Cato SASE Cloud Platform vs Exinda comparison

Cato Networks and GFI are both solutions in the WAN Optimization category. Cato Networks is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.8, while GFI is ranked #5. Additionally, 100% of Cato Networks users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 87% of GFI users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 10, 2024

Exinda and Cato SASE Cloud Platform provide network optimization solutions. Users lean towards Cato SASE Cloud Platform for its advanced capabilities, despite its higher cost.

Features:Exinda offers bandwidth management, application acceleration, and traffic prioritization. Cato SASE Cloud Platform includes comprehensive security, network integration, and cloud performance optimization.

Room for Improvement:Exinda needs better reporting, enhanced analytics, and improved user interface. Cato SASE Cloud Platform should improve third-party tool integration, scaling capabilities, and documentation.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service:Exinda is easy to deploy with quick response times for customer service. Cato SASE Cloud Platform also has a smooth deployment process, with remote support being more effective and comprehensive.

Pricing and ROI:Exinda is cost-effective with a quick ROI. Cato SASE Cloud Platform, though more expensive, offers high ROI due to its extensive features, making it suitable for users seeking robust network and security solutions.

To learn more, read our detailed Cato SASE Cloud Platform vs. Exinda Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Cato SASE Cloud Platform vs. Exinda

April 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Cloudflare

Featured Reviews

Spencer Malmad

Owner at Tech Exchange

It's easy to set up because you point the DNS to it, and it's working in under 15 minutes

Cloudflare is highly scalable. Cloudflare is a system with a web portal that the end users like me see. It's a console where we can adjust the DNS, caching, and security features all in that console. Cloudflare owns thousands of servers across the world that cache the data. It's a powerful solution. When clients sign up for Cloudflare, they're getting this monster content delivery network, security, and a web application firewall in one. It's all rolled into one, and it's massive. Unless you have your website hosted on a massive hosting provider, there's no way that you can deliver the amount of data that Cloudflare can provide to the end users. If you have static content, there's no way that you can ever match what Cloudflare can do. Obviously, there are competitors to Cloudflare that do the same, but I'm saying other types of solutions. Let's say you go with F5. Great, that's on-prem. That's in your colo. You can't deliver as much data to the internet as you can with a CDN. You don't have to spend $20,000 on a net scaler, F5, or whatever Cisco's selling now. You don't have to buy that. You pay them $50 a month or $150 a month. It's totally worth it because even in five years, you'll never get the performance value, not just the actual ROI. You have to consider how much throughput you can get with Cloudflare.

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Alexander Azikov

It Manager at Diamond Braces

Provide a seamless experience for end users with internet duplication feature

The setup and onboarding process is very straightforward - I'd rate it a ten out of ten for ease. We use CatoCloud as our cloud provider. They have points of presence, and we connect to the nearest one to our physical location. All the routing, inspection, and logic for what to route, block, or allow happens in the cloud, not on the local device. Our deployment took a couple of weeks because we installed the sites manually. If we had a team to help switch locally, it could have been done in a week. The deployment process is straightforward. We set up all the sites in their cloud system; then, they ship the sockets directly to the location or our main office. We connect the device to the internet, it gets activated, we assign it to a specific site inside the cloud, and it's online and ready to use. It's very easy.

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Marek Jaworski

Senior Engineer, Team Lead, Network Operations at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

Allows us to have better control over our network by shaping traffic more gently

There might be room for improvement in the speed and throughput of some of their devices. They're getting a bit slow on some of the bigger devices. It would be helpful if there were some sort of an ISP model. Also, while I don't think it would be possible for them to do, it would be better if they had the Citrix support and the visualization to visualize your network. Besides that, it fits its purpose as a shaper and accelerator. Some people would say things like, "Add a firewall to it," but I disagree. I think a firewall's a firewall, and Exinda's a shaper and accelerator.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The tool is user-friendly."

"The technical support is good."

"From what I've seen so far, there are no negatives to report as of yet"

"The UI is good."

"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is the GUI. You are able to control the solution very well through the interface. There is a lot of functionality that is embedded in the service."

"I like Cloudflare's application gateway and DDoS protection."

"The solution offers the flexibility to control configuration rules."

