We performed a comparison between Barracuda CloudGen Firewall and Fortinet FortiGate based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Firewalls solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The features I find most valuable is the VPN and the fact that we can apply our policies to the program."
"The most valuable features are SD-WAN, URL filtering, IPS, and virus scanning."
"Its ability to block incoming attacks is valuable. Its logging, traffic monitoring, and VPN capabilities are also valuable."
"I think Barracuda CloudGen Firewall is one of the most advanced firewall platforms. I also like that it's easy to get top-level support right away. You get that security, and if you make a mistake, it doesn't break."
"One of the big benefits of the product is that it allows you to manage big environments with fewer resources."
"The most valuable feature for us is the ability to offer firewall support to our clients."
"When you are sending information to an external email address, Barracuda can warn you when you are trying to access a private or personal email, or trying to upload information and not allow you to do that."
"We use Barracuda NG Firewall as a border firewall. We trough it to control all in/out Internet traffic."
"Security solution with a straightforward and quick setup. It's a stable and scalable product."
"Fortinet has a very good solution for Secure SD-WAN. One very good feature is that they have robust and simple FortiOS through which they provide all solutions. That's their strength. There's not much complexity involved with the Secure SD-WAN solution of Fortinet as compared to Cisco's solution, which has a lot of flexibility but complexity also comes with that flexibility."
"The most valuable feature is the VDOM, which allows the customer to have multiple firewalls in a single campus."
"Initial setup is easy to configure."
"The most valuable feature is the ease of use."
"The notable features that I have found most valuable are that it includes the antivirus, and also IPS, and even SD-WAN."
"We use a southern institution that's audited for IT security and the reporting that automatically comes off the unit makes it much easier to meet compliance standards and makes it easier as far as the amount of time that has to be spent to compile that information. If you get your reporting set up correctly when you initially set it up, you just select the one you want and hit print. The auditing trail on it is the best feature."
"It is simple to manage, and there are a lot of functionalities in the same box."
"I would like to see the connection improved."
"Can be underpowered if you choose to use all available add-on features. Just be careful when sizing your unit. Make sure you take into account what features you will be turning on, and work with your sales rep to get the model that can handle that load."
"If you experience an attack it can take a very long time to find a solution."
"Technical support used to be at a very high level but it is now a bit less so."
"Barracuda CloudGen Firewall should work a little bit more with the logs so that, in our company, we can generate a little bit more reports and get a bit more statistics, which would be fine for us."
"To start working with spam, it takes a while because the product has to see that multiple emails are coming in with all the spam. If it could reduce that amount of time, then we would reduce the amount of users who are receiving spam."
"A rule for email announcements, when configured hits occur, would be a great improvement for a more efficient experience."
"I would like to see a more user-friendly dashboard and an easier interface."
"The setup is pretty complex and not easy to implement."
"FortiLink is the interface on the firewall that allows you to extend switch management across all of your switches in the network. The problem with it is that you can't use multiple interfaces unless you set them up in a lag. Only then you can run them. So, it forces you to use a core type of switch to propagate that management out to the rest of the switches, and then it is running the case at 200. It leaves you with 18 ports on the firewall because it is also a layer-three router that could also be used as a switch, but as soon as you do that, you can't really use them. They could do a little bit more clean up in the way the stacking interface works. Some use cases and the documentation on the FortiLink checking interface are a little outdated. I can find stuff on version 5 or more, but it is hard to find information on some of the newer firmware. The biggest thing I would like to see is some improvement in the switch management feature. I would like to be able to relegate some of the ports, which are on the firewall itself, to act as a switch to take advantage of those ports. Some of these firewalls have clarity ports on them. If I can use those, it would mean that I need to buy two less switches, which saves time. I get why they don't, but I would still like to see it because it would save a little bit of space in the server rack."
"The Wi-Fi controller needs a lot of improvement."
"My only complaint about FortiGate is a lack of QinQ VLAN tunneling. I haven't found this feature in any Fortinet product. You can do this on all Cisco routers, including the smaller models. However, QinQ isn't available on the biggest, most expensive Fortinet units. They still don't have that. I think now we're on software version 6.0, and they still haven't found a solution for QinQ. It isn't a dealbreaker, but that's my main complaint."
"Due to its higher cost, Fortinet FortiGate can lead to increased operational expenses."
"Fortinet Fortigate could benefit by simplifying some of their processes."
"The central management for the FortiGate Fortinet Firewall needs improvement. They have the manager to do the essential management for both SD-WAN and for the security policy. They should also improve the SD-WAN function."
"I think they need to improve more in order to be a competitor with the leaders of the field."
Barracuda CloudGen Firewall is ranked 26th in Firewalls with 35 reviews while Fortinet FortiGate is ranked 2nd in Firewalls with 306 reviews. Barracuda CloudGen Firewall is rated 8.2, while Fortinet FortiGate is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Barracuda CloudGen Firewall writes "Feature-rich, robust, and easy to set up". 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 ". Barracuda CloudGen Firewall is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Sophos XG, OPNsense, Azure Firewall and Cisco Secure Firewall, whereas Fortinet FortiGate is most compared with Sophos XG, Cisco Secure Firewall, Netgate pfSense, Meraki MX and WatchGuard Firebox. See our Barracuda CloudGen Firewall vs. Fortinet FortiGate report.
