We performed a comparison between Fortinet Fortigate and Palo Alto Networks Wildfire 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 is the more popular solution because of its ease of deployment combined with its solid set of features, excellent service and support ratings, and the fact that it is more affordable than Palo Alto Networks Wildfire.
"Advanced routing (RIP, OSPF, BGP, PBR). It gives you a seamless and simple integration into a large network."
"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 stability and scalability of this solution are satisfactory. Its SD-WAN, VPN, and URL filtering features are very useful."
"The solution is very user friendly. The user interface in particular is quite nice."
"The SD-WAN is the most valuable feature."
"The interface is very good."
"Fortinet offers the latest versions to cater to the needs of enterprises."
"Fortinet FortiGate is a security device. It can optimize security on the networks of a company. It actually protects the company from attacks from outside. With FortiGate, you can categorize the users. You can create a group of users that can access all of the websites for their work. You can limit other users' access."
"Being an application-based firewall, this is one of the critical focus factors along with the threat prevention services it provides."
"WildFire has been instrumental in blocking a number of new threats, before common desktop anti-virus tools were able to detect them."
"We have found that Palo Alto Networks WildFire is scalable. We currently have six thousand users for the product."
"Whole team can use the firewall and understand it."
"The most valuable feature is the Automatic Verdict, to recognize whether something is a threat, or not."
"The most valuable features of the solution are user-friendliness, price, good security, and cloud-related options."
"The solution has plenty of features."
"The reporting feature helps our performance."
"The feedback that I have received is that the performance could be better, and the user experience is not as good compared to a previous solution we used. It could be more user-friendly. Of course, it still works fine for our operations."
"We were not able to build a full-mesh VPN; however, I am not sure if this was the fault of Fortinet FortiGate."
"In terms of what could be improved, the SD-WAN is quite difficult, because if you install the new box, 15 is okay, but if you change from an old configuration, if there is already configuration and a policy when you change to SD-WAN, you must change the whole policy that you see in the interface."
"The ease of use could be improved."
"One issue that I have had is that sometimes I need to monitor the traffic, so I need to filter it according to the user and which user is using it the most. I experience a bottleneck most of the time, particularly at the peak time when the number of contracts and users are at maximum."
"I would like to see improvements with the antivirus and IPS as they are not working properly all the time."
"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."
"One area for improvement is the performance on the bandwidth demands for smaller devices, as well as better web filtering."
"The free version does not have real-time updates. It is slow."
"The cost of the solution is excessively high."
"Palo Alto Networks WildFire should be more real-time in nature. The signature updates should happen in a minute or less than a minute to be a very good feature for the customer."
"I would give this product a rating of 9 out of 10 due to some slight issues of performance."
"The global product feature needs improvement, the VPN, and we need some enhanced features."
"There are certain changes that I was expecting in the previous version, and I hope that they are soon fixed. All of the problems that I have faced so far have been resolved."
"In terms of what I'd like to see in the next release of Palo Alto Networks WildFire, each release is based on malware that has been identified. The key problem is an average of six months from the time malware is written to the time it's discovered and a signature is created for it. The only advice that I can give is for them to shorten that timeframe. I don't know how they would do it, but if they shorten that, for example, cut it in half, they'll make themselves more famous."
"The price could be better."
Fortinet FortiGate is ranked 2nd in Firewalls with 306 reviews while Palo Alto Networks WildFire is ranked 3rd in Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) with 58 reviews. Fortinet FortiGate is rated 8.4, while Palo Alto Networks WildFire is rated 8.4. 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 Palo Alto Networks WildFire writes "Good technical support and provides automatic analysis that saves us time in filtering email". Fortinet FortiGate is most compared with Sophos XG, Cisco Secure Firewall, Netgate pfSense and Meraki MX, whereas Palo Alto Networks WildFire is most compared with Cisco Secure Firewall, Juniper SRX Series Firewall, Proofpoint Email Protection, Fortinet FortiSandbox and Check Point SandBlast Network.
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FortiGate has a lot going for it and I consider it to be the best, most user-friendly firewall out there. What I like the most about it is that it has an attractive web dashboard with very easy navigation tabs; It can be managed and controlled using layer two wireless access points; When compared with other firewalls, building IPsec VPN and SSL VPN is much easier; I can configure virtual networks within the same firewall; And, configuration of NAT and static routes are straightforward. I would recommend it to any organization that needs to provide VPN access for their employees.
FortiGate also has many security functions, such as application control, web filtering, IPS, antivirus, etc., that help companies protect their users. The FortiGate solution also helps optimize traffic from user to application via the hybrid WAN environment. I think what I like most about this solution is that I can combine security functions and SD-WAN, which allows me to scan traffic flow but also to protect the local application server or the user.
For me, the downsides of FortiGate are that it happens to include many bugs, and sometimes it can be a challenge to block content from a website with web filtering since web pages contain websites that consume other resources. Moreover, mobile device administration is complicated, and it does not seem to adapt to smartphone or tablet screens very well.
While it isn’t my favorite, WildFire provides the ability to block threats as they travers your network infrastructure both in retro-time and real-time. WildFire also has zero-trust and actively works to inspect traffic for malicious capabilities by forwarding a file to the WildFire cloud, even in the case that it doesn’t recognize what the file is doing. The reason why WildFire is not my first choice is because I feel that it is lacking many features and that they could improve by adding more functionality. But there doesn’t seem like there is a way to either tune or tweak the solution. If implemented correctly, though, it can be a good, robust solution to achieving great endpoint security.
Conclusion:
In my opinion, FortiGate is better than Wildfire because FortiGate meets my business needs better and has more appealing feature updates and roadmaps as well as great technical support, all of which are important to me.
What type of network is? how many users?
Fortinet products are unique in that they have specific chips to work on hardware rather than overcharging a CPU to 90%, as happens with some Sophos boxes and others.
Things in the cloud... the cloud is a name, it is software running on someone else's computer system and could be only for you or multi-tenancy. Delays and other dramas may occur.
The question as I was invited to comment :| Which is better, does not tell anything, somehow.