We performed a comparison between Cisco Web Security Appliance and Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway based on real PeerSpot user reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: After analyzing user feedback, it appears that Cisco Web Security Appliance is the better choice when compared to Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway. Users appreciate its easy-to-use interface, scalability, and integration with Active Directory. They also value Cisco's SSL decryption and high-quality technical support. While Forcepoint has more advanced features like sandboxing and cloud-based enterprise DLP, it falls short in terms of technical support, interface simplicity, and overall security protection. Furthermore, Cisco's pricing is reasonable, making it a more attractive option for smaller networks.
"The solution is stable."
"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 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."
"Cisco Web Security Appliance is user-friendly and easy to manage. It protects your environment while accessing the internet."
"Cisco regularly upgrades features for the customer's security requirements."
"The product is stable."
"The most valuable feature is security."
"It integrates well with Cisco Email Security Appliance."
"The most valuable feature is that we can use it as a proxy."
"The technical support is good. It is reactive and the documentation is very specific and very useful."
"Transparent Mode: Since we have multiple sites and roaming users, it has helped us in deploying the proxy to users without having to push any configurations to end users."
"The Forcepoint client software can be downloaded on a user's machine so that it can filter the sites from home or the office. That's one of the biggest features. We can use it for filtering our laptops for our users at any place."
"The most valuable feature of Forcepoint Web Security is creating the easy to install further policies that are deployed through the Forcepoint security manual at some stage. Just drag and drop and the policies are there."
"Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway does most of its job well, but I especially like its data security feature."
"SWG allows me to track internet usage patterns, helping optimize bandwidth and understand how much time each employee spends online."
"Real-time analytics."
"I have found the web content filtering and malware filter the most valuable."
"Giving visibility to people's actions in the network, while keeping attackers out: across data centers, offices, branches, and the cloud."
"Lookout was moving into the SSE space. And so their work on SecureWeb Gateway and SD-WAN is still sort of evolving."
"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."
"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."
"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"
"The tool needs to provide logs. They need to improve firewall threat defense."
"Setting up Cisco Web Security Appliance is highly complex and it takes about a week. We have to connect it to the Active Directory and configure all the policies for end users. It takes a long time to configure rules for our company data like port forwarding and separating the public and local components."
"WSA is lacking firewall features."
"Sometimes reporting is a little bit short."
"If a user wants to use it for other devices like mobile or smartphones, this product isn't so reliable."
"The reporting needs improvement."
"We would like to see a security service head, where we can combine all the security into one solution."
"The tool needs to provide logs. They need to improve firewall threat defense."
"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."
"An area for improvement would be the classification of websites - it can take a long time for new websites to be classified."
"What's missing in Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway is a specific level of micro-control on protocols or devices, for example, where you can control a particular user or user device."
"The automation lifecycle, integration, and export functionality could all be improved."
"Overall the software is occupying too much memory space. If they could remedy that, it would be a better experience, because today Windows is occupying too much memory space as well (in terms of the RAM), and this software has also started occupying all the memory. Due to this, I have less space for my other office products and data. I can't, for example, operate a huge Excel sheet or other datasets."
"The Sandbox solution should be integrated with the NIST to handle whatever new vulnerabilities or new sites are identified as potential threats."
"I have been in contact with technical support several times, and I am not happy with them."
"I am looking forward to the full integration of the endpoints that they offer for web security and DLP."
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Cisco Web Security Appliance is ranked 9th in Secure Web Gateways (SWG) with 29 reviews while Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway is ranked 5th in Secure Web Gateways (SWG) with 47 reviews. Cisco Web Security Appliance is rated 7.8, while Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway is rated 7.8. The top reviewer of Cisco Web Security Appliance writes "Ensures security for remote workers". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway writes "Simple to set up, reliable, and offers great reporting". Cisco Web Security Appliance is most compared with Cisco Umbrella, Zscaler Internet Access, Fortinet FortiProxy, Netskope Next Gen Secure Web Gateway and Skyhigh Security, whereas Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway is most compared with Zscaler Internet Access, Cisco Umbrella, Symantec Proxy, Fortinet FortiProxy and Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks. See our Cisco Web Security Appliance vs. Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway report.
See our list of best Secure Web Gateways (SWG) vendors.
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