Every products has its feature or characteristic. I always say to customers, that feature is really feature when it solves some problems or adds new capabilities of IT infrastructure required by business. So, that’s why in my opinion we cannot say which one is the best, it depends on a lot of factors.
Lets consider, as example, SD-WAN from Cisco and Fortinet. When comparing strictly only SD-WAN capabilities, no questions, Cisco beats Fortinet. Cisco SD-WAN is much more feature rich, it is quite easy to build complex topologies, better scalability. Fortinet just added load balancing capabilities to their firewall and provisioning scripts to FortiManager which build SD-WAN from bricks like BGP, IPsec, balancing methods, etc.
When simple hub and spoke topology is not enough, Cisco is better solution. Of course, Fortinet supports it as well, but management and provisioning will be more complex. On the other hand, Fortinet with average SD-WAN, has other capabilities, like for example access layers management (access points, switches) from the same FortiManager like SD-WAN. Probably, for retails companies, where simple hub and spoke is enough, Fortinet will be better cause of other capabilities around SD-WAN. Usually, such infrastructure do not need advanced SD-WAN features, but other capabilities like simple managment of whole distributed infrastructure counts.
As conclusion, in my opinion for Customer is better to relay on trusted advisor, system integrator. Competent system integrator should be familiar with products on the market, their capabilities and how it fits into specific needs. Vendors always claim that their solutions is the best, always and everywhere.
Definitely, companies shouldn’t relay on Gartner Magic Quadrant, it’s rather marketing staff than technical capabilities of solutions or other “independent” institutions like Miercom. To answer if that specific solution is right for my Company, approach is the only one – do Proof Of Concept.