We performed a comparison between Cisco IOS Security and Fortinet FortiOS based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Firewalls solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The solution is extremely reliable."
"The GUI is good."
"Initial setup is straightforward. There weren't too many issues with setting it up. It takes one hour or so."
"The CLI and GUI do a good job of putting a lot at your fingertips."
"Good performance, stability, and virtual domain ability."
"The customization potential is quite impressive."
"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."
"Some of the key features of the solution is that it has good reporting, you can receive many details from the connection, for example, clients and website information."
"You can scale it when you need to."
"I'm able to transfer data over internet network security. With the GRE I'm able to transfer data within one bunch to another bunch in a public way, like the internet. The communication is encrypted and is private. It gives me added privacy."
"What I have used the most and received the most benefit from is the IPsec technology."
"The solution effectively integrates with Umbrella."
"I've found their network routing to be very good."
"It covers everything we need it to without looking to secondary solutions."
"The VPN was valuable for us because more people are working from home. It has a lot of reporting and easy-to-use management tools."
"The technical support is good."
"It has a lot of scalability abilities which makes it easy to scale."
"For my organization, it has become much easier to scan the firewalls because the solution is more user-friendly than competitors."
"Compared to other firewalls, the segmentation is much easier in FortiGate."
"The information security features are the most valuable."
"We found the initial setup to be straightforward."
"FortiGate as a product is very easy to configure."
"The solution is very easy to configure and has a good interface, plus it offers more configuration options than other vendors."
"What I like about this solution, is that it is the only solution that currently offers VPN for clients."
"They need to improve their technical support."
"The renewal price and the availability could be improved."
"There are some tiny bugs that sometimes affect the operations. In the past revision of it, there was a bug. Because of the bug, we had to downgrade the version. It happened only with the last revision."
"The solution could have licensing fees reduced in the future."
"The initial setup and configuration are not intuitive and require training."
"The improvement is related to logs. Instead of the CLI, we should be able to have more insights into the logs of the firewall in the GUI."
"The platform's interface could improve."
"The stability could be a bit better."
"The company needs to make its solution more affordable to make it more accessible to larger markets. Otherwise, it's seen as an enterprise-level solution that small or medium-sized organizations can't afford and therefore they won't even look at it."
"We cannot directly upgrade the system. The tool's deployment is also very difficult in legacy environments. The tool needs to have bigger ports as well."
"Signatures and other critical definitions need to be updated more frequently."
"The configuration should be easier in the solution."
"There are the usual bugs that are inherent to some software upgrades. Sometimes this provides some unexpected issues, however, it happens with all brands all the time."
"There's a technology called SD-WAN that we would like to see. We are unable to handle multiple connections or to automatically load balance. I would like to have a feature that enables us to automatically prepare for load balancing."
"I think they should bring back remote VPN for users."
"We need to pay for the license and it is expensive."
"They're using a lot of application-specific IC, so that may be causing some performance issues. And whenever a Fortinet adds new features, it can affect performance."
"It would be great if they can push the Microsoft updates through Fortinet OS and provide a centralized patch management system. They should also include the data loss prevention (DLP) and data leakage prevention features. They could also add network monitoring more effectively."
"The additional features I would like to see included in the next release is better troubleshooting and reporting."
"The support is not very good, but the product is stable so it is not so much of a problem."
"While it is a solid solution, there are some product limitations which exclude it from deployment in some situations."
"The solution needs to adjust its pricing models. With the way they are structured, everything is very disparate and sold separately, and, depending on the solution, it can get quite pricey."
"Fortinet FortiOS can improve the monitoring function, it could be more accurate, easy to use, and understandable."
"FortiOS's interface and monitoring could be improved."
Cisco IOS Security is ranked 22nd in Firewalls with 47 reviews while Fortinet FortiOS is ranked 15th in Firewalls with 73 reviews. Cisco IOS Security is rated 8.0, while Fortinet FortiOS is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Cisco IOS Security writes "User-friendly and excels in documentation, making it easier to resolve issues". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Fortinet FortiOS writes "Provides effective filtering features, good stability but initial setup is moderately challenging". Cisco IOS Security is most compared with Cisco Secure Firewall, Meraki MX, Netgate pfSense, OPNsense and Palo Alto Networks URL Filtering with PAN-DB, whereas Fortinet FortiOS is most compared with Fortinet FortiManager, Fortinet FortiWeb, Fortinet FortiGate-VM, Infoblox Advanced DNS Protection and Vectra AI. See our Cisco IOS Security vs. Fortinet FortiOS report.
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