TrustRadius: an HG Insights company

AudioCodes SD-WAN vs. Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN vs. Fortinet FortiGate

Save this comparison

Save this comparison

Add Product

Recommended Comparisons

    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    AudioCodes SD-WAN

    N/AN/AThe AudioCodes SD-WAN solution is a VoIP enabled edge Universal Customer Premises Equipment (uCPE) appliance based on the AudioCodes Mediant 800 with an integrated Intel server module that can host SD-WAN application-aware routing algorithms. These algorithms evaluate end-to-end path performance across available underlying services and select optimal paths to deliver application data within service level agreements (SLA).N/A

    Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN

    Score8.7 out of 10
    N/ACisco Catalyst SD-WAN is a software-defined wide area network solution designed to simplify and optimize enterprise network connectivity in complex digital landscapes. It enables organizations to connect any user to any application, whether on-premises, in data centers, or across multiple clouds, with integrated capabilities for multicloud support, security, predictive automation, and enhanced network visibility—all built on a Secure Access Service Edge (SASE)-enabled…N/A

    FortiGate

    Score8.5 out of 10
    N/AFortiNet FortiGate is a firewall option with high integrability. It offers a variety of deployment options and next-gen firewall capabilities, including integration with IaaS cloud platforms and public cloud environments.N/A
    Pricing
    AudioCodes SD-WANCisco Catalyst SD-WANFortiGate
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    AudioCodes SD-WANCisco Catalyst SD-WANFortiGate
    Free Trial
    NoNoYes
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details——FortiGate pricing starts at $250 for home office use, up to $300,000 for large enterprise appliances. Must contact sales team for pricing.
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    AudioCodes SD-WANCisco Catalyst SD-WANFortiGate
    Considered Multiple Products
    AudioCodes
    No answer on this topic
    Cisco
    Chose Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN
    Most of the Cisco SD-WAN capabilities were better than FortiGate's, especially the AAR
    Incentivized
    Chose Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN
    Meraki SD-WAN is overall simpler to deploy and manage, but don't have the features like multi-tenancy as in Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN.
    Incentivized
    Chose Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN
    Nokia was very good for a large scale deployment. Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN was better for a small scale deployment (cost less). The product have similar features. The differentiator was at the cost level.
    Incentivized
    Chose Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN
    Still reviewing
    Incentivized
    Chose Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN
    Much more centralized management abilities
    Incentivized
    Chose Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN
    All the products are providing similar functions in terms of SDWAN perspective. Furthermore, according to their origination and expertise they differ as follows: Cisco is strong on routing and switching domain, Fortinet is strong on security domain. According to customer needs …
    Incentivized
    Chose Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN
    Unlike Cisco SD-WAN, Fortinet does not perform well to prioritize our business applications. Even though the Fortinet solution is cheaper, when it comes to monitoring and logging you need to pay extra. Fortinet web filtering is not very efficient and lacks some features, even …
    Incentivized
    Chose Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN
    Costs/functionallity
    Incentivized
    Fortinet
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    No answers on this topic
    96%
    Would buy again
    133 Answers
    100%
    Would buy again
    49 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    No answers on this topic
    94%
    Delivers good value for the price
    116 Answers
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    48 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    No answers on this topic
    97%
    Happy with the feature set
    135 Answers
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    49 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    No answers on this topic
    91%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    93 Answers
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    44 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    No answers on this topic
    87%
    Implementation went as expected
    109 Answers
    98%
    Implementation went as expected
    47 Answers
    Features
    AudioCodes SD-WANCisco Catalyst SD-WANFortiGate
    Firewall
    Comparison of Firewall features of AudioCodes SD-WAN and Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN and Fortinet FortiGate
    Feature
    AudioCodes SD-WAN
    -
    Ratings
    Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN
    -
    Ratings
    Fortinet FortiGate
    8.7
    53 Ratings
    1% above category average
    Identification Technologies00 Ratings00 Ratings8.951 Ratings
    Visualization Tools00 Ratings00 Ratings8.351 Ratings
    Content Inspection00 Ratings00 Ratings8.852 Ratings
    Policy-based Controls00 Ratings00 Ratings8.953 Ratings
    Active Directory and LDAP00 Ratings00 Ratings8.750 Ratings
    Firewall Management Console00 Ratings00 Ratings7.752 Ratings
    Reporting and Logging00 Ratings00 Ratings8.353 Ratings
    VPN00 Ratings00 Ratings9.152 Ratings
    High Availability00 Ratings00 Ratings9.348 Ratings
    Stateful Inspection00 Ratings00 Ratings9.251 Ratings
    Proxy Server00 Ratings00 Ratings8.539 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    AudioCodes SD-WANCisco Catalyst SD-WANFortiGate
    Small Businesses
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    SonicWall NSA Series
    Score8.3 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    Cisco Meraki SD-WAN
    Score8.6 out of 10
    Cisco Meraki SD-WAN
    Score8.6 out of 10
    Barracuda CloudGen Firewall
    Score9.6 out of 10
    Enterprises
    Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN
    Score8.7 out of 10
    VMware SD-WAN
    Score7.9 out of 10
    Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software
    Score9 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    AudioCodes SD-WANCisco Catalyst SD-WANFortiGate
    Likelihood to Recommend
