Fortinet FortiOS Reviews

We are using Fortinet FortiOS for our core network next-generation firewall.

The most valuable features are the ease of use, and the overall simplicity, everyone can use it with a small introduction.

I have been using Fortinet FortiOS for approximately 10 years.

Fortinet FortiOS is highly stable.

The solution is scalable.

We have approximately five administrators that are using the solution in my organization.

The technical support is good. However, during the holidays they can get a little slow to respond.

The installation is straightforward and simple to deploy.

I can do the implementation myself.

The solution could have a better licensing model. It's a bit more expensive than other solutions. The annual subscription is very pricy in Fortinet. The cost could be reduced.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate Fortinet FortiOS  a nine out of ten.

We typically use the Fortinet hardware firewall, and the FortiOS runs inside of that. We're usually working in a small or medium-sized business environment. So we use it for remote access, access from the LAN to the WAN, and site-to-site VPN. 

I personally think the site-to-site VPN is the most useful feature. A lot of firewalls have that, but to me, that's one of the features that's essential. Either you want to just do some basic routing or use one of these kinds of practices.

FortiOS doesn't work well with all browsers. I think they need to do a better job of making it compatible with the various browsers that are out there. I see weird stuff happen sometimes.

It doesn't crash the router bin itself, but it typically takes some time. Sometimes I'll have to reboot the router to get it working with a browser again. This is maybe just a problem with older versions. I can't say anything about the recent versions of the FortiOS, but over the years, I've seen weird stuff.  This is mainly just a problem with the browser interface. I've never had a problem with the command line.

I think FortiOS is scalable. It's not a Cisco product, but it's a solution that's easy to deploy and manage at scale. You can build as your business would grow. You could go to a higher unit without much effort. Migration is clean in terms of going from small to big units. You typically have to just configure again, but it's not difficult to do. There isn't a whole different set of OS commands between different models.

I find Fortinet to be on the higher end of the scale in terms of technical support. I don't know if I'll give them an A-plus, but I'd probably give them an A. Relative to other companies out there, like Microsoft, Intuit, and some of the other support agencies or ISPs that we deal with, their support is better than most.

I would rate FortiOS a seven or an eight.

We are using Fortinet FortiOS for our multi-level security. For example, we use the SD-WAN feature to protect our data center infrastructure.

There are many useful features, such as web security and advanced threat detection.

The solution could improve by making the dashboard easier to use.

I have been using Fortinet FortiOS for approximately 10 years.

The solution is reliable and stable.

The solution is scalable.

The technical support has been very helpful and they have local language support for Taiwan.

The installation was straightforward.

There is a license required for the solution and the price is fair.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate Fortinet FortiOS an eight out of ten.

We are system integrators and we deploy firewalls for our customers. I'm the CTO and we are partners with Fortinet. 

Fortinet is a feature-rich firewall. The ease of use is one of the primary advantages of this product. It has a very simple OS and things are pretty easy to do. Fortinet has a good price point which is one of the reasons it's so popular. It's also a good security product. With Fortinet, the link balancing features are easier to use compared to other firewalls. 

We have had some performance issues, but that seems to be improving. I'd like to see better integrations and more flexibility for different scenario configurations. In comparison to Cisco, the CLI is quite difficult to use. Finally, I believe that the reporting could be enhanced to provide better visibility into the traffic. 

As an additional feature, Fortinet could have XDR embedded into it which would mean more visibility from the reporting side because right now we have to separately install FortiManager and FortiAnalyzer for driver analysis.

We've been using this solution for over five years. 

Fortinet is a pretty stable product. 

Fortinet still has to prove themselves when it comes to higher throughput cases, because there are many places where other brands are placed with higher throughput than Fortinet. When we enable all the features, sometimes the performance migration is more significant compared to Fortinet's claims of what it should be, so that needs to be better matched. 

I think Fortinet needs to improve their support. They are not one of the gold star rating support companies. There are a few big vendors like Cisco, EMC, VMware with gold star support rating. The support is sometimes not up to the mark. 

The initial setup is quite straightforward. 

We generally deploy Fortinet, Cisco and occasionally Palo Alto which is an expensive firewall so less companies use it. We deploy Cisco and Fortinet frequently. When it comes to performance and price, Palo Alto is at the top on both counts. 

I rate the solution seven out of 10. 

We use this solution as a gateway, a firewall for the office.

More Stability on VPN and SSL Deep Packet Inspection (Compare to Sonicwall)

It is very robust.

Many things are missing from the interface that necessitates using the CLI, so it needs to be improved. When I migrated to FortiGate, there many things that I wanted to do, but couldn't.

With FortiOS, you can use the router in two modes. The first mode is the profile mode, which is the starter mode that most use, but you have another mode that is a policy mode and is required before creating your firewall rule. The problem is that when you switch from one mode to the other, all of your firewall rules will be gone. This means that you have to decide if you want to use the policy mode firewall or a profile mode firewall.

