You aren't required to license a Fortigate to use it and without a license it functions as a Firewall/Router/VPN-Router like this does

This is a really nice firewall/router

We bought three of these for a deployment where a more robust firewall was needed, and we initially could not get them working with a simple configuration

I didn't have very complex firewall, routing or NAT/port forwarding rules so that could be the reason, but I was able to use the GUI to config everything just like the Cisco.