"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is its global reach and it is always evolving."

More Cloudflare pros

"The visibility control and security aspects are amazing."

"The scalability is quite good."

"The feature that I find to be the most valuable is the bandwidth aggregation."

"Cato offers all the functionality found in other solution. The life cycle management is always very stable."

"The main features we use are the firewall and secure web gateway."

"The most valuable features of Cato Networks are the always-on VPN for remote workers and centralized management. Additionally, web filtering and antivirus are good."

"I haven't had any trouble, and practically forget that I'm using it."

"Unified management and internet duplication are our most valuable features. They provide a seamless experience for end users—if one link goes down, they can still work without noticing."

More Cato SASE Cloud Platform pros

"The most valuable features are the shaper, accelerator, and the reporting... it will shape the traffic better than, for example, a Cisco, because it's more gentle on the shaping side of things. Suppose you were selling a 20-meg link. Because you can shape to the nth degree of traffic, the 20-meg link feels like about a 30 to 40-meg link."

"Exinda can show you which product uses how much throughput and can help you manage it."

"The most valuable feature is the ability to manage the traffic at the application layer. It makes things a lot easier. We're not digging for port numbers and IP addresses and different services... It makes us far more responsive in our ability to do things and speed up the process. We're a very small shop, so having something that's straightforward and easy to use is a big help."

"The most valuable feature is the ability to provide very granular classes of service. That's important because it allows us to prioritize certain traffic types over others, to a very granular level."

"The most valuable feature is the ability to create policies where we can tailor them to the customer. It enables us to prioritize apps and users for bandwidth."

"It has the ability to prioritize, providing an automatic optimization. I can put it in a hierarchy and know that certain devices will be prioritized over others. It is able to identify the traffic. It can pick out whether if its a Zoom meeting (or something like that), then it's able to put that somewhere in the hierarchy based on the traffic type."

Cons

"There could be more courses with engineers. I like e-learning, however, having a specialist in a classroom is more comfortable for me."

"DNS Management."

"One area of improvement is in the Access Rules. Hypothetically, if we wanted to block or challenge traffic outside of the United States, the only way to currently do that (as far as I know) is to enter every single country outside of the United States. That could be a labor intensive job. A solution could be to enable users to create a rule where traffic is only allowed within a certain country."

"It would be helpful if the solution could continue evolving to compete with the other solutions on the market."

"Cloudflare should add more documentation and pricing to the cloud version."

"I think the APIs are a little bit hard for us to work with. The APIs could be more open so that we could integrate better with our SolarWinds or our monitoring solution."

"Cloudflare's console should be made more user-friendly."

"We're facing challenges due to an upgrade in the machine learning model. The problem arises from some users abusing the APIs, resulting in an influx of suspicious traffic. Cloudflare's learning model mistakenly identifies this traffic as human. Consequently, it assigns it a higher trust score, akin to legitimate human traffic, causing complications in our architecture. Previously, such traffic would have been categorized as suspicious, enabling us to apply appropriate blocking rules. However, we encounter difficulties distinguishing between genuine and suspicious traffic with the new categorization. Despite these challenges, overall, Cloudflare remains the preferred solution compared to Azure, AWS CloudFront, and Google Cloud Armor."

More Cloudflare cons

"There's no principal in Malaysia, only a distributor."

"The tool needs to be more granular. Its reports are not very in-depth."

"Modifying or incorporating Cato Network to work with a third-party platform, such as Microsoft, or other Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings would be beneficial. Having more integration partners would help the users implement the solution."

"I would like to see better integration with identity providers."

"The different languages in the user interface should be enhanced."

"I am located in South Korea, and I can say that most people here have no idea about Cato Networks. I think Cato Networks should promote its network services in various countries."

"There isn't much to improve as we have a close relationship with them, providing information for research and development."

