sometimes, that interface crashes and a new interface could not be created, which results in connectivity loss. 

Fortinet has established itself in the SMB market segment. It's doing pretty well in that space, but when it comes to the enterprise segment, they are lagging a little bit. It all boils down to the performance of the hardware. If I enable all of the security features available on my device, the throughput degrades quite a lot. If I have put 10 GBPS of throughput on a firewall and I enable all of these features available, such as IPS or UTM functionalities, the throughput comes down to 1 GBPS.

I used Fortinet FortiGate for seven months. I last used it in February of this year.

I'd rate it a seven out of ten in terms of stability.

The solution offers the option of deploying VMs or virtual machines to any public cloud, such as AWS or Azure. It provides such flexibility. If you have any application hosted in the cloud space, you can have a VM spin of the FortiGate over there and have a site-to-site tunnel established, so the scalability is there. Otherwise, at the site level, it's mostly hardware-based work. If you size it properly, then you have the option to expand. You might have chosen a low-end model because of the tight budget. In that case, it's not scalable on a specific site. However, if you have a certain number of sites, for example, if you have 400 of them and you want to expand to 500 or 1,000, there is simply a license that goes at the FortiManager level to support additional devices. FortiManager provides a single pane of management. 

I'd rate it a seven out of ten in terms of scalability.

My experience was not that rewarding. It took me around three hours in total to get a simple issue identified and fixed. I escalated it to their L3 engineer, and after that, I was able to resolve the issue. The entire process took around three hours. First, their initial level person was troubleshooting, then it went to the next level, and then it went to the highest level.

From the security perspective, I have not used any other solution, but I did have a glance at Cisco's portfolio. Cisco Meraki is one of the solutions that you can compare it with. Others were more specific to the routing and switching domain. I know the concepts and theory of Cisco SD-WAN, but I have not used it in a real environment for any customer.

For one of the clients, it was deployed on the Azure public cloud. Initially, it was not easy. It was complex. Every product and technology requires a certain type of prerequisite, and when you have anything hosted on a public cloud, it becomes a tedious job to get things done quickly because multiple stakeholders are involved in that.

I have deployed Secure SD-WAN specifically for many customers. I find it easy, but you need one person to be at the site for remote connectivity. That person just needs to do the basic configuration. Once the device has IP reachability, you can easily discover it from FortiManager, which is the central controller. So, once you have the device on FortiManager, it takes a few clicks to onboard the device because you already would have a template in place.

The deployment duration depends on the number of sites. For a customer with ten sites, it would take a week's time because there are a lot of dependencies. It also depends on the customer's readiness and availability, but a week's time would be enough for the deployment of ten sites. If there is proper planning in place, you can also deploy 50 sites in a week, but that's something you cannot control from your side because there are a lot of dependencies on the customer and the service provider. If you have to integrate it into a customer's existing network, it becomes quite challenging to make them understand your prerequisites. There are instances where nobody is available from the customer side from the technical standpoint to help you. Those are the roadblocks, but from the solution perspective, it's quite easy to onboard devices.

The deployment can be done by one person if that person is dedicated to a single project, but if more projects are running in parallel, you would require a few more people.

It does require maintenance, which includes upgrading the operating system and installing patches. Two to three people would be enough for around 500 site maintenance but not in the 24/7 case. If it's 24/7, then nine people would be required for that.

By default, they give SD-WAN along with the firewall. They don't have separate licensing for the SD-WAN functionality. However, they have security licenses that are sold separately on a subscription basis. Customers can consume these security features to protect their users from internet traffic.

To those evaluating this solution, I'd advise doing a PoC of different vendors who are meeting their requirements. They can then decide for themselves after seeing the demo.

Overall, I'd rate it an eight out of ten. It's user-friendly. It's also good features-wise, but their support is weak, and on the architecture front, it's not true SD-WAN. It's not decoupling the control chain functionality from the device to the controller. 

We use Fortinet FortiGate as a border firewall and in the middle network for segmentation. It is used for inspecting security traffic from users.

The best feature of Fortinet FortiGate is value for money. It is very easy to deploy and scale.

It saves us costs and increases bandwidth throughput.

We have never encountered any issues with it. The price and deployment part of Fortinet FortiGate is good, but it can always be better.

I have been working with Fortinet solutions for about five years. We work with Fortinet FortiGate next-generation firewall, FortiAnalyzer, FortiManager, and sometimes FortiSwitch. We work with Fortinet FortiGate's hardware and virtual appliance solution.

Fortinet FortiGate is stable since we use HA availability solutions.