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.7
    (150 ratings)
    8.7
    (79 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.9
    (4 ratings)
    7.0
    (5 ratings)
    Usability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.7
    (67 ratings)
    8.7
    (21 ratings)
    Availability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    8.0
    (3 ratings)
    Performance
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    9.0
    (2 ratings)
    Support Rating
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.3
    (15 ratings)
    9.0
    (27 ratings)
    In-Person Training
    -
    (0 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    -
    (0 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    5.0
    (5 ratings)
    Configurability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    7.0
    (2 ratings)
    Contract Terms and Pricing Model
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    -
    (0 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    7.0
    (2 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    7.0
    (3 ratings)
    Vendor post-sale
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    8.0
    (2 ratings)
    Vendor pre-sale
    -
    (0 ratings)
    7.0
    (1 ratings)
    8.0
    (2 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    AudioCodes SD-WANCisco Catalyst SD-WANFortiGate
    Likelihood to Recommend
    AudioCodes
    No answers on this topic
    Cisco
    It's great for connectivity. I think if you're looking at. There's a lot of players out there that do SD- WAN, you can do hosted solutions, you can do your own. If you're looking to do it yourself, I think this product works out well. I do know it's hosted elsewhere by some other companies, but for us, we want the control and we don't have a huge amount of sites, so being able to control that's important and the data that we can get out of the product, we can see just seeing the application experience through Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN, really gives us good information.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Fortinet
    Fortinet FortiGate addressed an immediate security issue we had a few years ago. The device gave us a much clearer picture of the activities on our network and also more importantly, increased our awareness of threats from the internet as a whole. Fortinet FortiGate helps us to mitigate these threats with regular signature updates from Fortiguard labs, identifying certain characteristics which, once recognised by Fortinet FortiGate, can be harnessed to deploy powerful 'playbooks'.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Pros
    AudioCodes
    No answers on this topic
    Cisco
    • We are able to use a multiple different circuits to go into the cloud, so we are not relying on just one particular private wireless. We're relying on wine circuits, ethernet, ethernet out. So it provides us that flexibility where we didn't have that before. Provides security that is very robust and flexible and scalable and it provides us with, the biggest thing is redundancy, where we have backup. For example, we have a Starlink for nuclear power plants. If our main circuits go down, we have that. And without Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN it would be very hard to actually achieve, to accomplish true redundancy. So we're happy with Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN in that regard.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Fortinet
    • SD-WAN - Load balancing of Internet traffic is a USP of Fortigate and makes it stand tall in the competition. Be it 3 or more Internet Links, multiple Subnets/segments of users to distribute and bandwidth load balancing for links and users. SLA based monitoring of Internet Links / MPLS links, makes it even better to choose the links on the basis of performance (Latency, packet loss, Jitter etc).
    • SSL VPN configuration - As we all have WFH force (to some extend or all employee) during Covid-19, it is impossible to plan BCP without having a SSL VPN. In Fortigate, the SSL VPN configuration is very easy with the help of wizard. The deep CLI-level debugging is also very helpful in troubleshooting. Type of tunnel can be easily configured - Full Tunnel or Split Tunnel for SSL.
    • Explicit Proxy - This is also a great feature to shape and re-route the traffic, configuring the Proxy on the Firewall itself. We are using this feature in Pilot for now, and planned to rollout in few weeks looking at the success rate of the POC.
    Read full review
    Cons
    AudioCodes
    No answers on this topic
    Cisco
    • I will say the way we use it now, and I think what happened was the way it was deployed, it was fine, but unfortunately over the course of the years we've gotten a little out of hand with our device templates and feature templates. I think if there's any form of feedback that I would give to Cisco is how do we find ways to improve the environment as it stands so we get to a certain point with the environment and then we don't know how to undo it or fix it or optimize the environment. Because right now we're in a position where we're playing a lot of catch up and clean up and if there was a way or some tool or feature that we can take advantage of that would allow us to optimize that environment where we will kind of corner ourselves into a lot of problems in the future. There's some feature or something that we could take advantage of that will allow us to optimize that environment and not let it get out of control pretty easily. That would be my suggestion.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Fortinet
    • Documentation is missing a great deal of detail and assumes the customer and just guess and fill in the blanks themselves
    • Fortinet has lots and lots of video guides on topics that only a small percentage of customers would ever need
    • The documentation and video guides do not get updated so most is only relevant to older software versions
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    AudioCodes
    No answers on this topic
    Cisco
    I would rate SD-WAN highly because it has significantly improved network performance, reliability, and cost-efficiency for my organization. Its ability to optimize traffic dynamically, enhance security, and simplify management across multiple locations has been invaluable. With SD-WAN, we’ve reduced dependency on costly MPLS, improved cloud application performance, and gained greater control over our network infrastructure.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Fortinet
    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