"For a packaged solution, needing external intervention or a system integrator to get other features not offered by Cato Networks could be an area for improvement. Cato Networks does what it's meant to do and is even overstretching capabilities when introducing new features. The product can only have very few features added on top of what its currently doing. Managed service providers can deliver the extra features you'd need. It's a set of managed services, and what Cato Networks does is very comprehensive. So, for the time being, when the actual incarnation of the SASE solution is deployed, Cato Networks is a very effective product. Naturally, technology will evolve, so everybody knows that in three, four, or five years, there will be a new kid on the block, a new game. Still, at the moment, Cato Networks only needs to improve a little regarding SASE delivery. The product is doing very well, but one feature the Cato Networks team is doing right is preparing for the future through deploying the SSE 360, so the security service is at that edge. It's an excellent strategy to prepare for the future. SSE 360 is what Cato Networks should invest in the most to keep prospering."

More Cato SASE Cloud Platform cons

"What I don't like is the fact that I haven't purchased the overall management interface. That is the interface that allows you to manage multiple Exindas. Personally, I think Exinda should provide that for free. I think that if you buy more and more Exinda boxes, you shouldn't then have to incur a charge for the overall management software. While I can manage each Exinda separately, if they provided me with the overall management platform for free that would probably encourage me to buy more appliances."

"There might be room for improvement in the speed and throughput of some of their devices. They're getting a bit slow on some of the bigger devices. It would be helpful if there were some sort of an ISP model."

"In terms of improvement, one thing that has always frustrated me about it is that when you look at real-time monitoring, you can only filter it by IP address. You can't filter it by anything else. It would be good if we could filter by VLAN."

"A lot of working with this solution is really intuitive. I have picked it up mostly on my own. I'm sure that there are some things that maybe I hadn't thought of or really hadn't considered, and I think it would be good just to promote some day courses. I don't really see a whole lot that comes out for Exinda as far as training or informational sessions through our normal resellers. It would be cool to know more about the solution by utilizing educational resources or even have Exinda promoted a bit better."

"The updating of applications that the system knows about could be a little quicker. For example, Zoom had been out for a while, but it took a while for it to show up as an application that Exinda could natively handle. We had to write some things in order to handle Zoom, initially."

"It should improve the quality of service. It can improve their connection to the internet and your IP."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product's pricing is cheap."

"There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."

"I give the price a five out of ten."

"The cost primarily depends on the size of the organization."

"In terms of licensing costs, we don't pay for licensing for Cloudflare. We only establish communication, then for peering, Cloudflare takes care of the cross-connection in different data centers."

"The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive."

"The product's pricing is minimal compared to other products."

"It's a premium model. You can start at zero and work your way up to the enterprise model, which has a very high pricing level."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"Cato Networks is an expensive product, but it works out of the box, so that's the usual trade-off, make versus buy. If you decide to buy a product that doesn't require much programming, then you'd want to go for Cato Networks, which will work naturally, and immediately without any complex setup. However, the product is a little bit more expensive than the competitors. On a scale of one to five, I'd rate the pricing for Cato Networks as four."

"You pay yearly based on the speed of your network. If you increase the speed of your network, you increase the cost for your throughput. It is by bandwidth for the most part and then licenses for VPN. There is some per-seat licensing for VPN access, but the majority of it is minimal. It is like $30 a year per client. The rest is based on how much bandwidth you'll use. You pay for that upfront for the year, and if you have to increase it, you increase it, and then they let you send more data through. There are no additional costs in addition to the standard licensing fees."

"The pricing of this solution depends on what you need. It is based on bandwidth."

"The product is very competitively priced, and that's compelling. They don't charge the customer based on the operational cost like other brands such as Palo Alto. Cato has its own fully-fledged cloud, with their own data centers, equipment, and so on, which is an advantage. I rate the solution five out of five for affordability."

"I'd rate Cato SASE Cloud Platform's pricing as about five or six out of ten. It's not the cheapest solution, but it is cheaper than Palo Alto and even VeloCloud. We've been working with them for a while and have significant discounts. Our licensing costs vary because we keep adding sites, but it's about 280 per month per site. This includes additional features beyond the base product, starting at around 200."

"The pricing is on the higher side, almost an eight out of ten."

"The solution is reasonably priced since Cato Networks provides features like SASE and monitoring, which I am very happy with currently."

"The price is not an issue for us, as it is priced more competitively than some other vendors."