With policy mode, you can have granular control on the application on the firewall rule because the firewall rule works with the source destination protocol. With the application, you have multiple rules, one by one. As an example, you can have one for Skype or one for OneDrive, etc. On the source, you can add a group, and add people to the group, and they can have access to Skype and OneDrive along with others added.

You can granularly control applications on the firewall rule with the policy mode, but you don't have access to the proxy mode rules. There are also issues with the antivirus, IPS, and you are forced to switch back to the profile mode where you have less granular control on the application.

I have problems with the IPS stability and the antivirus in Policy Based Mode. If the file is bigger, then the antivirus doesn't check it.

In policy Based Mode, There are many issues. (Firmware =< 6.4)

I have been using this solution for one year.

We are using the latest version, either 6.4 or 6.5.

This solution is very stable. It is more stable than SonicWall. The biggest difference is the stability on the VPN site to site, and on the DPI SSL for the HTTPS communication.

If you wanted to expand the firewall to another office you would have to use the FortiManager, which I have not used yet.

I have built five routers, one by one.

SonicWall is the same where you have the GMS that can be used to move the rule to the other firewall.

Technical support is not always good.

I can only compare it with SonicWall, and it is missing many advanced features that SonicWall has. SonicWall has multiple advanced features on the DNS, Antivirus, etc...  and a lot of options that don't exist in Fortinet.

With SonicWall, I never had to use the CLI but have had to with Fortinet. They are missing many things on the interface.

FortiGate is like a teenager, where SonicWall is the adult firewall. However, it is more robust than SonicWall, particularly on the VPN site to site and SLL Inspection.

When you build a VPN from site to site, you have to make sure the tunnel you select has the same option on both sides to make it work, but you have to also make sure that the routing exists, the mapping exists, and the firewall role exists. 

If one of them is not there, even if you create a site-to-site VPN with the other side and everything, there is no error, the VPN will not go up. 

On SonicWall, it's different. You build a tunnel, you put the same encryption, the same password on both tunnels, and you click up and it's up. If it's not working, it's because you didn't create yet the firewall rule, you work on the VPN, you click, then connect, and it's up.

Then if it's still not working, you create a firewall rule and it's up, or if you forgot the net rule, etc. You do that step-by-step, and it's working, but unfortunately if one of them has a mistake, even if you have no error on the site-to-site VPN setup, it's not going up.

With SonicWall, you can do it step by step and have it working, but with Fortinet, you have to do it all at the same time with no errors.

I work on the configuration and not really involved in the pricing. It was already in place when the company decided to switch back to Fortinet. 

I concentrate more on security.

I know Fortinet and SonicWall, and If I had to consider other solutions or if I have to redo it again, I would take a closer look with Palo Alto first.

With Palo Alto, the cost is more, but when I switch from SonicWall to Fortinet FortiOS, I lost a lot in the features. I would check to see if Palo Alto has what was lost in terms of features.

The stability is good. I would rate Fortinet FortOS an eight out of ten.

The primary use case is for integrated cybersecurity.  

The VDOM (Virtual DOM) is a virtualized firewall that has some opportunities for flexibility that are an advantage in certain configurations. The other valuable part is that this flexibility makes it easy to integrate with Cisco products.  

The product really has everything that we need as far as features for this type of solution and our use case. It works fine for us. One thing that can be improved is the pricing model. It is currently subscription-based and I think they should probably try to change that.  

We have been using FortiO since around 2016. So we have been using it for four years.  

We had some issues with the stability of FortiOS, but I do not think it was because of Fortinet. It was because of how the integrator handled the configurations. The partner that implemented it originally did not do it optimally. We ended up having to change the partner in order to have it done correctly.  

So far we are satisfied with the technical support. We have not had a lot of need to use them.  

We had been using Check Point and we still use it. In fact, we have been working with Check Point more than Fortinet. I may be a bit biased toward Check Point because I already have more implementation support for it than FortiOS.  

The difference between the price of the products is also obvious. Pricing is more flexible with Check Point than with Fortinet. Fortinet ends up being more expensive because of the pricing scheme.  

The pros and cons of them are not so much different. If it were my choice and we were going to change what we use or choose between the two, then we would move back to using Check Point exclusively. 

I think that the setup was a bit complex because we have a complex network. Because of that, we had to do some interoperability testing first and that made the initial setup take longer than it would in another, simpler environment.  

The initial setup is one other area that could be simplified.  

We used a partner for the implementation. We ended up having to replace them with a different partner because of installation issues. The second partner was able to fix the issues.  

The costs for the maintenance and subscription for Fortinet FortiOS software alone is actually half of the cost of the hardware. For example, if your hardware costs were about $40,000, your yearly subscription to FortiOS is about $20,000. That is kind of the drawback to using Fortinet. By comparison, that $60,000 is already three years of maintenance or support with Check Point for the same scale setup. It is a significant cost difference.  

