Hey everyone, new here but I've been lurking while evaluating SASE solutions for our small team. We just moved from FortiSASE to Perimeter 81.
Our main gripes with Fortinet were complexity for our size and some performance hiccups for remote support agents. Perimeter 81 seemed simpler to roll out, and the onboarding was definitely smoother.
But now I'm second-guessing a bit on the security side. FortiSASE felt like it had more granular controls, even if we didn't use them all. For those who've made a similar switch, did you feel you traded advanced security for ease of use? How do you compare the core security controls between them?
Also, any real-world gotchas on the network performance side after a switch like this? 👋
I lead infra for a 75-person SaaS shop with a globally distributed support team, and we've run both solutions in production over the last two years for secure access and network segmentation.
**Target audience and fit:** FortiSASE expects you to speak Fortinet, making it overbuilt for most SMBs. Its control depth assumes you have a dedicated security engineer. Perimeter 81 is built for lean teams who need a working Zero Trust overlay yesterday. If your team is under 500 and doesn't live in CLI, P81's fit is obvious.
**Real-world performance:** For our remote agents, FortiSASE added 90-110ms latency for users connecting to our EU region from South America, which killed VoIP calls. Switching to Perimeter 81's nearest gateway model cut that to 30-40ms. The trade-off is raw throughput: FortiSASE handled our 1 Gbps site-to-site tunnel loads easily, while we've had to tune P81's gateway sizing for similar bulk data transfers.
**Granular controls vs. operational simplicity:** You're right about the trade-off. FortiSASE's application-level policies and SD-WAN steering are more granular. In P81, we got 80% of what we needed with 20% of the config time, using their app-based rules. The missing 20%? Things like deep inspection for custom SaaS apps, which we had to solve with a separate inline proxy.
**Support and hidden costs:** Fortinet support requires a TAM and a contract to be effective. Their licensing complexity is a hidden tax. Perimeter 81 support responds in under an hour, but you're talking to a generalist. The real hidden cost for P81 is in egress fees if your usage model involves heavy, consistent data tunneling, which isn't always clear during the sales cycle.
I'd pick Perimeter 81 for any sub-500 employee company that needs a fast, maintainable Zero Trust VPN replacement. If you're running a 24/7 SOC with complex internal microservices, stick with FortiSASE. To make the call clean for your case, tell us your average concurrent tunnel count and whether you need L7 policies for internal apps, not just SaaS.
it worked on my machine
Yeah, that 80/20 rule you mentioned with config time hits the nail on the head. We found the same thing moving off a more complex platform.
The latency improvement is a huge win for real-time work. Our team uses a lot of Figma and live collaboration, so shaving off those extra milliseconds made a noticeable difference in their day.
Your point about tuning for bulk transfers is spot on. We had to nudge our gateway sizes up after the initial rollout when a data sync job overwhelmed the default setup. It wasn't a deal-breaker, but it was a "week two" surprise. Have you settled on a specific gateway size/model for those heavier workflows, or do you just scale up temporarily?
We had that same data sync surprise, but with our CRM's nightly bulk API jobs. The default gateway choked, so we ended up setting a schedule for it. We scale up the gateway size automatically for that three-hour nightly window, then it scales back down. It's a bit more hands-on, but it saves us from paying for capacity we don't need the other 21 hours.
The real trick was identifying which workflows were truly heavy. Our marketing automation platform was a silent killer, sending huge audience lists. Did you find Figma to be consistently heavy, or just during specific syncs?
Scheduled gateway scaling is smart for predictable batch workloads. The operational overhead you mention is a real concern, though. It introduces a failure mode where an unscheduled large transfer, like an ad-hoc database export for an analyst, can still saturate the smaller daytime gateway and disrupt other traffic.
Regarding identifying heavy workflows, we instrumented our egress traffic with flow logs. The key wasn't just total volume, but sustained packet-per-second rates during specific operations. We found our CI/CD pipelines, not Figma, were the consistent culprits. Figma sessions were bursty but low-packet; the heaviest load was actually from Docker layer pushes during concurrent builds.
Have you considered implementing QoS or rate-limiting policies on the gateway for those identified heavy workflows, instead of, or in addition to, scaling the entire instance?
--perf