Fortinet FortiGate is scalable.

I would rate technical support from Fortinet a ten out of ten, the best.

Positive

We used Cisco Firepower and Juniper SRX, and a little bit of Check Point too. We switched to Fortinet FortiGate because of the best pricing.

Fortinet FortiGate has an easy setup.

We bought it from Azure Marketplace, not AWS.

We used an integrator for the deployment.

Its price is good.

I would rate Fortinet FortiGate a ten out of ten.

The company uses FortiGate to offer protection for clients transitioning from MPLS to Internet, ensuring security for this new type of connection. In Brazil, clients typically seek protection, and FortiGate is used to offer such solutions. We start with this new kind of connection, explaining and training clients about the product.

With the FortiGate solutions, I see a benefit in controlling the bandwidth and managing users' access. It's important for leading the market and helping IT managers use the solution.

The common valuable feature for FortiGate is its UTM functionality, which includes various features under a license that is commonly implemented. FortiGate is widely used across fifty percent of the solutions in Brazil, making it a prevalent choice for many clients. It's beneficial because it allows the orchestration of networks with multiple vendors like Huawei, Cisco, and Juniper.

Improvements could be made when companies expand and need better equipment and more licenses. Additionally, a way to upgrade equipment when increasing Internet bandwidth is necessary. Companies often have to quickly close negotiations due to exchange rate changes affecting budgets.

I have had about five years of experience with FortiGate.

FortiGate offers good support, especially for telcos that have engineers inside the SOC to provide solutions to problems.

Positive

Previously, I worked with FortiGate. Now, I am studying to use Huawei. My current company has various solutions, though their firewall is not as developed. FortiGate is known for its firewall solutions, however, with Huawei, it’s a hard work to establish the offering.

The initial setup for FortiGate is straightforward and easy. The company frequently conducts meetings to present their solutions in Brazil, helping to streamline the process.

Using FortiGate has enabled us to increase security, control user access, manage bandwidth, and enhance the ability to provide a variety of operations solutions to clients.

We work with a price list that changes every three or six months, however, we purchase in dollars. The exchange rate between the local currency and dollars affects the budget of our clients, so we need to quickly close negotiations.

The clients in Brazil often use Fortinet, given its familiarity and integration with existing networks comprising vendors such as Huawei, Cisco, and sometimes Juniper.

It’s crucial to understand the client’s necessity first and implement only the solutions needed initially, expanding later with more solutions as required.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

We are using Fortinet FortiGate as a firewall.

Fortinet FortiGate has been invaluable. It has helped save costs due to its various features, reliable performance, very good UI, low latency, and stability.

The Threat Intel engine in Fortinet FortiGate is highly rated for its effectiveness in threat prevention. It has a good UI and overall integration, including FortiGate Manager for controlling all firewalls from a single place.

The anti-malware engine could use an upgrade. It should automatically classify and sandbox malicious packets with more granular controls, including providing details like TV numbers.

Initially, we faced some issues with updates due to network factors needing to be white-listed in the proxy. These problems have since been resolved, and we are not facing any issues now.

While I don't have a clear picture of scalability, we scale up in different regions based on the number of users and the amount of load. This is typically handled by architecture teams.

Customer support is very responsive, addressing queries in a timely manner. I would rate the customer support ten out of ten.

Positive

We have also used Palo Alto Firewalls and Fortinet FortiGate. Fortinet FortiGate has a better UI and overall integration, including FortiGate Manager for single-place control over all firewalls.

The initial setup was straightforward and easy, thanks to the support provided. I would rate the ease of setup ten out of ten.

We had the help of the end-of-support team for the setup, which made the process quite straightforward and easy.

The price is reasonable for our company. The finance team handles the specifics regarding the license costs.

We evaluated Palo Alto NG Firewalls before settling on Fortinet FortiGate.

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.

I primarily administrate the solution as a firewall. It's a perimeter solution. We filter content in order to ensure protection. We use it to publish services on-premises.

The GUI is good.

It's a basic firewall and it's a simple configuration. It can be ported very easily to our unit.

All of the licenses are included. We don't need to buy more licenses per pack of users. It is cost-effective. 

We'd like to see what they will do when AI attacks are generated. They will need to ensure their prevention continues to be exceptional. 

The solution isn't missing any features. Maybe they could make some features more accessible, such as a way to translate directions between two networks that share the same subnets.

I've been using the solution for ten years. 

The solution is very stable. It is a robust unit.

It's scalable. You can grow as you need. If you need more, you can use a model to upgrade to the next model. 

We don't have users per se; I provide the service to clients. 