More Cato SASE Cloud Platform pricing and cost advice

"The pricing and licensing are pretty fair and really competitive. There are other SD-WAN solutions that are pretty costly because they build in a service where they'll manage it for you, which is really great. I don't know if Exinda has that option as well. However, we are a small shop and cost-conscious. For things like this, we are accustomed to self-managing and this solution suits us just fine. For a tool that gives you, like the graphs and reporting, it has a fair price point."

"It is priced well for the market, for what it needs to do."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

17%

Computer Software Company

14%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

26%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Computer Software Company

24%

Real Estate/Law Firm

12%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Government

11%

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

Which is the best DDoS protection solution for a big ISP for monitoring and mitigating?

Cloudflare. We are moving from Akamai prolexic to Cloudflare. Cloudflare anycast network outperforms Akamai static GR...

See all answers

Which would you choose - Cloudflare DNS or Quad9?

Cloudflare DNS is a very fast, very reliable public DNS resolver. It is an enterprise-grade authoritative DNS service...

See all answers

What do you like most about Cloudflare?

Cloudflare offers CDN and DDoS protection. We have the front end, API, and database in how you structure applications.

See all answers

What do you like most about Cato Networks?

The solution is a simple WAN solution. We've onboarded the socket on the Cato platform, and it provides connectivity....

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Cato Networks?

We have been using Cato Networks as a solution for firewall and secure web gateway.

See all answers

What advice do you have for others considering Cato Networks?

I would definitely recommend Cato Networks to other users. I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

See all answers

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

April 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Cato SASE Cloud Platform

April 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Exinda

April 2025

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Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

Cato Networks

No data available

Overview

Cloudflare is a highly-regarded Content Delivery Network (CDN) and a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) protection solution. The robust global connectivity cloud platform that is Cloudflare ensures users are able to connect to the Internet quickly, securely, and reliably. Cloudflare is one of the world's largest networks in the marketplace today. Using Cloudflare, businesses, educational entities, NGOs, vloggers, bloggers, and anyone else with an internet presence can experience more secure, faster websites and applications.

Currently, there are millions of Internet locations on Cloudflare, and the Cloudflare network
continues to grow every day by the thousands. The solution is able to fulfill the requests for
millions of websites seamlessly and serves on average 45 million HTTP requests per second.

Cloudflare has safe, secure data centers in close to 300 cities worldwide to ensure every
client request is filled as quickly as possible. It is Cloudflare’s edge network that makes this
possible by keeping content and other services as close to each client as possible, so the
information requests are always only seconds away.

Many organizations that work in democracy, civil society, human rights, or the arts are able to
access Cloudflare's highest levels of protection for free via Project Galileo. Additionally, official
election websites can be secured from hacking and fraud through Cloudflare’s Project
Athenian, also at no additional cost.

Cloudflare can also help organizations of all sizes develop a robust zero-trust strategy to
ensure the highest levels of productivity and profitability. Employees, stakeholders, and end users have a greater level of satisfaction and overall improved user experience, which can, in
turn, result in higher revenues and overall ROI. Zero-trust and BYOD (bring your own device)
access ensure end users and employees always have the best resources and technology
available to them at all times.

Cloudflare benefits

Cloudflare has many benefits. Some of its most valuable benefits include:

- Faster load times

- Robust DNS security

- Intuitive cloud Web Application Firewall (WAF)

- Free universal SSL

- Image enhancement

- Automatic browser caching

- Next-generation cloud load balancer

- Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

- Rate limiting

- Minification

- Zero-trust capabilities

- Cost-effective

- Reduced carbon footprint

Reviews from real users

“Many websites require an SSL certificate because they sell stuff and want SSL. Cloudflare
comes with an SSL certificate built in. It's automatic. You sign yourself up for Cloudflare, and
an SSL certificate automatically protects your website. If you have a connection between your
website and your host, the server, Cloudflare, and the host, you don't necessarily need a
certificate.” Spencer M., Owner at Tech Exchange

“What I like best about Cloudflare is that my company can use it to trace and manage
applications and monitor traffic. The solution tells you if there's a spike in traffic. Cloudflare
also sends you a link to check your equipment and deployment and track it through peering,
so it's a valuable tool.” Daniel P., Network Engineer at Ufinet

“The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is the GUI. You are able to control the solution very
well through the interface. There is a lot of functionality that is embedded in the service.” PeerSpot user, Competence Center Manager at a tech services company

Cloudflare

Cato Networks is a leading SASE (Secure Access Service Edge) platform, combining SD-WAN and network security to obtain a cloud-native service. Cato Networks optimizes and secures application access for users and identities. The platform delivers a next-generation secure networking architecture that minimizes legacy IT infrastructures’ complexity, costs, and risks. The goal of Cato Suite is to connect any user to any application securely and optimally.

