Fortinet FortiGate vs. WatchGuard AuthPoint

We reviewed many different vendors product offerings, we found the Fortinet FortiGate to best fit our needs. We upgraded from a previous firewall, the migration was a fairly easy process. We were also able to consolidate multiple firewalls into one unit using vdoms. It's been helpful to have one pain of glass, one support contract and easy to work with support. These firewalls are feature rich which is great, but the support contracts are expensive.

Incentivized

While I cannot speak of the functionalities that we do not use, the 2nd factor authentication has been great. It's actually secure, I can control it all remotely, users don't mind the extra step, and management feels more at ease knowing that we have full access control. The VPN for remote connections is fast and stable, it stays connected during network oddities and has plenty of bandwidth.

Incentivized

• It is the most reliable NGFW that we have ever been touch with it.
• You can easily upgrade the firewall cluster firmware without user attention!!!
• User IDentity based feature is fantastic and intrusion prevention just works with least false-positive possible.
• Very reachfull and intuitive GUI, just love it

Incentivized

• Works well with the free Authpoint client and the OpenVPN clinet.
• Token management is simple and hosted completely in the cloud to reduce overall complexity
• Setup was simple and and staighforward
• Suppports several authentication methods we have used both RADIUS and SAML effectively, but ADFS, IDP, RDWeb, and RESTful API, and other custom apps are supported.
• Geofencing for RDP has been very useful as it is independant of our firewall geofencing. This is quite useful for organizations like us who do not Geofence at at the firewall level so as to provide global access to resources on the DMZ.

Incentivized

• When we switched to Fortinet Fortigate, it took some time getting used to and become familiar with the new interface. Being used to strictly command-line interfaces, a full GUI-based firewall was something brand new. Careful planning had to be done when creating rules to ensure we didn't miss anything. However, once we got used to the new GUI interface, going from one Fortinet product to another was simple, as Fortinet used the same interface for all of its devices.

Incentivized

• Integration with on-premise AD is not working, even after speaking with the support team, it could not get resolved. There is no better documentation on this topic as well
• Integration with Azure AD is not supported without the presence of on-prem AD
• Logs information is not precious, it provides a generic code in some cases, making it harder to troubleshoot.
• The Watchguard AuthPoint App in AppStore has some issues, after it's activated there is no approval request being sent to the phone, and there is no way to troubleshoot this, the only way to make it work is by uninstalling the app and reinstalling it again.

Incentivized

Fortinet's products have kept improving with new software releases and they continue to deliver great value. Their support is also very good. I believe that as a small enterprise, their products have given us competitive advantage delivering features and functionality that enable us to innovate and do things better. They also continue to be a leader in the markets they serve.

Incentivized

We are very happy with Authpoint and see no reason to make any change to it. If only there was a policy to set minimum password strength requirements and to force users change their password every xx days, then it would be a 10!!!

Incentivized

The user interface shared among many simultaneous users is very easy to get around. With shared favorites among users, most tasks are easily bookmarked and can quickly be found and edited. Their strategy for web filter integration is easy to understand and manage as well. With some general direction, setup and maintenance were easy to do and easy to teach others in the organization to do as well.

Incentivized

After initial setup, it practically runs itself. Onboarding new users is fast and easy as it should be. The AuthPoint mobile app is small and simple to use. The only reason I do not give it a 10 is that I frequently get complaints from end users that the AuthPoint app is "constantly downloading". In fact, it's not downloading anything and that what the users are seeing in the app is a timer for the 6-digit code that changes every minute.

Incentivized

We had didn't any hardware failures at our two main office locations and upgraded our units last year after using them for about 5-6 years

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Has rarely been unable to use; if that were the case, it was operator error

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Good performance and really good integration. We have integration with Microsoft AD.

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No apparent problem besides a couple of times that systems weren't working

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We live in Turkey. Fortinet's Turkey office [dealt] constantly with us in our every problem or our experience. In addition, global support teams also supported every ticket we opened in every problem we encountered. They support innovative approaches and evaluate and offer solutions. In this context, they were very supportive of the problems we encountered in previous versions.

WatchGuard support is always quick and reliable. They have urgency levels that you are able to select when creating your support ticket, and they respond in accordance to the severity that you have set. I have never had an issue with getting someone on the phone in the same business day, even for very low priority issues.

Incentivized

I received it a couple years afters use it and it was just to confirm my knowledge about the tool.

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It was an Onsite demo at the ditributor with the benefits of Watchguard Authpoint. Was very nice to see the abilities of the product. This Demo was a few years back, since then Authpoint changed allot. It is very nice for partners that you can get this demo without any aditional cost.

Incentivized

We use the online training for all our employees. There are both sales and technical trainings available and there even is a technical certification. You can use this for the Watchguard Partner Program which can give you aditional benefits. Every now and then you have a webinar that discusses multiple Watchguard products.

Incentivized

Make sure that you have the most current version of FortiOS. Make sure all Fortigates are on the same version

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the first time it takes more effort. It is helpful to already understand how each authentication type works. Then it's much easier to understand the MFA solution that you implement. It is useful to check the release notes from time to time and update the key parts of the Watchguard Authpoint. Authpoint Gateway, Logon App, RDWeb... Also, it's useful to set up notifications when something goes wrong or sometimes check the statistics of how many requests are being approved/denied, etc.

Incentivized

One of the biggest advantages over competitors that Fortinet FortiGate leverages well is its remote virtual private networks options. Licensing is included with Fortinet FortiGate units at no extra cost. We find that the telemetry is easier to compile and most importantly communicate with non technical members of staff. The Fortinet FortiGate unit is also extremely stable for long periods of time without showing signs of needing a reboot.

Incentivized

WatchGuard AuthPoint is easier to manage on a company-wide scale than Google Authenticator. We do use AuthPoint in conjunction with the Microsoft Authenticator but for different services. WatchGuard also has other features available, like dark web monitoring and device management, should we decide to move further services over to WatchGuard, with Google Authenticator does not have

Incentivized

My environments are pretty small (less than 100 users per location) so no issues here.

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We are a medium-sized company. We don't need rapid scaling.

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• SD-WAN : Can't stress it further that we are very happy with this functionality and outcomes in the org. We have multiple WAN and MPLS links and traffic switching becomes an important in order to utilize the best performing line.
• QoS : We use QoS for almost all internet traffic, be it Web browsing by users, IOT segment, Application based traffic policy and VIP and normal user based bandwidth allocation.
• SSL and IPSec VPN, both features are fully used to it absolute capacity. IPSec tunnels with multiple sister companies across globe.

• We currently have 300 users on Authpoint, and most of them use insecure passwords. Authpoint gives us peace of mind that we don't have to police individual employee passwords.
• In line with the comment above, with so many people in our organization using insecure passwords, I'm sure that Authpoint has already saved us from many potential security breaches.
• Security breaches can cost a lot of money. Preventing them saves the company money and helps to achieve our bottom line.

Incentivized