We compared Fortinet FortiGate and VMWare SD-WAN based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Fortinet FortiGate is highly regarded for its ease of use, extensive features, and affordability. However, it could benefit from enhancements in SSL VPN, multi-factor authentication, and filtering. VMware SD-WAN is praised for its efficient multipath optimization and robust cloud web security, but it needs improvements in customization, Broadcom routing support, firewall capabilities, and inter-cloud connectivity. The customer service and support for both products have received varied feedback.
"Reliability is the best feature. We faced some issues when we were setting it up, but the service, portal, and administration are good."
"The solution is very user friendly. The user interface in particular is quite nice."
"It increases security posture and is helpful for firewall reporting, intrusion protection, web filtering, and SD-WAN implementation."
"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 FortiGate controls the user's activities and maximizes my bandwidth use overall."
"Centralized monitoring, policy management, and virtualized appliances allow us to take control over our public and private infrastructure."
"One of the valuable features is a standardized OS."
"The most valuable feature is the ease of use."
"I find the application-aware routing feature to be the most valuable."
"The most valuable features of VMware SD-WAN are the overall capabilities and ease of use."
"Has an optimization feature that acts to ensure the quality of the services running on the overlay to be most valuable."
"They have a lot of built-ins. There are so many applications defined inside the solution. It makes it so that we don't have to create some policies. Each and every application is already defined in it."
"The product is consistent and is one of the best despite the competition."
"One of the standout features is its ability to dynamically manage enterprise networks based on applications."
"VMware SD-WAN is scalable."
"If one circuit crashes, we are able to switch to a second circuit without any disruption in connection."
"The Wi-Fi controller needs a lot of improvement."
"Technical support is good but the response time could be faster."
"One of the problems I was having was with user mapping, and it is an issue for which I have escalated tickets with Fortinet support."
"A couple of things I've seen that need improvement, especially in terms of a hard coding. The driver-level active moment really is out-of-the-box and we have to have contact the customer support and sometimes it is difficult to resolve."
"The user interface could be improved to make it less confusing and easier to set up."
"Fortinet FortiGate could improve by having more storage in the hardware for log data."
"Fortinet already improved FortiGate, but in the current market, many brands of security devices have improved together. Fortinet still needs to catch up with market standards. Fortinet is lacking in features in comparison to competitors."
"The search tool needs improvement. It's very difficult to search for policies right now."
"They need to start focusing on the security functionality. They should find a way to embed the next-generation firewall functionality within the architecture. They should move more into applying SASE tenants to what they're doing."
"The only thing that I'm having issues with is on one of the sites, I can't see the location on the map."
"There is one feature that would set VMware SD-WAN apart from others solutions, and that is what I call inter-cloud connectivity. All the solutions regarding VMware are good because for example, If I go from my workplace to a retail office and I want to use my applications in the Cloud, that is possible. Perhaps we have customers who have their IT partial environments hosted in different cloud locations, such as Amazon and Azure, and the interconnection between the clouds, this is not possible. If it was possible it would be a market game-changer. Having the SD-WAN solution that is good at optimizing and facilitating traffic between different cloud providers would be great."
"If you don't have an Internet connection, you can’t control it."
"They need more gateways"
"Security is a challenge. I would like to see VMware add things like IPS, IDS, and web filtering. These features are the future of security, and most competing firewalls have them."
"There are a number of customers we have that require a fully mashed SD-WAN on VeloCloud that is not available currently."
"The initial setup of VMware SD-WAN was simple. However, it took six days to complete."
Fortinet FortiGate is ranked 2nd in Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) Solutions with 306 reviews while VMware SD-WAN is ranked 4th in Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) Solutions with 50 reviews. Fortinet FortiGate is rated 8.4, while VMware SD-WAN 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 VMware SD-WAN writes "To fully utilize cloud vendors' hardware networking, Microsoft and VMware support everything". Fortinet FortiGate is most compared with Sophos XG, Cisco Secure Firewall, Netgate pfSense, Meraki MX and Check Point NGFW, whereas VMware SD-WAN is most compared with Cisco SD-WAN, Meraki SD-WAN, Cato SASE Cloud Platform, Versa Unified Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) Platform and Aruba EdgeConnect SD-WAN Platform. See our Fortinet FortiGate vs. VMware SD-WAN report.
See our list of best Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) Solutions vendors and best WAN Edge vendors.
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One of our favorite things about Fortinet Fortigate is that you can deploy on the cloud or on premises. It is a very stable, reliable, and consistent solution. We like that we can manage the entire network from one interface; there is no going back and forth as some other solutions force you to do. Fortinet Fortigate firewalls have access point controller functionality built right into the system; there is no need for additional devices. This solution offers great built-in features for web filtering and the VPN is an extremely valuable feature.
The reporting with Fortinet Fortigate needs some degree of customization so that more usable reports can be created. If you want extra features, you need to buy extra licenses, which can get expensive quickly. We would have liked to get more features with the general license. We would also like to see better cloud management.
We like VMware SD-WAN for our clients that want a very easy-to-use solution. VMware SD-WAN offers simple troubleshooting and great cybersecurity. One amazing feature it has is DMPO (Dynamic MultiPath Optimization), which helps ensure data integrity. VMware SD-WAN comes loaded with several defined applications so that you don’t have to create them yourself - this is a huge time-saver.
Reporting and security with VMware SD-WAN could be improved, though. There really needs to be some failover capabilities, especially with their own devices. We would also like to see a mobile application. Many other solutions are already offering this as a basic feature. It would help make this solution easier to manage.
Conclusion
We felt the biggest difference between Fortinet Fortigate and VMware SD-WAN was the ease of use. The zero-touch provisioning offered with VMware SD-WAN makes it very easy to set up and the DMPO makes it easy to manage. We also felt the SD-WAN on VMware SD-WAN was better.