I would probably recommend Check Point to most users considering FortiO if they do not have any ACI (Application Centric Infrastructure) implementation or a Cisco ACI. If you could do a workaround on the ACI, then I would probably still recommend Check Point. But if you do not know how to make that type of adjustment or can not and you do not have any partners that need to access your systems, then it is better you go for Fortinet.  

We primarily use the solution as a firewall. It's protecting customers from the internet to have access to servers behind the firewall.

We co-locate customers' servers at our company, and we also give them firewall protection. Mostly, people that co-locate a server don't have any firewall so they ask for the service through us.

The solution is very user friendly. 

The product is very easy to configure, compared to other firewalls that I've worked with.

Fortinet needs to make this solution even more robust. Sometimes when we get a DDoS attack, the cannot withstand it. We can run out of sessions very easily. That said, I suppose if you want more a robust system, then you could purchase higher-end solutions, which are more expensive. Still, I would like to see more protection from even in the low-end version.

The pricing needs to be improved. It's quite pricey.

In terms of the CLI, if they could make it more intuitive, and more user friendly, it would make the solution better. I like to work on CLI instead of through the GUI. If you are used to it then you wouldn't mind the way it works right now. However, for those that don't, there's just a sizeable learning curve.

I have been dealing with the solution for three and a half or four years.

The solution doesn't really scale. If you want a bigger box, you need to scrap the box you have and trade up to get the larger capacity. You can't just "add" to it per se on existing solutions you've bought. It's hardware, so it doesn't scale well.

We're not looking to increase our usage right now. COVID-19 really slowed us down in a lot of ways.

We have a local supplier that helps us a lot every time we need to open a ticket. So far we haven't had that many issues. The few ones that we have had, we didn't have any problems with opening up tickets and getting support.

The solution is not complex at all. I'd say it's very easy. There's a learning curve, however, once you're used to the device, it's very easy to set up a firewall. It's fairly straightforward.

The solution is too expensive. If they could push down their prices, that would be great. However, I'm not in charge of purchasing. I wouldn't know about the exact costs.

We're just customers. We don't have a business relationship with Fortigate.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for our firewalls. 

Basically we're providing security distribution for our client. One of the solutions we utilize are firewalls. It helps secure the environment and monitor traffic.

There are a lot of features that we like within the solution. The resources or performance of the firewall is very good. However, the real selling point is the fact that the solution offers so many features, it gives our clients a lot of extras that they can work with. There's a lot on offer.

Right now, it's very trendy to integrate everything into the cloud. This solution would be more effective if they did more integration in that regard.

I've been using the solution since 2016. It's been a few years now.

The solution is very stable, however, in rare instances where there happens to be a bug or glitch, the good thing about them is that they release fixes whenever there's a bug on the OS. Users will need to upgrade their OS if this is the case in order to get the fix. It's great that they deal with the bugs head-on and put out fixes efficiently.

The solution is quite scalable. It's one of its selling features. Although, I believe that most competitors would also scale just as well.

Support is very fast and reliable, but it absolutely depends on the ticket, or what it is comprised of or how hard the errors or problems are. Easy questions are dealt with quite quickly, but harder issues might take at least an hour or so before a user would get a reply. 

We mostly focus on Fortinet products for our firewalls. We don't really use a different solution and haven't used something else in the past. I'm familiar with Sophos firewalls but have not deployed any just yet.

While Sophos is more expensive than Fortinet, from what I have seen, their functionality is basically the same. The difference between the two appears to be simply in the architecture of each solution. They are quite similar, but the user interface is a bit different.

I'm quite comfortable with the solution, so for me the process of installing the solution is quite straightforward. I would say it's very straightforward, and it's easy to learn, especially because they offer a very good GUI. It's not as easy to set up as, for example, FortiGate, which is an application on FortiOS. FortiOS is just a bit more complex.

The deployment time varies. It largely depends on the number of security policies that demand attention. It's most likely one day or so, so it's not too long. However, it can vary. You only need one person to deploy the product.

We implement the solution for our clients. We handle the deployment for them ourselves using our in-house team. Typically I'll be the one to deploy it for the clients directly, and then I'll hand everything over to after-sales support.

I'm not sure of the pricing, but my understanding, after looking into Sophos, is that Fortinet is less expensive than Sophos.

We're using version 6.2 of the solution right now, however, the latest version available is 6.4.

I'm part of the security team at our organization. We're business partners with Fortinet.

I would advise other companies to choose a firewall brand that they can they afford. Cost is an important aspect. It needs to work well within an organization's budget. It doesn't make sense to look at products that are out of an organization's price range, so make sure you are looking at options that are affordable. 

The second thing to consider is the solution's functionality. If that particular brand or particular product has the functionality required, and they are able to implement it on their network or in their infrastructure, that's a good sign. 

The third consideration should be support. It's important for a company to understand how fast and how reliable the support is. That's very important after the sale.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.