Fortinet FortiGate-VM Reviews

We use FortiGate-VM to access clients' networks. These are generally Azure cloud environments in which we set up resources for clients to use.

The most valuable FortiGate-VM features are the ease of use and setup. 

Sometimes, FortiGate-VM is a little different to set up than other firewalls that I've managed. It would be better if it was just a little more mainstream. Some more documentation would be nice as well. Documentation has always kind of been our problem with FortiGate-VM. 

There's a lot of stuff I like about FortiGate-VM, but like I said, we still do a lot more Palo Alto firewalls than anything because they have true layer-seven attack prevention. FortiGate-VM does have that too, but it doesn't work as well. I would like to see more layer-seven functionality and expect to realistically block things at the top level.

We have been using this solution for two years. 

FortiGate-VM is stable. They have been okay for everything that I have done with them.

I have worked on some of the largest and smallest solutions that Fortinet sells and they all scale really well.

The initial setup is straightforward and only takes hours to deploy. 

We implemented FortiGate-VM in-house. 

Make sure that you're on the latest stable versions when you update code and stuff like that. That's one of the things that we've had some issues with in the past. 

My primary use case of this solution is for advanced security in the cloud, as well as SD-WAN and branch connectivity. We use version 6.4 and are just now moving to 7.0. 

FortiGate-VM has many valuable features: it's easy to use, it's intuitive, it's got very good traffic inspection features, it's got comprehensive filtering categories, and it has an extensive threat database, using FortiGuard. 

FortiGate-VM could be improved by making it cloud-based. I'd like it to be a cloud-based management solution instead of just a dedicated management orchestration tool. 

I have been using FortiGate-VM for five years. 

Personally, I like Fortinet support. I know other colleagues and people think it's slow, but I don't.

I used FortiGate for 10 years. I also have experience with Azure Firewall Premium, Cisco ASA, and Cisco Firepower. 

The installation is really easy. There's HA deployment in the marketplace involving Azure and AWS. I handle the installation myself. 

I implement this solution myself for customers. 

There are yearly or monthly licenses which you can choose from. 

I rate FortiGate-VM an eight out of ten. I recommend this solution to others. There's a use case, like any cloud-based firewall. 

We're an MSP, so we sell, configure, and manage these solutions for customers. 

My primary use case is for controlling the internet in our organization, as well as for our VPN for those working from home. I also use it for routing the connection to stores so we can access them.

This solution allows us to easily access the stores from where we are. It also blocks a lot of websites that we don't want to allow access to during working hours. It has also made our network more secure, and it's now much harder for people to intrude into our network.

The most valuable feature is that its IPsec works perfectly. The work filter also works perfectly - it's able to detect anything coming in that is not supposed to be on the network.

We have had some issues with connecting to the VPN from home after firmware updates, which could be an area for improvement.

I have been using this solution for about five years.

I think the product's stability is very good.

The scalability depends on what you want to use it for - previously, we were using 60D, and it wasn't accommodating some features we wanted, so we had to go to 100D.

The technical support is very helpful.

I previously used pfSense but found it was a bit complicated in terms of configuration and didn't give periodic updates. I switched to FortiGate because they were very consistent in giving updates on outbreaks and what they were doing to resolve them.

The setup was straightforward because of the integrator's help. Deployment took about two days, and only my assistant and I were required for deployment and maintenance.

I implemented through an integrator.

Our main ROI has been the extra stability on our network - since we implemented this solution, we haven't had any major attacks.

The cost of this product is too high on a yearly license. The license can be renewed on a monthly or yearly basis. There are additional costs for extra features.

To me, this is one of the best firewalls I've ever used. I would rate this solution as nine out of ten.

Fortinet FortiGate-VM is easy to use.

The performance could be better. Some features need to have quality control when the switch is working. The dedicated bandwidth for some users is not reliable.

I have been using Fortinet FortiGate-VM for approximately one year.

I have found Fortinet FortiGate-VM to be stable.

We have approximately 150 people using the solution.

