Fortinet FortiGate-VM Reviews

We use Fortinet FortiGate-VM as a firewall for our internet.

Fortinet FortiGate-VM is very easy to create the user of VPN, allowing them to use it quickly. Additionally, the integration and interface are good.

I have been Fortinet FortiGate-VM for approximately three years.

The stability is good.

Fortinet FortiGate-VM is scalable.

We have 110 systems for users that we can connect and we have 12 users using the VPN.

The technical support in my experience has been good.

We require ten people for the deployment of Fortinet FortiGate-VM.

We have been waiting a long time for the vendor to give us licenses, it has been five months and we are still waiting. However, the price is reasonable.

I rate Fortinet FortiGate-VM a ten out of ten.

I like how Fortinet products work together to provide a total equipment solution. And, I don't see any issues with that solution. In terms of specific features, I like FortiGate's load balancing, interface, and priority on the network.

Fortinet could improve the availability and delivery of its products. It takes four to six weeks for every purchase to arrive.

I've been using FortiGate-VM for six years.

Fortinet's local support in Mexico could be better.

I rate FortiGate 10 out of 10. 

We use the solution for creating IPsec tunnels and web and application filters. We use it for monitoring virtual traffic on platforms including VMware solutions. 

I only know a little bit about the solution's firmware.

This said, the solution is stable and user-friendly. 

The solution should provide more useful GUI features. This would prevent us from having to resort to CLI or certain basic commands. 

There should be an IPsec failover. 

We have been using Fortinet FortiGate-VM for around four years.

The solution is stable. 

The technical support is very good. It does not need to be improved. 

The installation is very easy and user-friendly. 

We have two teams, involving PLM managers, whose sole job is to support the customers. 

We pay for a yearly license. 

We deployed the solution in a vCenter, using VMware. We do so solely on cloud. 

We have around 10 clients who are making use of on-premises deployment. 

We usually recommend SonicWall and Sophos in place of the solution since, with this IPsec solution, if one configures to an HPE with the IPsec failover, it fails to work. 

I rate Fortinet FortiGate-VM as a seven out of ten. 

We installed Fortinet FortiGate-VM for security purposes. Our main motivation is for security reasons and improving networking.

The most valuable features are network security, VLAN, network protection, and encryption are very valuable to us.

Integration could be better. Whatever devices I'm using with FortiGate are all compatible. The access points and switches are also FortiGate, so I can easily integrate them. But it would be better if we could embed other devices as well. There are compatibility issues with other brands, and we need that. We can only integrate universal brands with FortiGate. The initial setup could also be easier.

I have been working with Fortinet FortiGate-VM for three years.

It's stable, and our customers aren't giving us much of a problem.

Our customers are very happy with its scalability.

Technical support is good. However, we're not satisfied with partner support, and we're looking to diversify. We have signed up, and we're training our engineers.

The initial setup is a little complex. Not too complex, but it's good because we like to work. It takes half an hour at most to install and deploy this solution.

We're a reseller, and we implement this solution.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Fortinet FortiGate-VM an eight.

We use it to separate our office environment from our training courses and customer environment. 

We have on-premise and cloud deployments. We use the on-premise version for the functionality for our local network, and we use the cloud-based solution to provide the same functionality for our cloud-hosted workspaces. We have its latest version. 

Its performance is adequate. We are quite satisfied with its performance. 

The fact that it is a complete ecosystem with all kinds of integrations is valuable. It did take us a couple of months to get a grip on the new software, but all in all, it replaced our on-premise and single-point solution environment. 

It would be useful to have integration with different reporting tools. This is something we are sorely missing. It would be a plus to have reporting integrations. 

It would be good to have more integration with the identity suites, such as Office 365 and Azure Active Directory, of different providers that we use. Integrations are already available, but it would be nice to have some more advanced options.

I have been using this solution since 2015 or 2016. 

It is stable.

It is very scalable. In terms of the number of users, we have about 300 employees and 300 daily on-premise customers.

We have plans to increase its usage. We are looking at the high-availability options for our branch offices.

Most of the technical support is provided by our support partner, but there have been some instances when I interacted with their technical support. They have been most satisfactory.

Its initial installation wasn't really that hard. It was very much doable. It was a scaled rollout, which makes it a bit hard to measure.

We did get some help from our network support partner. We initially needed extra help for the deployment. We didn't require any help later on. 

To support an environment of this size, two people are good enough. If this is the sole focus of their job, then even a single person would be enough.

There is a support fee that can be bought on a yearly or two-yearly basis. I don't think they do five years. The best benefit is that the same pricing is guaranteed for that duration. If you can afford it, I would recommend using the longest possible time span.

