We performed a comparison between Fortinet FortiGate and Meraki MX based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Based on the parameters we compared, Fortinet FortiGate and Meraki MX have a similar user rating regarding ease of deployment, pricing, service and support, and ROI. In terms of features, users of Fortinet FortiGate had mixed reviews on the interface, and felt the reporting feature needed updating. On the other hand, users of Meraki MX felt there was a need for better and more monitoring capabilities.
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiGate are remote access, web filtering, and IPS."
"I'm pretty happy with its reliability. It is also very scalable."
"The pricing is excellent. It's much less expensive than Cisco."
"Good load balancing feature."
"It's a user-friendly firewall. Most of the tasks are very simple. It's simple to configure and troubleshoot this firewall."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiGate are the APIs. They are the most widely known."
"This is an easy solution to deploy."
"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."
"The product is quite secure, easy to manage, and well-connected with other devices."
"WAN optimization is the best feature of the solution."
"The most valuable feature of Meraki MX is I can manage the solution from anywhere remotely, I can throttle bandwidth, and create all rules. Additionally, it is secure for our customers."
"I like the automatic firmware updates. We use the Active Directory to authenticate VPN users."
"MX is easy to manage, configure and install."
"Meraki makes it easy to be secure and know where the holes are to fix them. We have been fixing anything that we have ever found for 20 years. We keep up-to-date with firmware upgrades. We just try to stay on top of everything for security, like maintaining updates and getting rid of old systems. I feel like we're on top of it."
"In a week, we can make new policy and view what all our users did."
"The technical support people from Meraki are brilliant."
"Lacks sufficient security options."
"The solution is very expensive."
"From a reporting perspective, there's room for improvement. They're providing FortiAnalyzer through which one can get some enhancements, but the visibility and reporting still need slight improvement."
"The price of FortiGate should be reduced because there are some other leading products that are cheaper."
"It should have a better pricing plan. It is too expensive. It should also have a more granular view of the attack. I don't have FortiAnalyzer, and it is difficult for me to have a complete view when there is an attack on my server."
"Fortinet FortiGate is a firewall solution and once it's deployed, you can rest assured that your system is secure."
"The renewal price and the availability could be improved."
"The logs need to be better. They need to be more visible and easier to access."
"What I would like to see in the next version is to have more interfaces for WAN links."
"It is very expensive."
"Right now, you can postpone the update but eventually, if you don't do the update, it will install the updates automatically for you and that's something that is not working for me."
"The only stability issue is in Content Filtering. Sometimes we need to report these types of issues to Cisco support."
"They're very complacent and I find the rule set to be a little arcane."
"Expensive licensing and firewall stops immediately working if the license is not renewed at expiration date."
"The configuration options for firewall and IPS have limitations."
"The IPS, the Intrusion Prevention System, can be improved."
Fortinet FortiGate is ranked 2nd in Firewalls with 306 reviews while Meraki MX is ranked 2nd in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 59 reviews. Fortinet FortiGate is rated 8.4, while Meraki MX is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Fortinet FortiGate writes "It's a reliable solution that's easy to install and cheaper than competitors ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Meraki MX writes "Cost-effective, simplified, easy to manage, and reliable with advanced security features and granular visibility". Fortinet FortiGate is most compared with Sophos XG, Cisco Secure Firewall, Netgate pfSense, WatchGuard Firebox and Check Point NGFW, whereas Meraki MX is most compared with Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Cisco Secure Firewall, Sophos XG, SonicWall TZ and Netgate pfSense. See our Fortinet FortiGate vs. Meraki MX report.
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definitely the FortiGate , I can assist you with configuration and support if needed .
I recommend that using a Sonicwall as the peripheral firewall as you can easily configure the firewall rules to block certain countries. Its ease of use and SSL inspection and many other features and reporting features are more than sufficient for a small company.
You don't need a dedicated IT department, Sonicwall provide cloud-based support services that can assist you 24hrs/ 7 days.
To enhance the firewall protection further, we also deploy ZoneAlarm and webroot security firewalls at the desktops level. We also have several firewalls routers to safeguard very important servers, giving an onion-like "layers defense" structure.
We have Meraki Mx devices now, we are looking to replace them. But that is because the Meraki MX platform lacks SSL Inspection, Granular Firewall rules (Block only, no allow setting), client vpn relies on windows vpn setup (we would prefer a software solution).
But when we bought Meraki's we were switching from something with little to no visibility into the network. The visibility we got with the meraki and the content filtering and ability to block countries was quick and easy to setup. If we weren't looking to lock things down further, we would renew our Meraki's rather than replace them.
We are also looking at the fortigate series, but we would be using the latest generation - I think the 60f would be the newest of the 60 size.