The technical support could improve. They took approximately one month to solve a firewire issue to update. I would not recommend it.

I have used Sophos previously and I could it to be better. However, we have found the performance to be the same as Fortinet FortiGate-VM.

The company that provided the solution that was installing it took approximately three days.

I can do the implementation by myself. I do the maintenance and support of the solution.

There is an annual license required to use the solution.

I rate Fortinet FortiGate-VM a seven out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for our internal worldwide corporate network.

It's allowed us to have fewer personnel requirements in relation to maintenance. 

The maintenance part is definitely quite easy. We do not require any additional manpower to maintain this. It's quite simple and it has the least required manpower over it based on an individual unit.

The initial setup is pretty simple. 

The solution can scale well.

The stability is quite good.

Right now, we are totally satisfied with this solution. There are several units worldwide. We have only one unit at our Kolkata location, and we are satisfied as of now in terms of its capabilities.

Price-wise, it could be slightly better, however, if you compared it to other makes and models of equal category, it is generally cheaper.

I've used the solution over the last seven months. 

The stability has been good. Its performance is reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. it doesn't crash or freeze. 

The scalability is there. When taking into consideration our business environment right now, I find that this is capable of handling all the requirements until the end of 2022.

Right now in the Kolkata office, we are around a hundred people - and that is in the Kolkata office only. If you talk about India, then we have around 250.

We do not plan to increase usage at this time. However, in the future, scaling may be required. 

I've never directly dealt with technical support and therefore cannot speak to how helpful or responsive they are.

We did previously use a different solution, however, the main office makes the decisions around product changes. They may have chosen this product as it is less expensive. 

We had been using a British Telecom hybrid VPN solution. In April, we stopped that and migrated to this new SD-WAN connectivity solution based on the Fortinet firewall. 

The implementation process was not complex or difficult. It was straightforward. 

The deployment takes around two to three hours.

Maintenance aspects are handled by the vendor. 

The implementation was done by our vendor as well as our internal team.

We won't have a sense of an ROI until we've used the solution for another year and a half. 

The pricing is pretty reasonable when compared to other solutions of the same caliber.

We pay a yearly licensing fee. I do not know the exact costs, however, as that is handled by the team in Luxembourg.

We don't make product decisions. Decisions of that scale come from Luxembourg. 

We are a customer and an end-user.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we're using.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

FortiGate is an Exhibition Firewall that comes with the Antivirus, IPS, and Web Applications

The most valuable features are the IPS and Antivirus.

The firewall functionalities are fine.

It has a lot of features.

It needs an Application Inspection. The threat landscape is very high. Anyone can exploit the flow-based policies. It is always better to have intern-based policies.

I have been using Fortinet FortiGate-VM for more than two years.

We are using the latest version.

Fortinet FortiGate-VM is a reliable product.

It is easy to scale this solution, but there are some challenges with Azure and high availability.

My experience with technical support was good.

We are also using Palo Alto.

The initial setup was simple.

We don't require a lot of maintenance. Most of the maintenance is carried out by Microsoft.

It is a custom operating system that is available on FortiGate Firewall, and Palo Alto Firewall.

Microsoft doesn't do anything in terms of upgrades of the patches. They only do basic maintenance at the host level and the VM level.

We only have one person managing the device.

We were able to complete the installation on our own.

Pricing is somewhere in the middle. It's a mid-ranged product.

There are additional fees with this solution.

I would recommend this solution to others. It is a stable firmware, with many releases. It has a lot of features. Apart from the firewall, it comes with antivirus, IPS, and Web Application Firewall.

It has a lot of integration with external connectors, such as Teams, that are protected from threats that come from external sources.

I would rate Fortinet FortiGate-VM an eight out of ten.

The use case for VMs is if you're going to deploy them like a SaaS edge, to protect your applications or provide deeper visibility into the traffic. Or you could use it in your data centers as well. However, that's not our preference.

We primarily use the solution for network segmentation at our data centers and remote connectivity to our distributed sites.

