# Fortinet vs CheckPoint vs WatchGuard



## Ricer (Oct 4, 2013)

I'm looking at NGFW's, and think I want to make the jump to UTM.

Of course my research has led me to Fortinet, CheckPoint and WatchGuard, and, on paper, I'm getting the feeling that they're all pretty similar.

I have about 85 DHCP users, not including servers and a lab, spread across 3 NA offices (with private WAN and VLAN). I'm very interested in remote management, in particular, for myself. But in terms of actual FW features, I'm looking for AV and Malware protection, VPN, content filtering, spam-blocking, and load-balancing if I can get it.

I know that getting the right box to fit my needs is one thing. But, to me, that's more of a model thing. I'm just starting out at the moment, and it's too early to dive that deep just yet.

I've been burned by a few point solutions in the past (particularly with regard to remote management), so I want to get a REAL WORLD sense of whether there are truly any advantages of one vendor over the other. Support? Timely releases? Those little niggles that don't show up on paper so you don't know about them until the box is in the rack kind of things (like, yes, you can manage the firewall remotely, but you have to bounce it every time you change a config). Anything that should steer me toward one or the other in an OVERALL sense, rather than specifics about individual models.

Anybody have any insight, good or bad, for any of the three vendors mentioned above... or any others you think are stellar.

TIA!
Greg


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## Wand3r3r (Sep 17, 2010)

Welcome to TSF!

Old IT saying: do it in hardware before you do it in software.

In other words look for hardware appliances like Sonicwall for firewall/load balancing. Those mentioned softwares require hardware for them to run on. Spam/antivirus are subscriptions for sonicwalls so they are constantly updated.


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