We compared it with Check Point.

I would definitely recommend this solution. I was advised to be very skeptical about the performance statistics as indicated in the documentation, but I didn't find that to be the case. It is very scalable with good performance.

I would rate Fortinet FortiGate-VM an eight out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for checking a 250-person defense contracting company with multiple locations.

It's improved our operations by not being overly problematic.

The solution seems to be very reliable. 

It's a relatively simple product that is easy to use. It's not overly complex.

The initial setup is fairly straightforward.

The product does not have a good graphical interface. Their patches and their upgrades are not always compatible with configuration. That means that often you find after you upgrade that there was something else you have to do to the rest of the infrastructure, whether it's a printer or a user or whatever. It doesn't appear to me that their upgrades are well tested. They usually do what they're supposed to do, however, they also usually do some other things that FortiGate doesn't seem to be aware of.

It doesn't maintain legacy capabilities very well.

The stability of the solution isn't ideal.

They don't seem capable of supporting their own product.

The solution needs a better user interface and more intelligent services like spam blocking and auto whitelisting, gray listing, blacklisting, et cetera. It just basically needs better user monitoring.

I've been using the solution for about four years at this point. It's been a while now.

While I wouldn't describe the solution as unstable, there are definitely hiccups. I expect firewalls to be really efficient and very stable and I would say they're only sort of stable. I don't expect to have to figure out how to create a scan-to-email solution every time I upgrade my firewall, for instance.

Of course, they'll blame it on the vendor of the printer and say now how they're not following the standard or something, however, it was working with their product previously and the printer wasn't the item that changed. Their product gets a patch and it no longer works and you're like, "Well, I like your theory, but I don't exactly accept it." I don't think they have the features that a Palo Alto has, let's say.

The solution seems to be scalable. For our purposes, it scales well.

We have about 250 users on the solution currently.

Technical support isn't that great. On a scale from one to ten, they're a five at best. A couple of times where we had a problem, they couldn't solve the problem. We researched the problem on our own, unfortunately, via Google, and we found the solution and the solution was actually written by one of their techs and they didn't even know it.

The initial setup is not too difficult. It's not overly complex. I'd describe it as pretty straightforward. A company shouldn't have any issues with implementation.

For deployment, we did one site and then the other site and it took probably two weeks to deploy it, with maybe 30 days to get it fully configured. Then, once we had one site deployed, configured, and functional, we implemented a copy of that to the other site. We followed this pattern for each of our locations.

In terms of maintenance, it's hard to quantify what you need for the firewall. The firewalls are relatively low in terms of required maintenance. We have one IT administrator that may be a day a month has duties that are firewall-related. It varies, however, it's not significant work to maintain the firewall.

We did not need the assistance of an integrator or consultant. We were able to handle it ourselves.

We haven't really seen an ROI. It does what it's supposed to do, however, I'm not sure that it makes my job easier. It's kind of a sunk cost. It's one of the frustrations I have. I would expect it to be smarter and capable of doing things that it really doesn't do.

We pay a yearly licensing fee. It's probably a couple of thousand dollars per firewall.

On top of that, if you maintain a hardware warranty, so that you own the devices, you still maintain a warranty on them. There's sort-of a service contract, or you can go at risk. I don't know where we are in that. I'd have to go look, but I know at one point in time we talked about again, if we're going to be doing a tech exchange, maybe we don't want to maintain the warranties on them anymore.

The competitors actually have lower prices for more functionality. On the higher side, if you go with Cisco, it's more expensive, however, it's obviously more functional. A Palo Alto is probably a better solution than a FortiGate.

We're currently looking for alternatives to this solution.

We're looking at alternatives. However, the deficiencies that they have are not significant enough that I would like to immediately leave them, however, they're big enough that I'm looking for alternatives. 

When I come to end the life and I do a tech refresh, if we're not going to go 100% virtual, which is certainly another consideration, I am going to look at an alternate product. I'm not sure we're going to go away from them with a timeline right now, however, I'm certainly looking at it.

We don't yet have a shortlist, however, we'll likely look at the top big names in the market.

We're an end-user and a customer.

We have a plug-in with the subscription. We use the current version on their 100Es.

In general, I would advise other users that they need to look at whether they're going to go physical or virtual. I'd advise once they decide that to then look at the maybe lesser known next-generation firewalls that have functionality. The folks that are going to be operating the tool need to look at the user interface to make sure that that it is easy to use. Most users at an enterprise don't even know the firewall's there, let alone what it is, so they're not unique. I think all of the firewalls are pretty decent at not impacting users. The differentiator is which ones are easy to set up, which ones are easy to configure and use and how good they are at reporting.