We were able to take advantage of their management tool, FortiManager, to get a single pane of glass. FortiManager and FortiAnalyzer do not have a single panel glass. Rather, they are two panes of glasses to manage and monitor the firewalls where previously we were using Cisco. I don't want to call them legacy firewalls, however, with Cisco firewalls, we didn't have that management or logging visibility.

The product has pretty good logging and reporting capabilities native to the firewall. Then they also use FortiAnalyzer to aggregate that traffic and provide more detailed and aggregated reporting. That's going to help when you're analyzing network traffic for network segmentation initiatives.

The stability is excellent.

It's very easy to set up, even for more junior developers.

The scalability has improved. 

It's got a clean interface and it's very intuitive. Everything is easy to navigate.

Their offering for MFA isn't the cleanest. They have a product called FortiAuthenticator. It's not a FortiGate but that is one of their MFA offerings. However, other products that I've used, like Duo, are better from a user experience standpoint. They are easier to configure. 

I've been using the solution for ten years. It's been a while. 

Six or seven years ago, they had issues with code versions where they would make changes within the code version and they would have some bugs. That said, over the last six or so years, their releases have been very stable. We've had very few issues with any type of bugs or issues.

Scalability has gotten better with their SD-WAN offering. They're able to utilize inexpensive lines such as 4G, 5G, or DSL. It has allowed us to move away from expensive MPLS lines.

Historically, conventional or Next-Gen firewalls have been utilized at data centers and remote sites. Now, however, a lot of customers are moving towards Zero-Trust access and SASE. I'm currently looking to get a little bit more information on Zero-Trust architecture, as it reduces the overall management and need for physical firewalls in all your locations, which can get expensive.

We also use the Cisco ASA firewalls. I do find that Fortinet is easier to handle than Cisco as you don't need to handle tasks via the command line, which makes it easier especially for junior-level developers.

The initial setup is very straightforward. I started out in the Cisco world with Cisco firewalls and switches. Then we started deploying FortiGate and I found that FortiGate was easier to learn, especially for junior-level engineers. We were able to get junior-level engineers up to speed quicker than if it was a Cisco platform, especially if they haven't used the command line before.

Deployment usually takes a day, depending on the complexity of the firewall. It might be a day to two, depends on if we are using multiple IPSec tunnels if it's at a data center or a remote site. 

In terms of deployment and maintenance, in my experience, by a rough order of magnitude, a company would need one technician per 30 firewalls. For our company, we had a team of three network engineers and we had a fleet of about 120 firewalls.

I handed the implementation myself with my team. We didn't need any integrators or consultants.

For our entire fleet of 120 firewalls, we're paying about $100,000 per year. The licensing fees give you support and the capability to download updated definitions of threat intelligence from Fortinet.

I was previously a customer. now I am a reseller and Fortinet partner.

We primarily use hardware-based appliances, including the 100 D/E series, 100F, 190 D/E's, ADCs, 600 E's. They are similar to VMs.

We're using the most recent code level at this time. We're one version behind the latest version. We tend to use one version behind the most recent for safety reasons so that we can avoid troublesome bugs or glitches.

Anyone looking to deploy Next-Gen firewalls, in general, should really define their use cases to be able to decide on the proper technology to deploy within the environment. If you're looking to deploy Next-Gen firewalls at all your locations and create point-to-point VPN tunnels, they can get cumbersome and difficult to manage policies. It is also difficult to do network segmentation. With some of the Zero-Trust offerings, you're able to actually move your clients outside of your corporate perimeter, and then isolate those applications based on the user per application, instead of requiring them to dial back via traditional VPN to your data centers, which sometimes isn't the best user experience for your end-users.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

We use FortiGate as an edge security device. We are system integrators and we use this product ourselves, as well as implement it for our clients.

The geofencing and blocking capabilities for all non-domestic countries lower the attack surface by approximately 85%.

The most valuable feature is geofencing, where we can block all access from all non-domestic locations.

In the next releases, it would be nice to see central cloud management.

They have an on-premises solution that you can deploy for fleet management or for multiple site management, but it seems like a cloud solution would be a little bit easier.