    Read full review
    Usability
    AudioCodes
    No answers on this topic
    Cisco
    The niche configurations are given equal focus as the standard use cases, which can make onboarding difficult in the beginning (ie why am I not using an entire tab of the portal), but aside from that part, the dashboard is relatively easy to navigate and apply the configuration. The metrics and analytics available are also nice to have in a single pane.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Fortinet
    The firewall runs very well, firmware updates are fairly quick but you must follow the upgrade path. Neglecting this step will cause a lot of pain. If you decide to go with Fortinet FortiGate switches and/or access points, they can be managed within the firewall which is great. We're also using the FortiAnalyzer which easily plugs into the firewall for any reporting you may require.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Reliability and Availability
    AudioCodes
    No answers on this topic
    Cisco
    I think if we could afford, we could have HA inplace but we planned out outage and workaround to avoid any outages.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Fortinet
    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
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Performance
    AudioCodes
    No answers on this topic
    Cisco
    It does slow down over the period but it's same with other product. you need to clear/reboot services.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Fortinet
    Good performance and really good integration. We have integration with Microsoft AD.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Support Rating
    AudioCodes
    No answers on this topic
    Cisco
    Al ser soluciones integradas del portafolio de soluciones de Cisco, el soporte es transversal a cada uno de los componentes implementados, teniendo el cliente la capacidad de resolver sus inconvenientes bajo una misma infraestructura que está totalmente homologada, satisfacciendo de esta manera, las necesidades del cliente asi como permitiendo, que este se concentre en su negocio. Since the Cisco SD-WAN tools are a part of Cisco’s broader portfolio of solutions, support cross-cuts to each of our deployed components, with our company as the customer having the ability to solve our problems through the same, approved infrastructure. Their support team easily satisfies the customer’s needs so that they continue to focus on business functions.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Fortinet
    The Support team at Fortinet is excellent. They can not only help you configure the device for what you are trying to do, they offer suggestions on improving rules, and troubleshooting issues. Their response time is fast, ensuring you are up and running immediately with no questions asked. We had a hard drive failure in one of our Fortinet Fortigate appliances. The tech answered immediately, and started rebuilding the drive after some preliminary investigations. After rebuilding, there were still errors and issues, so they dispatched a brand new Fortinet Fortigate appliance. The tech then backed up the configurations for when the new device came in, which showed up in a few hours. A restore of the configuration took less than a minute, and there were no more errors or issues.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    In-Person Training
    AudioCodes
    No answers on this topic
    Cisco
    No answers on this topic
    Fortinet
    I received it a couple years afters use it and it was just to confirm my knowledge about the tool.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Implementation Rating
    AudioCodes
    No answers on this topic
    Cisco
    I was late to participate but my team was very happy with the outcome.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Fortinet
    Make sure that you have the most current version of FortiOS. Make sure all Fortigates are on the same version
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Alternatives Considered
    AudioCodes
    No answers on this topic
    Cisco
    We've used the old Cisco SD-WAN, which no longer exists. It was a lot more complex to configure what is now called Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN. So they've definitely come a long way in that it is a lot less complicated to set up and template based.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Fortinet
    [Fortinet] FortiGate is not only cost effective but it gives the comprehensive security against the APT attacks and gives the complete traffic visibility and granular control. You can easily create the VDOMs (Virtual firewall) within a Fortigate firewall and customize the dashboard as per your requirement if you have multiple VDOMs within a single firewall.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Contract Terms and Pricing Model
    AudioCodes
    No answers on this topic
    Cisco
    I didn't take part of this decision but it always multiyear contract get best discount.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Fortinet
    No changes needed to terms and conditions.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Scalability
    AudioCodes
    No answers on this topic
    Cisco
    Really strength in scalability. Only thigs it's depends on some prototype Cisco product which you can't work with other Cisco products.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Fortinet
    My environments are pretty small (less than 100 users per location) so no issues here.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Return on Investment
    AudioCodes
    No answers on this topic
    Cisco
    • Our branch offices can connect to our enterprise network and the internet quickly and securely, which has helped to increase productivity and reduce downtime.
    • We have been able to reduce our dependence on expensive MPLS connections, and instead utilize a combination of broadband and LTE connections, which are more cost-effective
    • The centralized location improves network visibility and troubleshooting process
    Read full review
    Fortinet
    • The pricing given to us for our firewall was well within what we were already spending for other vendors solutions and had the added value of eliminating a separate expense for a dedicated web filtering appliance.
    • We have also adopted Fortinet's security fabric approach and thus changed vendors for our switch and AP devices. These devices have come at reduced prices as compared to another previous vendor we were using, particularly in relation to ongoing annual maintenance costs.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots