We performed a comparison between Fortinet Fortigate and Cisco SD-WAN based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison of Results: Based on the parameters we compared, Fortinet Fortigate seems to be the superior solution. All other things being more or less equal, our reviewers found Cisco SD-WAN rather expensive to purchase, not as secure as it should be, and somewhat difficult to deploy.
"Troubleshooting is swift, allowing for fast turnaround times whenever we encounter an issue."
"Cisco SD-WAN's collaborative features are unique and sustainable. I also like the protocols, which use two SD-WAN."
"The orchestration on the VPN connection between remote locations is a fantastic feature. I used it some time ago."
"Load balancing is a feature that allows us to take the best of our links and distribute the load intelligently, always with an eye on the end-customer experience."
"The availability of services and combining different connections is most valuable."
"The most valuable features, application awareness, and failover resilience, stand out as key considerations for users."
"The solution can scale. We haven't had any issues doing so."
"It's a complete solution with many security features."
"Provides good firewall security and has great VPN features."
"The initial setup of Fortinet FortiGate was straightforward."
"It has improved our security capabilities."
"It has improved our organization with control data."
"The pricing is excellent. It's much less expensive than Cisco."
"The features that I have found most valuable are the SD-WAN and their IP4 policy."
"Allows for firewall rules to be programmed and named in a way that makes it “readable”"
"The secure web gateway module and the application control module are valuable. HA operations are very easy."
"The user interface needs improvement. Users should be able to find various features faster without much tweaking."
"They should enhance the reporting because, as it is today, they need more executive-level reports."
"The bandwidth limitations would be good to remove, but it is a policy and license situation for Cisco because the cost is very high. It would be good to have OTP implemented with VRF. It can have support for EIGRP Over the Top (OTP) VRF. I saw some limitations in regards to the VRF protocol and the advertisement between VRF configuration. EIGRP Over the Top basically was quite limited with the VRF configuration. If you wanted to do rollback in VRF by using the EIGRP OTP protocol, the formation was not populated across. Cisco got back and confirmed that it is a configuration that I need to wait for until the next release, which is going to happen in one year. Cisco documentation is not the way it used to be before. It just gives an easy way to configure, but it doesn't go into the details of the configuration. The information that you need is there, but sometimes you want to go further and get more information, but the information is quite limited. It would be good to cover a few business cases or configuration cases. They used to be there in the past."
"Compresson deduplication should be added."
"The security features could be improved."
"Since Cisco acquired Viptela, the stability of this solution has given problems since it is quite new."
"Cisco SD-WAN is not as easy to deploy as the Meraki and FortiGate solutions. The zero-touch deployment could be a lot better. The deployment and initial setup are complicated and could be better."
"The solution could have a better web interface to simplify changing configurations."
"One of the problems I was having was with user mapping, and it is an issue for which I have escalated tickets with Fortinet support."
"The firewall engine is not so strong as of now, in my opinion... My second concern is that, while they have Zero-day vulnerability and anti-malware features, the threat engine needs to be strengthened, its efficiency can be increased."
"Currently, FortiGate is providing SSL VPN. But they're missing some features that are available in Palo Alto's SSL VPN."
"There are SD-WAN network monitoring, SD-WAN features, Industrial Databases, Internet of Things, Detection, etc., however, we do have not licenses for those features. We thought that if you bought a product, you should have all of the features it offers. Why should you need to make so many extra purchases to enable features? They should have one price for the entire offering."
"Reporting is limited to providing an external appliance for improving the reporting capabilities of the FortiAnalyzer. It does not offer a central management and is also sold separably as an appliance."
"The stability of Fortinet FortiGate could improve."
"They have to just improve its performance when we enable all UTM features. When you enable all the features, the performance of FortiGate, as well as of Sophos and SonicWall, goes down."
"The renewal price and the availability could be improved."
Cisco SD-WAN is ranked 1st in Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) Solutions with 86 reviews while Fortinet FortiGate is ranked 2nd in Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) Solutions with 306 reviews. Cisco SD-WAN is rated 8.0, while Fortinet FortiGate is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Cisco SD-WAN writes "A solution for integrating services to enhance up-time, performance and lower costs". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Fortinet FortiGate writes "It's a reliable solution that's easy to install and cheaper than competitors ". Cisco SD-WAN is most compared with Meraki SD-WAN, VMware SD-WAN, Juniper Session Smart Router, Versa Unified Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) Platform and Cato SASE Cloud Platform, whereas Fortinet FortiGate is most compared with Sophos XG, Cisco Secure Firewall, Netgate pfSense, Meraki MX and OPNsense. See our Cisco SD-WAN vs. Fortinet FortiGate report.
See our list of best Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) Solutions vendors and best WAN Edge vendors.
We monitor all Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) Solutions reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.