We performed a comparison between Fortinet Fortigate and Palo Alto Networks Wildfire based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Based on the parameters we compared, Fortinet Fortigate is the more popular solution because of its ease of deployment combined with its solid set of features, excellent service and support ratings, and the fact that it is more affordable than Palo Alto Networks Wildfire.
"The technical support is great."
"This version is stable. I don't have any issues with this solution, in our environment, it works well."
"The dashboard I have found the most valuable in Fortinet FortiGate."
"The scalability of Fortinet FortiGate is good."
"The base firewall features are quite valuable to us."
"The initial installation is very straightforward."
"The web filtering feature and the intrusion protection system are the most valuable. It is a resilient appliance. I never had an issue with it in terms of any security breaches."
"Some of the valuable features are the firewall, IPS, web filter, and gateway capabilities. Additionally, it is easy to use and flexible."
"The most valuable feature of Palo Alto Networks WildFire is its ability to adapt to environments and its robustness."
"The graphic user interface of Palo Alto is good and it's easy to configure."
"Detailed reporting on analysis of content. The inspections are easily applied to security policy profiles and profile groups, and may be assigned on a per-rule basis."
"I love the idea of Palo Alto Networks WildFire. It's more geared toward preventing malware. If someone's laptop or phone is malware-infected, the tool prevents it from uploading valuable corporate data outside the corporate network. That's what I love about Palo Alto Networks WildFire. It stops malware in its tracks."
"They have many different options with Palo Alto WildFire and the set-up is quick. If you have all the details in hand, it does not take more than 15 minutes to deploy a firewall."
"It has a user-friendly interface."
"Stability is never a concern."
"High availability with active-active and active-passive modes."
"FortiGate should have a better way of detecting and managing the system memory because otherwise if the memory is too low, a system restart is required."
"We sometimes have issues with FortiGate's routing table in the latest firmware update. We had to downgrade the device because our customers complained about bugs."
"I would like to see improvements in the product's application rules."
"It needs to improve its ISP load balancing."
"Some of the web policy reports could be improved."
"They should make the rule sets more understandable for the end user. When you're trying to explain to somebody how a computer network is secured, sometimes it's difficult for an end user or customer to understand. If there was a way to make the terminology more accessible to the end user, the set up could be easier. They should translate the technical jargon to an easily relatable and understandable conversation for the end user, the customer, that would be brilliant. Particularly in an environment where the IT structure is audited regularly, there's always pressure from the auditor to up the standards and up the security and you get your USCERT's that come out and there's a warning about this and the customer will want to lock out so much and when you apply it they run into issue where they can't search the internet or print to their remote office. Of course they can't print to your remote office, they just locked it up. They should make the language more understandable for the customer. If there's a product out there that made the jargon understandable to John Q. Public, I would buy that."
"The captive portal could be improved."
"They've become quite expensive."
"The product's false positive logs could be more user-friendly to understand. They could provide examples of precious cases to learn."
"The size of Palo Alto's cloud is big but it could be easier to use from a product management perspective."
"Palo Alto Networks WildFire should be more real-time in nature. The signature updates should happen in a minute or less than a minute to be a very good feature for the customer."
"In terms of what I'd like to see in the next release of Palo Alto Networks WildFire, each release is based on malware that has been identified. The key problem is an average of six months from the time malware is written to the time it's discovered and a signature is created for it. The only advice that I can give is for them to shorten that timeframe. I don't know how they would do it, but if they shorten that, for example, cut it in half, they'll make themselves more famous."
"I don't think it needs to improve anything, except maybe the speed to deploy the changes."
"The price of WildFire should be reduced in order to make it more affordable for our customers."
"Palo Alto Networks WildFire could improve by adding support for manual submission of suspicious files and URLs. Additionally, it would be an advantage to add rule-based analysis. Currently, it uses only static and AI. We need to be able to analyze archive files."
"The GUI is better in 8.0, but I still feel it lacks the fast response most of us desire. Logs are much quicker."
Fortinet FortiGate is ranked 2nd in Firewalls with 306 reviews while Palo Alto Networks WildFire is ranked 3rd in Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) with 58 reviews. Fortinet FortiGate is rated 8.4, while Palo Alto Networks WildFire 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 Palo Alto Networks WildFire writes "Good technical support and provides automatic analysis that saves us time in filtering email". Fortinet FortiGate is most compared with Sophos XG, Cisco Secure Firewall, Netgate pfSense and Meraki MX, whereas Palo Alto Networks WildFire is most compared with Cisco Secure Firewall, Juniper SRX Series Firewall, Proofpoint Email Protection, Fortinet FortiSandbox and Check Point SandBlast Network.
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FortiGate has a lot going for it and I consider it to be the best, most user-friendly firewall out there. What I like the most about it is that it has an attractive web dashboard with very easy navigation tabs; It can be managed and controlled using layer two wireless access points; When compared with other firewalls, building IPsec VPN and SSL VPN is much easier; I can configure virtual networks within the same firewall; And, configuration of NAT and static routes are straightforward. I would recommend it to any organization that needs to provide VPN access for their employees.
FortiGate also has many security functions, such as application control, web filtering, IPS, antivirus, etc., that help companies protect their users. The FortiGate solution also helps optimize traffic from user to application via the hybrid WAN environment. I think what I like most about this solution is that I can combine security functions and SD-WAN, which allows me to scan traffic flow but also to protect the local application server or the user.
For me, the downsides of FortiGate are that it happens to include many bugs, and sometimes it can be a challenge to block content from a website with web filtering since web pages contain websites that consume other resources. Moreover, mobile device administration is complicated, and it does not seem to adapt to smartphone or tablet screens very well.
While it isn’t my favorite, WildFire provides the ability to block threats as they travers your network infrastructure both in retro-time and real-time. WildFire also has zero-trust and actively works to inspect traffic for malicious capabilities by forwarding a file to the WildFire cloud, even in the case that it doesn’t recognize what the file is doing. The reason why WildFire is not my first choice is because I feel that it is lacking many features and that they could improve by adding more functionality. But there doesn’t seem like there is a way to either tune or tweak the solution. If implemented correctly, though, it can be a good, robust solution to achieving great endpoint security.
Conclusion:
In my opinion, FortiGate is better than Wildfire because FortiGate meets my business needs better and has more appealing feature updates and roadmaps as well as great technical support, all of which are important to me.
What type of network is? how many users?
Fortinet products are unique in that they have specific chips to work on hardware rather than overcharging a CPU to 90%, as happens with some Sophos boxes and others.
Things in the cloud... the cloud is a name, it is software running on someone else's computer system and could be only for you or multi-tenancy. Delays and other dramas may occur.
The question as I was invited to comment :| Which is better, does not tell anything, somehow.