We have been using FortiGate for the past two years.

We are using the latest version.

This is a very stable solution.

So far, this product has scaled very well. We have approximately 100 deployed, as edge devices. Currently, it is our only edge device and we plan to continue rolling it out in the future.

Their technical support is great.

We used Cisco ASAs exclusively before changing exclusively to FortiGate.

We decided to change to FortiGate because the entitlement was too difficult on Cisco.

The initial setup is straightforward and it takes approximately two hours to deploy.

Licensing is pretty standard. It's approximately 15% of the total cost per year as a subscription cost.

The subscription cost also includes support for entitlement, which was not the case with Cisco. That was the deciding factor. We changed our whole install base because of that.

There are no additional costs other than the standard licensing fees.

I would recommend stopping waiting to use Fortinet Fortigate. It's really a great solution and their support is very good. SonicWall has awful support. I can't say more strongly how bad SonicWall has ever been.

With the engineers, everything is difficult to phrase. They don't understand what you're trying to do. They should understand. Their first-level support is terrible. They really don't understand. You can't get to the next level without going through level one. 

Level one is terrible. It's frustrating enough that we just do it ourselves with Google articles because of this.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for checking a 250-person defense contracting company with multiple locations.

It's improved our operations by not being overly problematic.

The solution seems to be very reliable. 

It's a relatively simple product that is easy to use. It's not overly complex.

The initial setup is fairly straightforward.

The product does not have a good graphical interface. Their patches and their upgrades are not always compatible with configuration. That means that often you find after you upgrade that there was something else you have to do to the rest of the infrastructure, whether it's a printer or a user or whatever. It doesn't appear to me that their upgrades are well tested. They usually do what they're supposed to do, however, they also usually do some other things that FortiGate doesn't seem to be aware of.

It doesn't maintain legacy capabilities very well.

The stability of the solution isn't ideal.

They don't seem capable of supporting their own product.

The solution needs a better user interface and more intelligent services like spam blocking and auto whitelisting, gray listing, blacklisting, et cetera. It just basically needs better user monitoring.

I've been using the solution for about four years at this point. It's been a while now.

While I wouldn't describe the solution as unstable, there are definitely hiccups. I expect firewalls to be really efficient and very stable and I would say they're only sort of stable. I don't expect to have to figure out how to create a scan-to-email solution every time I upgrade my firewall, for instance.

Of course, they'll blame it on the vendor of the printer and say now how they're not following the standard or something, however, it was working with their product previously and the printer wasn't the item that changed. Their product gets a patch and it no longer works and you're like, "Well, I like your theory, but I don't exactly accept it." I don't think they have the features that a Palo Alto has, let's say.

The solution seems to be scalable. For our purposes, it scales well.

We have about 250 users on the solution currently.

Technical support isn't that great. On a scale from one to ten, they're a five at best. A couple of times where we had a problem, they couldn't solve the problem. We researched the problem on our own, unfortunately, via Google, and we found the solution and the solution was actually written by one of their techs and they didn't even know it.

The initial setup is not too difficult. It's not overly complex. I'd describe it as pretty straightforward. A company shouldn't have any issues with implementation.

For deployment, we did one site and then the other site and it took probably two weeks to deploy it, with maybe 30 days to get it fully configured. Then, once we had one site deployed, configured, and functional, we implemented a copy of that to the other site. We followed this pattern for each of our locations.

In terms of maintenance, it's hard to quantify what you need for the firewall. The firewalls are relatively low in terms of required maintenance. We have one IT administrator that may be a day a month has duties that are firewall-related. It varies, however, it's not significant work to maintain the firewall.

We did not need the assistance of an integrator or consultant. We were able to handle it ourselves.

We haven't really seen an ROI. It does what it's supposed to do, however, I'm not sure that it makes my job easier. It's kind of a sunk cost. It's one of the frustrations I have. I would expect it to be smarter and capable of doing things that it really doesn't do.

We pay a yearly licensing fee. It's probably a couple of thousand dollars per firewall.