The other thing I would say is, look at whether or not they integrate into your overall IT management, whether you're using ServiceNow or what you're using for IT management. How do the firewalls integrate with that or not? It's important.

I'd rate the solution at a four out of ten. It does base functions and it's doing that at a pretty high price.

We primarily use this solution for the firewall and IPS.

The most valuable feature is the UTM, which gives them an advantage over other firewalls.

The reporting is not as good as it is with other firewalls and it should be improved. There should be a customized report, for example.

The dashboard seems to change quickly from version to version, and they should follow the lead of vendors like Palo Alto, Juniper, and Cisco, and always keep it the same.

The bandwidth limitations should be increased.

I have been using FortiGate-VM for approximately one year.

FortiGate-VM is stable and I have not faced any problems with it.

It is working fine and I have had no trouble with scalability.

We have very rarely had to contact Fortinet about anything. When we have a problem then we have local support with our vendor. They will send their technical people if we need help on-site. We are very satisfied with our local experts.

I have worked with McAfee for a long time. The only thing that is better with McAfee is reporting, which is very good. They offer customized reports. We have decided to keep McAfee as our endpoint solution and use FortiGate-VM as our firewall.

The initial setup is very easy. Somebody who has a little bit of experience in VMware or with firewalls will be able to do it in no time.

There is a benefit in terms of the cost of using this solution because the price is very good. There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

I tried SonicWall, Cisco ASA & Sophos but Fortinet is best among them in term of service and price.

I will say that for low-end firewalls, Fortinet is good compared to the others. The pricing is good, and when you need a new feature, you don't have to buy a new device.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We're using FortiGate-VM on-prem for our firewalls. The Fortinet component in the cloud is FortiGuard. We get our virus definitions regularly updated from the cloud, but the FortiGate firewalls are all on-prem. While the virtual firewalls are created inside the physical firewall, there is an option for a virtual machine firewall where we'll give you the VHD file, and you can install it to a server.

Virtual machines aren't widely used in Brunei because the Brunei government isn't ready for these things yet. They're more confident in hardware, but everything is slowly starting to head in this direction. Others are watching what will happen when people use the apps before they try them.

Some customers prefer VM, especially those customers already leveraging the virtual machine environment. Typically, they don't want to spend on the hardware because they already have all these VMs, so they choose the VM option. But in most deployments, they still prefer the hardware for their firewall because it's already hard-coded.

To improve FortiGate-VM, Fortinet needs to harden it more. For example, if you are using Hyper-V, then you need guidelines for hardening FortiGate-VM that are specific to the Hyper-V environment. If it's VMware, there should be at least a guideline on how to harden the firewall.

We've been working with FortiGate-VM since 2010.

Fortinet-VM is more scalable than the hardware version. If you're using an appliance, there are limitations in terms of hardware specs. So if you want a more scalable firewall, you can get a VM and install it on a high-end server. From there, you have more leverage on how many virtual firewalls you want to create based on that VM. In other words, it's already fixed hardware in the appliance — it's already hard-coded in the appliance. So if you are using a VM and installing it on a high-specs server, then your machine has much higher performance in packaging all these policies and all these hardware security features. 

We proved the frontline support for our client organizations or customers. So far we are satisfied with Fortinet support. We have currently have Fortinet-certified engineers in our company, so we don't have to contact support unless it's a complex issue. We have an NSE7-certified engineer, so we are quite confident with our deployment now.

FortiGate-VM setup is pretty straightforward. It depends on the implementation size, but it takes a week for an organization of around 100 users. Normally Fortinet helps their customers with deployment and post-deployment adjustments, so you don't have any problems. If anything goes wrong, Fortinet is there to support you. 

Like most similar products in the market, Fortinet's enterprise customers need to pay for annual support. They call it FortiCare, and it's direct support from Fortinet. FortiCare is renewed annually and covers support for new releases, purchases, and updates. 

I rate Fortinet FortiGate-VM eight out of 10. However, based on experience, we usually don't recommend using VM firewalls. We still prefer using a hardware-based firewall when that's appropriate. It depends on your needs and the size of your user base. With FortiGate-VM, you can control the size of your firewall if you're using VMs. But on the other hand, if you are using Microsoft Hyper-V, you need to address all these vulnerabilities of Microsoft. And if you're using VMware, then you need to deal with VMware's vulnerabilities. The hardware version of FortiGate has already been hardened based on FortiGate standards. That's the main difference between the FortiGate appliance and FortiGate-VM.