Cato Suite runs on a private global network of more than 65 PoPs (points of presence) connected via SLA-backed network providers. The service can connect branches, data centers, users, and clouds. Cato can be deployed in stages to augment legacy network services.

Cato Suite delivers end-to-end route optimization for WAN and cloud traffic. The architecture is self-healing, enabling a high service uptime.

Cato Features

Cato Cloud has a global backbone to deliver a reliable, global network. Here are some key SD-WAN features of Cato Cloud.

Optimizes traffic flows: The Cato Suite can individually optimize traffic flows in the last mile - from the customer’s location to the point of presence, and also between PoPs. This feature eliminates the need for internet providers to hand off traffic to each other, avoiding the resulting latency and congestion.
Controls and manages bandwidth: The software-defined overlay is encrypted across the entire cloud infrastructure. This overlay uses application-aware routing, analyzing latency and loss data to choose the best route according to network conditions. These features, like protocol priority marking, enable the system to ensure the performance of real-time applications.
Delivers redundancy and failover: By connecting the points of presence with multiple Tier-1 IPs, Cato builds the redundancy needed to ensure security and highly available service.
Cloud-native: Cato is built as a scalable, resilient, and elastic cloud service.
Converged: The platform converges SD-WAN and network security into a single infrastructure framework.
Secures all edges: Cato Network can secure and optimize traffic from all users, locations, applications, and clouds.

What challenges does Cato Network solve?

Migration to SD-WAN

MPLS (multi-protocol label switching) networks are usually expensive and limited in their capacity. Cato simplifies migrating to a faster, higher-capacity internet and SASE cloud. Cato SD-WAN appliances enable customers to improve usable capacity and resiliency.

Global connectivity optimization

Customers who suffer from the challenge of high latency and network inconsistency can use Cato to deliver a consistent connection and user experience to access on-premises and cloud applications.

Securing branch internet access

Cato’s complete network security stack connects all branch locations to the Cato cloud, therefore protecting all traffic, both internet-bound and WAN, with enterprise-grade, cloud-based security services. This capability avoids having to backhaul internet traffic to a data center or hub or having to implement stand-alone cloud security solutions.

Cloud acceleration and control

Organizations using Cato notice an acceleration of cloud traffic. Cato achieves this by routing all traffic from the edges to the PoP closest to the data center. Because of the close distance between the two, the latency is near zero.

Reviews from Real Users

An IT manager/project coordinator at a healthcare company says that “[Cato is] a cloud-based solution that integrates well with everything. They are the classic SaaS solution.”

Yeong-Gi L., a network engineer at Snetsystems, notes that “The solution is very stable. The scalability is quite good. Technical support was always helpful and responsive. The integration capabilities are not a problem at all.”

"The most valuable feature is that it also works as a next-gen firewall because it has security features," says Lorenzo S., senior solutions consultant Lead at MDI.

Cato Networks

Exinda is designed to help Network Managers solve pressing IT problems in today's complex network. Our award winning technology combines interactive analytics, an intelligent recommendation engine and powerful actions like shaping and optimization, all in one solution.

GFI

Sample Customers

Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.

Paysafe, AdRoll, Pet Lovers Centre, Arlington Orthopedics, Humphreys & Partners Architects

UMass Dartmouth, MLB Network, R&R Ice Cream, Savills, Manhattan School of Music, Blum Shapiro, Cincinnati Public Schools, City of Richmond, Genting Casinos, The Salvation Army, VoIP Unlimited, Frontier Silicon, Lakeshore Toltest, CTI Foods

Buyer's Guide

Cato SASE Cloud Platform vs. Exinda

April 2025

Free Report: Cato SASE Cloud Platform vs. Exinda

Find out what your peers are saying about Cato SASE Cloud Platform vs. Exinda and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.

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