On top of that, if you maintain a hardware warranty, so that you own the devices, you still maintain a warranty on them. There's sort-of a service contract, or you can go at risk. I don't know where we are in that. I'd have to go look, but I know at one point in time we talked about again, if we're going to be doing a tech exchange, maybe we don't want to maintain the warranties on them anymore.

The competitors actually have lower prices for more functionality. On the higher side, if you go with Cisco, it's more expensive, however, it's obviously more functional. A Palo Alto is probably a better solution than a FortiGate.

We're currently looking for alternatives to this solution.

We're looking at alternatives. However, the deficiencies that they have are not significant enough that I would like to immediately leave them, however, they're big enough that I'm looking for alternatives. 

When I come to end the life and I do a tech refresh, if we're not going to go 100% virtual, which is certainly another consideration, I am going to look at an alternate product. I'm not sure we're going to go away from them with a timeline right now, however, I'm certainly looking at it.

We don't yet have a shortlist, however, we'll likely look at the top big names in the market.

We're an end-user and a customer.

We have a plug-in with the subscription. We use the current version on their 100Es.

In general, I would advise other users that they need to look at whether they're going to go physical or virtual. I'd advise once they decide that to then look at the maybe lesser known next-generation firewalls that have functionality. The folks that are going to be operating the tool need to look at the user interface to make sure that that it is easy to use. Most users at an enterprise don't even know the firewall's there, let alone what it is, so they're not unique. I think all of the firewalls are pretty decent at not impacting users. The differentiator is which ones are easy to set up, which ones are easy to configure and use and how good they are at reporting.

The other thing I would say is, look at whether or not they integrate into your overall IT management, whether you're using ServiceNow or what you're using for IT management. How do the firewalls integrate with that or not? It's important.

I'd rate the solution at a four out of ten. It does base functions and it's doing that at a pretty high price.

It is primarily for VPN access and restricting access into the network. One of our clients has a shared system between multiple counties, and it is used to keep the right traffic flowing between counties and blocking the rest.

Each client has a specific version. We're trying to get them all current. Our number one client has the current version.

It provides greater security and flexibility. Instead of just opening it all up, it allows access to only those people who should have access. The network itself is pretty open, and with FortiGate, we can lock down exactly what they have access to.

Primarily, the VPN solution is most valuable. It allows you to have more flexibility in terms of what is there on the end-user device, and what is not there. You can check and make sure that they're current. It has more flexibility than just a straight VPN solution.

It works really well. It has the features that 99% of people need. 

They should keep us up to date about the latest version. That's the biggest thing. Currently, we have to go looking for the latest version. We should get notified about what's going on with the versions.

I would like to see easier dual-factor authentication.

Our clients have been using it for several years, and we've been helping them with that.

It is rock solid.

It is reasonably scalable. It is not as flexible in scalability as Cisco Firepower with their FMC.

Usually, the clients who use it are cost-conscious. They don't want to spend money on a Cisco device, so they go for Fortigate. A large organization usually goes with Cisco. A smaller organization tends to go for Fortigate or some other solution because of the price.

Our clients use it all over the place. It is not just for their internet. It is used for their internal networks and the rest of it.

It was average. I wasn't overly impressed. I was also not disappointed.

There is a little complexity to it but not more than other solutions. I haven't noticed greater complexity.

The deployment duration depends on how detailed you are and what you don't want to get. You can deploy one of these firewalls in half an hour, but if you're going to add a bunch of complexities and things to it, it can take at least a couple of hours to get it all set up the way you want. It ranges from half an hour to four hours.

We help our clients in implementing it. We also manage it. We just have one network support person to take care of things. It is not a job that requires more than one person.

There is no additional cost. Once you get the licensing fee, you're good.

Realize that it is not Cisco, and it doesn't work the same way. You got to pay attention to what you're doing. Those who are super familiar with Cisco got to pay attention to what you're doing because it works differently.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. It works well. Except for the dual-factor authentication feature, it has all the next-generation features that you need for a standard user.