Cisco offers the Meraki brand of Ethernet switches.
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FortiGate
Score 8.6 out of 10
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FortiNet 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.
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Pricing
Cisco Meraki MS
Fortinet FortiGate
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Cisco Meraki MS
FortiGate
Free Trial
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Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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FortiGate pricing starts at $250 for home office use, up to $300,000 for large enterprise appliances.
Must contact sales team for pricing.
Meraki MS provides the sweet spot between manageability and functionality, though not at a significantly lower cost. Desktop support engineers can manage it day-to-day and sometimes that is the most important factor, especially in our case, as a layer 2 switching solution that …
we use both classic Cisco switches and Cisco Meraki MS switches but for differents infrastructures and different customers. Cisco Meraki switches are clearly better for large and fast deployments on non-complex environments and are very easy to maintain and update. There is …
We decided to go with Cisco Meraki Switches, due to the cloud management ability, we wanted a solution that was quick and easy to install that was easily managed from thousands of miles away, that was resilient to errors, config mistakes etc.
I have seen other "cloud-managed" solutions and none come close to the Meraki MS. The ease of setup, and management, especially with applying updates, license and support information at your fingertips is priceless.
Great for a small office or for organizations that have minimal IT resources or needs. If you need a secure, easy-to-manage, set it and forget it solution, Meraki is definitely worth a look, though I would not consider it low budget. Be careful if you need layer 3 advanced features, DHCP server functionality, etc., as these features are found in the "higher-end" models.
For FortiGate Firewall, the basic functionality and requirement is met easily as Fortigate is among market leaders in NGFW. There are some extra points that inclined us to use Fortigate as our main Firewall. [Fortinet]Fortigate has a very well refined and functional SD-WAN solution when it comes to load balancing for normal Internet Traffic. 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 - 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. Though, I think Fortigate is one of the best options for small and mid-sized organizations, there are some areas for improvement. First, the CLI interface is very hard to adapt as the commands and directory hierarchy is very different for common syntax and standards.
Meraki MS switches are wonderful at allowing a network admin to configure a VPN mesh network without having to have highly specialized knowledge. Unlike Cisco switches, there is no CLI, there is only a GUI, and Meraki support helps you set it up as you add nodes to your network.
Meraki MS switches are easy to deploy. Full stop.
They can work with any firewall or ASA but I would strongly recommend using the Meraki MX security appliance if you are going to use Meraki MS switches because they were made to work together.
They easily stack. It's all done for you in the Meraki cloud control panel.
They will get an address from your admin VLAN's DHCP scope and keep it. Even if you unplug it and move it, you will not have to worry about addressing it.
The GUI is online and you can reach it from anywhere, so as long as you have the credentials, you can manage the network from any device that has a browser.
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.
Being on the cloud its very easy to manage. We have layer 7 visibility and Cisco has introduced stackable MX switches which is even better! The Meraki portal can be accessed via SSO which is important to my organization (although it was a bit difficult to get that implemented initially!)
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.
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.
Cisco support for the Meraki products is great. I have a dedicated representative who I can reach out to at any time. They offer numerous online resources and easy to follow tutorials to help the most novice user feel like a pro. When I need support they were ready and quickly helped me solve my problems.
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.
I think that Meraki stacks up well against the competition. I have not found a situation where it does not meet the needs from speed to security. I think that this concept of how it is designed will become a trend of the next few years and the competition has something to learn.
[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.
I give Cisco Meraki gear a near 100% rating for any business in the small to medium-sized business scenario. Only large organizations have certain business needs that Meraki gear may or may not provide the 99.9% uptime IT professionals and management would demand. Cisco Meraki gear is very scalable as an organization grows and makes it easy to scale up and scale out as needed.
One critical business objective was a worry-free network. This is it!
Another business objective was to be able to manage my entire network from a single interface. Meraki delivers again! Not having to be in the building to monitor, manage and configure networking equipment is worth the weight of these devices in gold.
I wanted to be able to see everything that was happening on my network. Meraki enables that. I can see every device, what each is doing, set alerts for when individual ports go down or the device that is attached stops sending packets, etc. The visibility into my network's performance and security is unprecedented. I never knew what I was missing and I do not want to go back!
Fortigates have an interesting bundle model for support and subscription services that make it an attractive option to deploy Firewall, IDS, Ant-virus, anti-SPAM in a single device. The cost of the bundle is pretty much what you pay for the device, not requiring huge expenditures on it's time to renew the hardware.
