Fortinet FortiGate Reviews

Primary use would be firewalls for the central office as well as all our branch offices. For some branches, we use the wireless feature.

The product is very stable, easy to troubleshoot, and configure, so it has reduced the time it takes for support.

• Stability
• Ease of use
• Configuration
• The available feature sets

• It needs more available central management. 
• It could use better throughput on some of the smaller boxes for the branch offices.

It is very stable.

Since we are not virtual, it is a physical box. It scales well if you know what to buy from a physical box standpoint. They seem to offer something for every level.

The technical support is very responsive and qualified.

Cost and convenience are probably why we switched from our previous solution to FortiGate.

The initial setup is straightforward, once you understand the operating system environment.

I was not here at the time that they were evaluating other solutions.

I highly recommend the Fortinet product because of its implementation. It is a solid product with an easy configuration and good support.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• Experience
• Installations of similar types which met our needs
• Pricing
• Support
• Ease of implementation.

It is a UTM firewall with many features. It has helped me to control users and public multi-servers easily. It also can make the VPN connection free through advanced routing (RIP, OSPF, BGP, PBR). It gives you a seamless, simple integration into a large network.

It help me control users, so I could review how users access the Internet or the bandwidth, and what they use per day. 

• A strong point of FortiGate is the graphical interface is complete and easy to use. 
• The IPS is good. It protect my network from attackers. 

One area for improvement is the performance on the bandwidth demands for smaller devices, as well as better web filtering.

To protect network perimeters.

Security. The main options feature protection and security against attacks.

Reliability and performance, those are key factors.

I have only one request and that is to have Fortinet as a market download in Azure. 

So far, so good.

I'm an integrator, so I use SonicWall, Sophos, and Fortinet.

I am using it as an IPS, intrusion protection system.

The first benefit is the cost. It is very affordable.

Also, it's very easy to set up, it's very easy to make policies and, for an organization, that means you don't need IT expert in firewalls. You just need to have somebody who knows a little bit of IT, and that's it. With other products, you need someone with a "Masters" degree in firewalls.

It's a complete solution. You can purchase switches and you don't need to do anything with them. You just put in the firewall and the switches get all the policies and rules that you already have in the firewall. That's a very nice feature because with, for example, Cisco, you need to set the switch, you need to set the firewall, and you need to test it. With Fortinet, you just connect the FortiSwitch to the Fortinet and that's it. It's very easy.

In the last version of the FortiOS - the operating system of the firewall - they put a lot of new features to support communications in a firewall. Whatever the communication that you have, you can put that in the firewall, and that's great.

For me, at this time, it's very complete.

Stability is very good. I have no problems right now with any of my customers. I haven't had a call from a customer in about three months, other than to make new policies. That's it. They are not complaining about the Fortinet, that it is damaged or something like that.

Scalability is very good. We just did a quote for a university here that has about 25,000 students, and all the solutions that we put in the RFP, they were accepted. The only thing is the cost. As far wanting more scalability or things in the network diagram, it's going to cost you.

Technical support is very good. If you have any questions, they have a forum and, apart from the forum, depending on the FortiGate that you purchased, they have very good support from second-line engineers. Whatever your problem is, you call and at least you get a callback.

I was using a SonicWall. The problem with SonicWall is that they were purchased by Dell, and apparently, Dell is not putting any research money into the devices. That is the reason I changed because there are a lot of new things, new generation firewall technologies and they are not using them. Also, apparently, the price is very high right now. If you compare the price with a FortiGate, which has a lot of additional features, it's not worth it.

When selecting a vendor the most important criteria are support and cost.

Setup is very straightforward.

Pricing is good. They offer a lot of things, the most important is the support. Every time you upgrade your license, you also get insurance for the equipment. If you have any problem with equipment, they send in new equipment.

We did a total cost of ownership analysis against Sophos and also Palo Alto, but that was out of scope, it was too expensive. Another one was WatchGuard. When you start looking at the cost of the license for all the things that you get, Fortinet is by far the best option. The problem with the other companies is the licensing.

I rate FortiGate a 10 because every time I need to use the support, they are there. There were times when I went to a customer to give support, I called Cisco, they pass me to Brazil, and on another call, they passed me to India. After I gave the guy in India all this information for an hour, he asked me, "What's the problem?" So there was a communication issue with them and they don't know the problems very well. With Fortinet, they are in the US, not in India.

Do a total cost of ownership analysis with all the features you are looking for and, based on that, make the purchase. Also, reviews are very important.

The main use is to protect from outside attack, from any side. Because we work with sensitive data, we have to protect our work. We use it mainly for security, not only for content control.

We have peace of mind. We do work in a very dangerous environment, the internet, and this device gives us alerts. It gives us the opportunity to know what is going on.

The filtering that you can do with the firewall.

I would like to be able to do segmentation, for a specific user, with more priveledges. I would also like to see an easier user interface to implement that.

Sometimes we found that the traffic to the internet froze, I don't know exactly the reason. The only way to get it to work again was to turn it off and then run it again, a hardware reset. Overall it is a very stable platform but sometimes there is this problem.

The scalability is fine. The problem is the licensing. To do more you have to pay for it. In this market, where you can find a lot of devices to do the same things, to charge for them in the license is very difficult. Also, sometimes Fortinet changes their products, they drop devices from the market very quickly.

We have guys who are certified to work with Fortinet, so right now it's fine with them. We never really have serious problems, something to escalate to Fortinet. Only when there is a very difficult issue with the performance or something like that have we had to go to Fortinet, but it has been great.

One of the main reasons we're considering switching from FortiGate is because many companies have a lot of features and you don't have to pay for. If you compare side by side, you find a lot of things that new brands do as well for fewer dollars.

When selecting a vendor the most important factor is the prestige of the vendor. Also the cost, renewing licenses. Our customers are looking for more features for less cost. We have to look at what is going on in the market, who the main players are, who is doing well, and who has a good reputation.

I was not involved in the initial setup of the devices. I only had to check it out and make sure it was working fine. But I saw the guys working with the configuration. Occasionally they had to reference the manual but had to find the answers on Google.

Fortinet and Sophos are the main players for this type of solution.

I would rate FortiGate at seven out of 10 because, although they are doing well, the problem is the licensing, the cost is too high, and how they support their own devices needs improvement. They have to focus on more features with less cost for the customer. If you see the market, where it's going, there are a lot of players offering more features for less cost. FortiGate is a great product but they have to look out.

My advice would be, look at the time on the market. FortiGate is doing well, but right now they have many competitors that are doing well.

Firewall/Web Filter management. We have over 30 sites, and it is imperative that one person (myself) can plan, implement, and deploy these devices to our sites and manage them when finished.

Consolidated our network environment at all locations, but mainly at our datacenter. 

The web filtering was the most valuable, because at a school board, we need to make sure the students are not tying up our bandwidth and also to keep the bad guys out.

One area for improvement is the performance on bandwidth demands for smaller devices, as well as better web filtering. Each manufacturer has their own way of filtering and each one needs improvement in categories, URL, and/or application filtering.

We saved a bundle by not needing all the past appliances from an NGFW.

I use this product on AWS. FortiGate's VM GUI is slightly different than the hardware devices.

It is a one box solution, which covers most of the edge device’s requirements.

I have found FortiGuard Services to be valuable.

It needs to improve its ISP load balancing.

No issues.

No issues.

I would rate technical support as a seven out of 10.

We had a previous solution, but switch because FortiGate is a one box solution.

Initial setup was not complex.

Easy to understand licensing requirements.

• Palo Alto Networks
• Cisco ASA

Easy to implement, and it is also reliable.