We performed a comparison between Fortinet Fortigate and Fortinet Fortigate VM based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Fortinet Fortigate is the winner in this comparison. According to reviews, it has better support than Fortinet Fortigate VM.
"Advanced routing (RIP, OSPF, BGP, PBR). It gives you a seamless and simple integration into a large network."
"The features that I have found most valuable are the SD-WAN and their IP4 policy."
"Customers are more inclined towards FortiGate because of application control, web filtering, and anti-spam features. The support from the FortiGate team is good, and price-wise, it is affordable."
"I have found Fortinet FortiGate to be scalable."
"It is simple to manage, and there are a lot of functionalities in the same box."
"FortiGate improved our security. It's one of the best hardware firewalls."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiGate are it is one of the most mature firewalls in the UTM bundle."
"The GUI is good."
"The thing that I like the most is that they're very willing to work with us to resolve issues that they haven't taken care of before in their product."
"Its interface is good. It comes with a lot of features, and its performance is also very good."
"The setup is simple."
"We are able to closely monitor the usages of individual users and see their usage habits and other items, including the data itself, which gives us quite a bit of visibility."
"We work in the archiving domain where a secure environment is very important. We have some special requirements regarding the security of infrastructure."
"All the security features that are built into the product are valuable."
"The customer care center of Fortinet is good. For all the requests that we have done, they work as fast as possible, so this is a good point for Fortinet."
"It provides an ease of management and configuration as well."
"It does not have key authentication for admin access."
"There are some license issues. Not every feature must have a separate license. There must be some of kind synergy between the license so we don't have to pay for every individual license that we would like to have."
"They need faster serviceability and more security features."
"The platform's interface could improve."
"Pricing for it is a bit high. It could be cheaper."
"The cloud features and integration could be improved."
"One of the features that I would like to have is to do with endpoint production, it should be integrated. For example, the firewall gets notified of any kind of forensic event that needs to be done, such as if there is a ransomware attack and how it originated, all those records have to be available from the firewall, which is not."
"The main aspect of FortiGate that could be improved is load balancing. Our management team does not want to buy another appliance for only load balancing."
"Fortinet support needs improvement. The response times are lackluster. Fortunately, the product is stable and we seldom have issues. Also, it takes months for them to deliver hardware when we order it."
"Capacity-wise, I think the solution's log storage area is something that needs to be increased since, by default, it stores logs for only seven days."
"The costs could be lowered."
"The biggest area for improvement is storage configuration. It could be smoother."
"The user interface needs to be improved."
"There is always room for improvement in any solutions, including Fortinet's FortiGate-VM. Although the solution claims to have a superior throughput compared to other OEMs, upon closer examination and comparison, there is potential for significant improvement in this area. In today's rapidly evolving technology world, it is important to continuously strive for enhancement and development, and I believe Fortinet can make significant strides in this direction for the FortiGate-VM."
"The management tools should be more user-friendly."
"SD-WAN could be enhanced to provide a clear division between control and data planes, utilizing controllers to manage tasks within the network."
Fortinet FortiGate is ranked 2nd in Firewalls with 306 reviews while Fortinet FortiGate-VM is ranked 9th in Firewalls with 113 reviews. Fortinet FortiGate is rated 8.4, while Fortinet FortiGate-VM 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 Fortinet FortiGate-VM writes "An easy-to-manage and configure tool that provides ample documentation to help with the setup phase". Fortinet FortiGate is most compared with Sophos XG, Cisco Secure Firewall, Netgate pfSense, Meraki MX and SonicWall NSa, whereas Fortinet FortiGate-VM is most compared with Azure Firewall, Palo Alto Networks VM-Series, Fortinet FortiOS, OPNsense and Cisco Secure Firewall. See our Fortinet FortiGate vs. Fortinet FortiGate-VM report.
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We monitor all Firewalls 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.
Purpose-built appliances offer tested performance measures and provide proven results for the specified traffic and service configuration.
VM can only provide vCPUs, RAM, and hard disk resources. However, in some cloud environments, you only have the VM option, no appliances accepted.
We have several Fortigate VM firewalls operating for 3 years now in the cloud and appliances in our centers that handle the traffic just fine. We have not had to increase the resources above the recommendations and they work just fine.
FortiGate VM
Virtual machines are less efficient than real machines because they access the hardware indirectly.
FortiGate Hardware
Fortigate appliance is purpose built with NPU and SPUs designed to increase throughput while maximizing the ability to decrypt packets in search of malware.
VM deployments are software only and do not include the NPU and SPUs.