FortiGate or WatchGuard: which firewall should an SMB choose?
We deploy both. An honest comparison of FortiGate and WatchGuard Firebox for an SMB: features, administration, MFA, SD-WAN, licensing and three-year cost.
19 September 2026 · 2 min read · ALLSAFE SOLUTIONS
As a partner of both vendors, we have the luxury of no religion. Here is how we choose between FortiGate and WatchGuard Firebox for a client, criterion by criterion.
Security: a draw for an SMB
Both offer a complete next-generation firewall: application inspection, IPS, stream antivirus, web and DNS filtering, sandboxing, SSL inspection. In independent tests, both block the overwhelming majority of threats an SMB meets. The choice is not decided here.
Administration: WatchGuard is simpler
WatchGuard Cloud centralises firewall, MFA, WiFi and endpoints in a readable console designed for small teams. FortiOS is deeper, more granular, and demands more skill. For an SMB without an internal network administrator, WatchGuard saves time; for an IT team that wants to control everything, FortiGate offers more.
MFA: advantage WatchGuard
AuthPoint is one of the most mature MFA products on the market, deployable in days on VPN, Windows, Microsoft 365 and SaaS applications. Fortinet offers FortiToken, effective but less elegant for uses beyond the firewall.
SD-WAN and multi-site: advantage Fortinet
To interconnect sites with several carrier links, FortiGate is the reference: built-in SD-WAN, fine failover, voice prioritisation. WatchGuard does SD-WAN, but with less depth.
Ecosystem: Fortinet is broader
FortiSwitch switches, FortiAP access points, FortiClient: Fortinet covers the whole network from the firewall. WatchGuard also offers switches and WiFi, with a smaller catalogue.
Licensing and three-year cost
Both work as an appliance plus an annual security services subscription. At equivalent scope, differences are small. What costs money is an undersized model: SSL inspection divides usable throughput by two or three. We size on inspected throughput, never on the datasheet.
Our recommendation in one sentence
A single-site SMB without a network team: WatchGuard. A multi-site, industrial or network-demanding organisation: FortiGate. In both cases, a firewall is only as good as its operation: rules reviewed, firmware current, logs read.
See our Fortinet partner and WatchGuard partner pages.
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