Cisco IOS vs. FortiOS

I've worked with several network device vendors in my 10+ years of being in the industry and my favorite continues to be Cisco IOS. Overall, Cisco IOS tends to be the most stable, the most intuitive, has the best TAC support, and has the best knowledge base articles and white papers.

Incentivized

FortiOS is a great platform for deploying multiple FortiNet products and solutions in your environment that are operated under a single management console such as FortiManager. Automation and Orchestration become a reality with its simple API and FortiOS's ability to work with 3rd party API capabilities. FortiOS makes it simple to operate Fortinet's next-generation firewall features such as intrusion detection, SD-WAN, and Identity then consolidates them under a common management interface.

Incentivized

• User friendly CLI.
• Quick fixes for critical bugs.
• Longer uptime.

Incentivized

• Automation
• Orchestration
• Common security fabric
• Easy to use API

Incentivized

• By this point, there are several "flavors" of the Cisco IOS such as XE, XR, and the standard Cisco IOS. While they are all fairly similar, there does exist syntax differences between them. It would be ideal if at some point in the future, Cisco is able to unify all of them into one standard operating system which would use the same syntax across all platforms.
• While overall Cisco does a great job of QA'ing their IOS, no matter the release, there's always some minor bugs. I think it's important that Cisco continue to pour resources into their QA team to test their software.
• While I'm very familiar with the graphical readouts of "show processes cpu history" I would love for Cisco to eventually find a more intuitive way to display this data. I can't begin to count how many times I've had to teach more entry level (and even mid level) engineers how this graph is interpreted.
• I do wish that Cisco had something similar to Juniper's "commit check" or "commit confirmed". This helps validate the changes you're about to apply, and catch errors, so that you have a better idea of the impact of the change.

Incentivized

• Upgrades are difficult to stage
• Upgrade path is complex
• Too many releases
• Latest release is usually not stable across all platforms

Incentivized

IOS is pretty intuitive as you can use the question marks to check for all the options or parameters for a specific command. Also having the tab key to complete the words is nice as you don't need type the complete command. Using also abbreviated commands with 2 or 3 letters instead of the whole Word makes it a great OS.

Incentivized

Cisco has a better presence on corporate business so it makes it easier to find engineers and technitians to support your network. Also a lot of Universities and schools use it as a reference and use it to teach and prepare students so it will be easier to recruit people with cisco preparation.

Incentivized

FortiOS was easy to learn and came with our Firewall purchase, therefore it was the logical choice. It became evident early on that the FortiOS and security fabric would make our migration quicker and easier from our current legacy platforms. Utilizing tools such as FortiConverter allowed for virtually error-free migrations.

Incentivized

• Great uptimes on proven availability/reliability.
• Longevity of these switches ensures great ROI.
• Easy to learn for new users.

Incentivized

• Fast learning curve made adoption quick
• User interface was easy to learn
• Migration from legacy platforms was smooth, with little downtime or mistakes
• Features and capabilities were easily mastered because of its intuitive UI

Incentivized