We performed a comparison between Fortinet FortiSwitch - Secure Access and NETGEAR Switches based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Ethernet Switches solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."With FortiSwitch, you can easily identify who is connected to each port, disable ports as needed, and retrieve configurations from FortiGate when required."
"The most valuable feature is that I can completely isolate devices that are compromising the network."
"I like that everything flows back to FortiGate, which is the controller, management console, and firewall. There's one central point for the entire network, so the security, switching, wireless, etc., flows back to the FortiGate. The ease of management is what customers like. They don't need separate solutions like Cisco."
"It is a stable solution from the security front."
"Deploying the solution is a breeze, even a novice can do it."
"Fortinet FortiSwitch - Secure Access has essential features for managing switches."
"The solution is very simple, and it's very easily available."
"Integration is good, as well as price and technical support."
"Technical support is helpful and quick to respond."
"Valuable features include network monitoring and ease of programming for VLANs, etc. I especially like NETGEAR because it's easy to teach system administrators how to use them, how to look at them, how to make changes to them without having the complexity of CLIs, but still having a CLI should we need it."
"The initial setup was straightforward."
"Their online portal is one of the most useful features. The portal is very user-friendly, so even someone with not a lot of tech experience can go in and see what's going on with the switch."
"You are not limited in terms of stacking ports, and especially, if you're using the 96X as a core switch, the scalability, I could see this being very large. If you're using a type of a hybrid topology with a core switch going out to multiple switch stacks, or something like that, I could see the scalability of this being very good, especially considering the kind of backplane switching capacity on the 96X."
"The solution is simple to use. I am also impressed with the tool's GUI and CLI."
"We have one client that has three Insight switches and when we make a change to their network... we can make the configuration change and push it down to all three switches at once. We don't have to individually log on to each switch to make the change."
"The product is easy to deploy."
"In Fortinet, the packet reconstruction in the SD-WAN solution needs a little bit of improvement. When it comes to the Secure Access to the switches or the mix of Fortinet solution, the very small ones do not have the capability to use fiber cables. So, the small FortiGates have to work with the copper cables and cannot use fiber cables. Even though they have the capacity and throughput on all technical connectors, they don't have the interfaces, which is one of the good things with Cisco. They just add models to it. You buy the independent models, and you add them."
"If you contact Fortinet, it's a bit difficult. Most of the time, they send you just links and documents to read for troubleshooting. When you contact support, you don't need documents. You want someone that can understand your problem, give a hand, and help you. I'm not impressed by the support really."
"It would be easier if Fortinet FortiSwitch - Secure Access could be managed via cloud, and this is something that could be improved in this product. Bandwidth display could also be better."
"The reporting capabilities should be included."
"FortiSwitch requires periodic firmware updates. It can be a little difficult because the switches aren't connected to the internet, so you cannot upgrade the firmware remotely. You need to go to the site and do it manually because it's a closed network."
"The product must improve its prices."
"Renewing the annual licenses for Secure the Switch FortiSwitch can be cumbersome, especially considering the relatively high cost of Fortinet licenses."
"An area for improvement would be the segmentation and network in logic networks."
"My one issue with it is that not all the features of the switch can currently be managed via the portal. For some of the more advanced features, you still have to configure the switch."
"The ‘how-to’ guides could do with some improvements. We got in trouble following the stacking and Dante set-up guides. If these would have been accurate, we would not have lost three days."
"The web interface has been a little sketchy on occasion. Sometimes I have to reload the page to get things to show up properly, but the switch itself seems fine. The web user interface is a little wonky at times."
"The security features must be improved."
"If they could come up with ways to look at metrics on it while the video is capping through the system, that would be nice. There could be some interesting uses for that, but it's a long way off."
"There are some design issues on which they really missed the boat. The problem has to do with rack mounting them because the lights and jacks should all be on the front, and the power on the back. The way they did it makes it really difficult to use them in a rack environment, because when the lights are on the opposite side of the jacks... you usually can't see the back side of a rack. You can't get back there to see, so it's just crazy."
"There are a lot of systems that are moving into different areas. There are a lot of cloud-based things happening. One nice feature that I've seen in other switches is artificial intelligence on the actual porting. They've got AI technology that will tell you when a port is down. They not only tell you when a port is down; they also tell you when a port is running slower. You can do a cable-fault check, or you can do other checks. It would be nice to have this information in NETGEAR. This feature might already be there in a new release of the NETGEAR's firmware, but I haven't seen it."
"This product lacks a CLI interface."
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Fortinet FortiSwitch - Secure Access is ranked 7th in Ethernet Switches with 40 reviews while NETGEAR Switches is ranked 4th in Ethernet Switches with 49 reviews. Fortinet FortiSwitch - Secure Access is rated 8.2, while NETGEAR Switches is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Fortinet FortiSwitch - Secure Access writes "It's a strong product that's easy to manage and costs significantly less than competing solutions ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of NETGEAR Switches writes "You can stack different models of switches which makes the scalability great". Fortinet FortiSwitch - Secure Access is most compared with Cisco Ethernet Switches, Aruba Switches, Ubiquiti UniFi Switches, Meraki MS Switches and Juniper EX Series Ethernet Switches, whereas NETGEAR Switches is most compared with D-Link Ethernet Switches, Cisco Linksys Ethernet Switches, Cisco Ethernet Switches, Ubiquiti UniFi Switches and HPE ProCurve. See our Fortinet FortiSwitch - Secure Access vs. NETGEAR Switches report.
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