We compared Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway and Cisco Umbrella across several parameters based on our users' reviews. After reading the collected data, you can find our conclusion below:
Features: Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway provides category-based site blocking, making it easy to block specific types of websites. It also offers well-integrated web security, ensuring a seamless experience for users. Cisco Umbrella is highly regarded for its seamless integration with existing infrastructure, extensive range of security features, and ability to centrally manage security.
Room for Improvement: The Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway could improve in terms of accessibility, website classification, latency, and endpoint management. Cisco Umbrella could enhance security by adding a transferring proxy feature and improving its Linux agent for Linux-based companies.
Ease of Deployment: The setup process for Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway is seen as complicated and time-consuming, requiring in-house expertise or vendor assistance. Customers have praised Cisco Umbrella's support, describing it as excellent and superior to the customer service of other vendors.
Service and Support: Forcepoint's customer service received mixed reviews, with some customers complaining about response time and issue resolution. Customers have praised Cisco Umbrella's support, describing it as excellent and superior to the customer service of other vendors.
Pricing: Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway is considered reasonably priced but on the higher end. Some users mentioned extra expenses for reporting. The cost of Cisco Umbrella differs based on the specific needs and approach of the customer, with flexible pricing and transparent charges. It is seen as both reasonable and competitive by some, but a few perceive it as costly.
ROI: Forcepoint's ROI has been compared to an insurance policy. Users say they gain peace of mind from knowing that their security needs are covered. Cisco Umbrella has proven to be a valuable investment by addressing maintenance concerns, reducing expenses associated with hardware updates, and effectively thwarting threats.
Comparison Results: Users appreciate Cisco Umbrella for its easy setup, extensive security features, and ability to centrally manage security. Forcepoint offers more granular control and integration with other security products. Cisco Umbrella could improve its Linux agent, while Forcepoint could improve its accessibility, website classification, and support.
"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."
"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."
"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 documentation is good, and we have been able to resolve any issues ourselves."
"Meraki features and cloud-based functionality are advanced and easy to manage centrally."
"I have found the malware protection feature valuable. It is helpful and deliverable and is able to protect my entire organization from getting compromised. It also prevents us from visiting any malicious sites which are not visible to the users."
"The security and access control features."
"Cisco's technical support is pretty good. When a solution is available, they will find it. On a scale from one to ten with ten being the best, I'd rate Cisco's technical support at nine."
"The agent that gets installed on the endpoints or on people's laptops and devices is a Cisco AnyConnect Umbrella module. It's one of the most impressive things because you are able to protect your users anywhere they are."
"The insight into what our users are doing via Cisco Umbrella is valuable. Knowing that we're protecting our users as they leave our network is also valuable now because we've got more hybrid working."
"DNS protection, domain blocking, SIP component, and the Cisco Umbrella roaming client are the valuable features of Cisco Umbrella."
"It’s pretty stable after you get up and running."
"Secure Web Gateway's most valuable features are firewall blocking and anti-malware scanning."
"It allowed our company to not worry about the security of a page, but talk more about the content and the productivity of specific types of web categories."
"Email Sandbox, DLP and Proxy."
"The spam filter is very effective."
"The tool categorizes the user profiles which is very comfortable."
"In terms of functionality, Forcepoint is the best web proxy available."
"The initial setup is not complex."
"Lookout was moving into the SSE space. And so their work on SecureWeb Gateway and SD-WAN is still sort of evolving."
"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"
"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."
"I would like to see a graphical representation of the entire network."
"Security, overall, can always be improved."
"We would like to see the enhancements made to the EDR, as we see features that are running endpoint management."
"I'd like to see this solution more closely integrate with other products Cisco has in its portfolio."
"If the virtual appliances could also gather traffic bandwidth reports, that would be great."
"Actually, we recently switched over to Zscaler because it has more features and it's more scalable than Cisco Umbrella."
"It should have a real-time malware classification engine. It should check the malware on the website. It would be good if it had a real-time malware check for the websites because currently, it just compares the DNS queries of the blacklist. It should also have malware control over file execution and the types of files that the users are allowed to download."
"Client delivery and client updates should be improved. Client delivery was not as easy as expected. Another area for improvement is the integration of escalation procedures for security issues."
"Improve detailed guidelines to deploy the transparent proxy to Firefox users."
"We are using a V10000 G3 appliance. It is just a proxy. It is just HTTP, FTP, and HTTPS. Now, as our website has developed and we are using rich time-connectivity protocols, the proxy doesn't have the ability to work with these protocols. It would be nice if the UDP feature was there for it to filter UDP traffic. It needs firewall capabilities for UDP filtering. Its upgrades can be quite complex, and they don't always go as per the plan. Its reporting could be a bit more granular."
"We have a lot of false positives, which is one area that can be improved."
"It's the support that's the problem because that's a different question from the product itself — it's the Achilles heel."
"Security of browsing."
"The deployment is a bit complex and it requires expertise to deploy, which is something that should be improved and made easier to do."
"Managing the endpoint for both DLP and web security should be simplified."
"There are several issues with the product. Version 8.4 can only be managed with a CLI, they removed the nice GUI interface from version 8.1. The load-balancing needs massive improvements. The incident lists don’t sync between appliances, they need to be manually edited for each one."
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Cisco Umbrella is ranked 1st in Secure Web Gateways (SWG) with 108 reviews while Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway is ranked 5th in Secure Web Gateways (SWG) with 47 reviews. Cisco Umbrella is rated 8.8, while Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway is rated 7.8. The top reviewer of Cisco Umbrella writes "Protects endpoints wherever they are, always pushing people to the right locations to avoid malicious intent". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway writes "Simple to set up, reliable, and offers great reporting". Cisco Umbrella is most compared with Zscaler Internet Access, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks, Palo Alto Networks DNS Security and Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange, whereas Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway is most compared with Zscaler Internet Access, Symantec Proxy, Fortinet FortiProxy, Fortinet FortiGate SWG and Cisco Web Security Appliance. See our Cisco Umbrella vs. Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway report.
See our list of best Secure Web Gateways (SWG) vendors and best Internet Security vendors.
We monitor all Secure Web Gateways (SWG) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.