I very rarely contact technical support. If I need to scale, they have very knowledgeable sources and solid workbooks. The resources they offer ensure I always have a solution. 

I've worked with SonicWall and Cisco. Fortinet offers a good license model. It's also very clean in terms of configuration. It offers high performance. It is a bit more expensive compared to SonicWall, however, if you take everything into consideration, the pricing is quite reasonable. 

We have a FortiGate appliance. We are using the 2000F version of FortiGate and running the license for FortiOS. 

First, we design our network, then we update policies. 

Fortinet makes the process very easy. I try to make it more efficient by replicating policies using the GUI. 

How long it takes to deploy depends on the complexity. I have 20 or so subnets and some services and I can manage the deployment in two to three hours. 

It is not difficult to maintain the solution. 

I'm able to handle the deployment myself. 

The licensing model is very good. It's less expensive than Check Point. 

I'm an independent consultant. 

Users have to understand the size of the network. That would dictate the model you need. You also need a qualified technician to configure the unit. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. It's very easy to use.

In the last months, we use Fortinet FortiGate for internal segmentation firewalls and also for the OT for the production to separate ICS components; that's the most reason why we implemented a Fortinet FortiGate firewall.

The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiGate that I found are its next-generation firewall capabilities with stateful inspection and antivirus, along with features such as a reverse proxy that are missed by some other firewall products such as Palo Alto or Check Point. We have a product suitable for the mid-sized market where we can handle all necessary features without the need to build every security feature with a separate device or product; thus, Fortinet FortiGate offers the completest feature set for a firewall on the perimeter to the internet or for internal segmentation.

The main issue we have dealt with in the last few months is the number of vulnerabilities, which has caused concerns for both customers and integrators regarding whether Fortinet is a secure product; this has affected my rating, as it is why I do not give a ten, instead rating it an eight. The feature set works, but the excessive vulnerabilities bring risks, necessitating upgrades and patches, which complicate matters.

I have been working with Fortinet FortiGate firewall for more than 10 years.

We do not have any problems with the stability of the Fortinet FortiGate product, but we have had problems with vulnerabilities. There are many vulnerabilities in the last few months, leading some customers to question whether Fortinet is a really secure product, which has created issues for us.

For Fortinet FortiGate's scalability, we have many different appliances available, and for the internal segmentation as well as the firewall components in the OT, the scalability is very good, so we do not face any problems there. That's one of the main reasons we use Fortinet FortiGate—because there are many different appliances available and we can select the one that we need without having to buy a bigger, more costly appliance.

My experience with Fortinet FortiGate customer service and technical support is that when we need assistance, we receive fast and competent support. We are certified with this product, and we do not encounter any problems, as they are quick and possess the know-how that we need.

Most issues are related to integration and operations, and since I'm only a consultant, I am not directly involved in these aspects. Engineers handle the implementation and operations, and while I know they use third-party products to integrate different firewall policies, I do not have any negative feedback regarding the implementation, so I cannot compare Fortinet FortiGate against other products.

In the last 12 months, I only worked with Guardicore, but now other products are coming up: ColorTokens and Illumio, though I do not have any experience with these two products. We have many collaboration tools such as Webex Teams and others; however, I only use them as a usual user and not as an administrator of these tools. I do not have any experience with Fortinet FortiGate's SD-WAN. I know the product but do not have experience with Fortinet Unified SASE; as I mentioned earlier, my focus in the last months was on internal segmentation, which means I could not use a cloud solution. I do not have any experience with Fortinet FortiGate's data center solution. There have been no benefits or improvements for the organization since the deployment of Fortinet FortiGate. 

Overall, I would rate Fortinet FortiGate an eight out of ten.

We use FortiGate as a firewall. We have a FortiGate 201 model.

It's good that we didn't get hacked or attacked, indicating strong threat prevention.

The reporting on employee behavior and the prevention of new viruses are essential features. Additionally, we have found it convenient for monitoring if users download documents from unknown websites.

The AI part needs improvement to enhance its functionality.

We have been using Fortinet FortiGate IPS for almost three years.

Fortinet FortiGate is very stable. We have not faced any delays or issues.

The scalability is good. We haven't faced any issues, and it supports our organization well.

The technical support is very good.

Positive

We use FortiGate for our data center firewall and Sophos for our internet firewall. We find FortiGate to be more stable than Sophos.

The initial setup was straightforward and did not present any issues.

The installation was performed by a product's partner. I supervised the process.

Overall, the stability of FortiGate IPS is impressive, and I would recommend it to others because of its stability.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.