See our list of best Firewalls vendors, best Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) Solutions vendors, and best WAN Edge vendors.
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I strongly recommend you SonicWall 5600. Its having lots of feature for network security and Comparison of price and Support it would be great choice.
Fortigate firewalls are quite rugged and offer great flexibility in configuring the policies and managing them. For individuals as well as group level user privileges. The antivirus offered is also very effective and not at all resource hungry. The only drawback is, the admin should be very well trained and aware of configuring the firewall. It’s quite complicated that way. Or the support provider (reseller) should have expert level admins to configure and set these firewalls in the infrastructure.
I would alternatively suggest looking into Sophos firewalls. They are equally rugged and effective. And also have a much user-friendly configuration and management console.
Barracuda: No Presence in the market at all, quite different way to install manage the product. Impossible to find the technical resource. If it is managed by Multinet then it’s a different story.
UTM control was not good back in the days, not sure about recent improvements.
Support Generally good feedback of Barracuda support.
Sonicwall: Very little presence in the local market, will have compatibility issues when establishing VPN with other vendors or any other integration.
UTM should be good, not experienced it first-hand.
Support, Have horrible feedback about support. they don’t respond for months.
Fortinet: Firewall full of features, good market presence with official REPs in the country. It is basically the same Juniper SSG ScreenOS platform with good UTM.
UTM is good
Support, Support in the region from India is poor, fright. A good local partner can make your day. If case is escalated to US/Canada teams, the experience is much better. You need in-country REPs support to escalate the cases.
China effect, the downside of Fortinet is, its QA of new FortiOS release is not good at all. Things running fine on one release fail badly when upgraded to new release. you need to be ready for an alternate solution when faced with such situation.
But it is better than Barracuda and SonicWall anyways.
RMA time is not next day.
Palo Alto: I would recommend Palo Alto, it can do everything typically required from a NGFW/UTM. Price can be expensive. Typically models with high throughput are quoted from most vendors. In reality, the actual required throughput is not that much. PA820 and PA220 can cater 90% of requirement we have in our environments. This way solution will be comparatively competitive cost wise. Compatibility with third-party devices is good.
Per-user bandwidth limit is missing.
UTM is best.
Support is good. The first level is through support partners, but the experience is good.
No rapid RMA, as no in-country depot exists. But On site spare is best, as the customer owns the spare unit on his premises.
Fortinet is a good option, the interesting thing with them is all the other bits you can add. Many of these such as email protection, Sandbox, edge device protection (anti-virus, VPN Connector for PCs), tokens (electronic or hardware), switches, Wireless Access Points all talk to each other so the Fortinet security umbrella covers them as well. Fortinet has a SIEM as well.
Whatever you buy, get training on it. Also, evaluate the reseller's ability to do an install. Some folks just sell the product, other also know how to install - buy from the latter, and get some Pro Services for the installation.
I have always thought Barracuda's marketing was better than the products (it is very good marketing) and SonicWALL R&D suffered under Dell, and I don't know that it is any better now they are owned by an Investment house.
Out of these three firewalls I would, and have chosen Fortinet. Checkout NSS Labs for real world comparisons. I have been using Fortigates for 2 years now in HA configurations and have only once had to use the cli. Also updates and firmware upgrades never bring the network or internet down. These firewalls get new features added at no extra cost and the throughput is amazing. Buying the UTM bundles gets you all of the features you need and more. I heard about support issues but evertime i call i get routed to someone who knows how the features work and actually helps. We added a fortianalyzer and now we can see logs from all of the firewalls in one console and hold them for a year. Fortinet doesn't just manage their antivirus products they are the developers. These firewalls decrypt data on the fly and scan for viruses before it gets to your email, desktops or servers. Within the first week it caught ransomware within a yahoo email before it could infect our systems. We replaced our websense URL filtering with the URL filtering within the fortigates and never looked back.
I could go on and on but the real tilt in Fortinets favor was it was near half the cost of similar features and functions PA had quoted. Write down what you want and then ask if the vendors have these included in their firewalls or if they have separate appliances that can do them. Every appliance has a latency cost associated with it. You might find that all three can do what you want then it will come down to the management of the firewalls and cost.
Good luck.
I've utilized both SonicWALL and Fortinet in many implementations over the years. Fortinet does a better job in large, multi-tenant deployments and has excellent stateful packet inspection throughput. If you're planning to do SSL decryption and inspection, SonicWALL is the way to go (and currently, the product we lead with). I've found SonicWALL to be easier to manage and have also found that if you're a GUI-oriented user, all of the features are there in the UI. On the Fortigate you'll often have to dig into the CLI to enable some features.
The Barracuda products are very good and quite pricey, especially since you mentioned you were looking at the Sonicwall TZ series. The Sonicwall TZ series is meant for a smaller environment. The Fortinet firewalls are great but require a little more training. My experience with Sophos is that they have been a little buggy and support is not great. Since Sonicwall was sold by Dell the support has been better. I work with several small companies and I would say go with whatever product you have the most experience with. The learning curve can be a little much when you don't know what you're looking at. Both Sonicwall and Fortinet have pretty good support and a pretty extensive KB. Good Luck!
fortinet or baracuda and CISCO ASA 5500 series also good