We performed a comparison between Cisco Web Security Appliance and Zscaler Internet Access based on real PeerSpot user reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Zscaler Internet Access is the preferred choice when compared to Cisco Web Security Appliance due to its advanced features such as cloud-native proxy architecture, cloud browser isolation, and advanced threat protection. Users found it easy to set up and configure, with a stable and scalable performance. While pricing, reporting functionality, and technical support can be improved, users consider Zscaler Internet Access as a reliable and cost-effective solution for remote users with a strong return on investment.
"The protection offered by the product is the most valuable feature. It detects vulnerabilities or traps on our users' phones and then prompts them to clean up their devices. Tools we used previously would only discover, which required us to gather information on the backend, so Lookout is a welcome upgrade."
"The solution is stable."
"The most valuable features are the antivirus as a whole, the anti-malware, and all of the protection features that scan our enterprise devices."
"On the outside, the main differentiation is because Lookout ingest. They have ingested basically all of the apps for the last ten years and all the versions of all the apps, and we have that in a corporate database that allows us to do very large-scale machine learning and analysis on that data set. That's not something that any of the competitors really have the capability to do because they don't have access to the data set. A lot of the apps you can no longer get them because that version of the app is five or six years old, and it just doesn't exist anywhere anymore, except within our infrastructure. So, the ability to have that very rich dataset and learn from that dataset is a real differentiator."
"The setup was very easy and straightforward."
"Since working with the tool, we have not found any threats in our organization."
"The tool has good Umbrella DNS security."
"The product is stable."
"Cisco regularly upgrades features for the customer's security requirements."
"The solution provides good web reputation and anti-malware protection."
"The technical support is good. It is reactive and the documentation is very specific and very useful."
"The tool has good Umbrella DNS security."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to drop packets."
"The initial setup was straightforward. The biggest thing for us was to build our own policies. The deployment itself was only a few hours."
"The users are at different locations, and Zscaler helps us to put the organization's central security controls on these roaming users."
"There is no lag in service when accessing the internet."
"The policies are very intuitive and easy to configure, with very little possibility of messing things up."
"Tech support is good."
"The protection is most valuable."
"We enjoy all of the proxy capabilities and the capability to integrate into the SIEM/SOC solution."
"The stability depends on the service from where you access it. Because sometimes, the place you are in, you have Gateway. You don't have Gateway. The gateway is overutilized. At the end, you need to go through their gateways. And this is the key point here. You have a tracking point. If it's not well orchestrated, and it scales up as you add more to the existing team, you will suffer"
"Lookout was moving into the SSE space. And so their work on SecureWeb Gateway and SD-WAN is still sort of evolving."
"From the analysis that we've done, they do seem to be maybe a step behind in trying to enter the market with a new solution. But when they do pick up, they do come out with some good products."
"We just submitted an enhancement request reflecting the main area we want to see improvement in; the APIs. Currently, we're able to build dashboards, but it's somewhat backward because we use our MDM API to create them. Lookout should provide API to customers so we can query our data and use it in our cloud, and this is the only outstanding area for improvement with the product right now."
"The solution is priced high."
"There are certain shortcomings related to the product's management capabilities, where improvements are required. The solution needs to provide better management of the category of web pages."
"The FTD 21 model's Firepower Threat Defense does not have the multi-instance feature for the virtualization with the physical equipment."
"The tool needs to provide logs. They need to improve firewall threat defense."
"If a user wants to use it for other devices like mobile or smartphones, this product isn't so reliable."
"Customer support is good but could be improved."
"WSA is lacking firewall features."
"The solution could improve the graphical user interface. It is not up to the regular standard of what we would expect from Cisco. Additionally, they need to improve the categorization when blocking in the settings. The CLI could have a better view than the graphical user interface but I did not investigate further."
"Another thing that I would like to see is if Zscaler could have a separate product for direct access. I looked at a private access solution, but I understand there's a separate product that isn't integrated with this."
"They block Zscaler IPs when the traffic origin is from Zscaler IPs. They've been blocked by certain government organizations so the end users are not able to visit those websites unless we ask them to unblock those IP. This is a bit problematic."
"They should enhance the audit reporting feature."
"I would like to see the ability to choose a pool of IPs for my company, set up rules based on them, and know that those IPs are not used by other companies."
"Zscaler Internet Access can improve by adding traffic filtering based on the DNS."
"One thing that they could improve is the ability to import rules from other platforms."
"Cloud App’s database should be improved."
"Zscaler Internet Access could improve by adding a VPN feature."
Cisco Web Security Appliance is ranked 9th in Secure Web Gateways (SWG) with 29 reviews while Zscaler Internet Access is ranked 2nd in Secure Web Gateways (SWG) with 46 reviews. Cisco Web Security Appliance is rated 7.8, while Zscaler Internet Access is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Cisco Web Security Appliance writes "Ensures security for remote workers". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Zscaler Internet Access writes "Provides integrated CASB and file sandboxing but could be less expensive ". Cisco Web Security Appliance is most compared with Cisco Umbrella, Fortinet FortiProxy, Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway, Netskope Next Gen Secure Web Gateway and Skyhigh Security, whereas Zscaler Internet Access is most compared with Cisco Umbrella, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, Netskope , Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks and FortiSASE . See our Cisco Web Security Appliance vs. Zscaler Internet Access report.
See our list of best Secure Web Gateways (SWG) vendors.
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