Cisco ScanSafe Web Security SaaS [EOL] vs Menlo Secure comparison

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Cisco and Menlo Security are both solutions in the Secure Web Gateways (SWG) category. Additionally, 100% of Cisco users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Menlo Security users who would recommend it.

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Cisco ScanSafe Web Security SaaS [EOL] and Menlo Secure based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco, Fortinet, Zscaler and others in Secure Web Gateways (SWG).

To learn more, read our detailed Secure Web Gateways (SWG) Report (Updated: August 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Secure Web Gateways (SWG)

August 2026

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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

iboss

Featured Reviews

Ashok Ananthula

Senior Consultant Proxy Engineering at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Cloud gateway has strengthened remote web security and now needs better Mac and ISP support

The problem our organization had is that iboss failed for the Mac devices. It is not able to give a successful agent for the Mac agents. That is where in 2025, we had to migrate to the Palo Alto-based platform. If your use case is for just Windows laptops,you can consider this platform as an option One issue is the data center resiliency part. In India especially, they are not tied up with the Tier 1 ISPs like Tata or Airtel; they were having Tier 2 ISPs and encountered many issues reaching few major sites that my organization depends on, and they were having problems that they could not fix quickly. They also lack a mechanism to route that traffic within their data center; rather, they ask customers to make a pac file change to route it to Singapore explicitly. It would be better if they route from their backend , i mean even if I send it to India DC, they should be able to route it internally to make that work; however, they fail to do that and ask the customer to route it in the pac file. Another suggestion is that in China, they do not have the proper setup; they used to have numerous problems with slowness and lack of premium circuits in China as well. That leads to multiple sites working slowly with latency-related issues. So the main issue is the ISP-related problems that need to be solved.

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Samir Shah

CEO / Managing Director at Infinity Access Technologies Pvt Ltd

Easy to implement with good security and scanning

The software is scalable, no doubt about that. As such, the customers that we have given this software to had previously scaled up. Still, with a new version, we were able to satisfy them without any issue. Cisco is continuously working on making the software better, stronger, and compliant with the latest vulnerabilities. Their main aspect is to have software or hardware that is scalable. There is never an issue with the scalability. I'd rate it five out of five in terms of the ability to scale. This is a data center, so there are a lot of services that are being accessed from different departments. As far as users are concerned, they don't have more users within the data center. However, when it comes to accessing various services from the data center, it is sizeable. There may be 4,000 service requests happening daily. There may not be more than 50 users in general.

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reviewer2701794

Head Of Bluechip Enterprise at a manufacturing company with 51-200 employees

Provides strong protection and multiple use cases but struggles with market recognition

There aren't specific areas for improvement; however, they're not as well known as the big vendors such as Palo Alto. Menlo Secure is a smaller company with limited resources and funding, which makes it challenging to compete with larger companies such as Palo and Cisco. What can be improved is market awareness and adoption of the technology. When selling it in the channel, regardless of how good the technology might be, success depends more on market adoption and awareness.

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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

"Deploying iboss leads to good return on investment, estimated around 70% to 80%."

"First of all, the security policies are essential. I do not have to rely solely on Active Directory for our users."

"Because of iboss, I did not have to assign web filtering tasks to my techs on a daily basis."

"I would rate the technical support of iboss a solid 10 without a shadow of a doubt."

"iboss has significantly lowered the number of security incidents. It is crazy how much it blocks and how much it is aware of the outside danger."

"The students were always protected, and the content filtering worked very well, seeming to work better than other products we had tried previously."

"Our primary use case for this product is DLP,"

"I would definitely recommend iboss for web filtering purposes to other organizations or individuals."

More iboss pros

"It is valuable to be able to block whole categories or groups at one time."

"The solution is super stable because it is made up of a bunch of mega proxies."

"The cyber security features they offer are most trusted."

"The web security is great."

"It is an easy solution to implement, the web security is great, the filtering of different URLs has been very helpful, it also acts as a firewall which is quite helpful in terms of security, we've used it for content scanning and filtration in the data center, since this is on the cloud the cost has gone down, it's got good features and is easily manageable, and Cisco is rather well-known and robust."

"We are not aware of a single compromise from the web since implementing the solution."

"Either you have access to something or don't have access to it, and if you do, we can ensure, 100 percent of the time, that there is nothing malicious that is going to impact our system in any way."

"The fact that it is a cloud proxy solution is another feature we like. For example, if you acquire a new company, you can use it to protect that new company without the need to install anything physically on their networks."

"For us, the primary goal is protection on the web, and that's extremely important. We're not using any of the other services at this time. The web part is key to the success of the organization. It gives us the ability to protect. It can isolate. It opens the session in an isolated format so that the code isn't running locally. It is running over in the Menlo environment, not in ours. It is not running on the local computer, whereas if you were to go to a normal website, it would run Java or something else on the local machine and potentially execute the malicious code locally. So, it does give us that level of protection."

"Accessing the internet with a proxy from anywhere is the most valuable feature. It ensures that users are only able to browse legitimate websites. If they happen to go to a legitimate website with a malicious payload, the isolation feature will take care of that."

"The solution is invisible to our end users, so it doesn't have any impact on their work or performance."

"This security technology addresses risk and enables people to conduct business without that risk, which is where the ROI is realized."

"We have definitely seen ROI, as we save a ton of money and time because the numerous hits that we were receiving from our security tools prior to implementing them had to all be chased down, dispositioned, and endpoints had to be reimaged."

More Menlo Secure pros

Cons

"Their on-premise hardware's network interface is capped at one gigabit, which is sort of a problem. If you stand a filter up where all traffic flows through that, according to them, in order to go above a gigabit, you have to have multiple devices, which in today's IT seems a little bit silly. They could easily put in an SFP port into their device that could accommodate 10 gigs or at least offer a box."

"If they could implement an extra security layer preventing access to iboss from the open internet, it would be great."

"The reporting feature needs improvement."

"It is stable, but due to growth, it can sometimes be less stable than wanted."

"The dashboards for local use could be better."

"I am currently doing a PoC of the zero trust aspect of it. Compared to other similar solutions, it is hard to get around each feature. It takes a while to get used to it."

"SSL decryption: We had issues with learners using apps instead of using web browsers. This type of encryption is tough for any appliance in a BYOD environment."

"File integrity monitoring would be very advantageous as an additional feature."

More iboss cons

"The solution is not supported because it is legacy and almost out of market."

"Setup is not that difficult, but it really requires proper technical training."

"The licensing could be better. They are an expensive product."

"Cisco has good technical support although sometimes our clients would like it to be better in some areas."

"In the best of all worlds, we wouldn't have to make any exceptions. However, that is a big ask because a lot of that depends on how websites are constructed. For example, there are some very complex, application-oriented sites that we end up making exceptions for. It is really not that big an issue for us to make the exceptions. We feel like we are doing that without a huge impact on our security posture, but we do have to make some exceptions for complex sites, e.g., mostly SaaS-type sites and applications."

"Currently, I don't have a good way to see which of my rules are being used in the access control lists."

"Currently, I don't have a good way to see which of my rules are being used in the access control lists. I have numerous entries, but are they all still needed? A report that would show me my list of who is allowed and whether we're actually using it would be useful because I can then go clean up my list. It would be easier to manage. We would eliminate the vulnerability of unused services."

"We are now transitioning to another solution. The main reason for that is that managing all of the exceptions and troubleshooting all of the issues our users have had connecting to the internet has become too significant in terms of workload, compared to what we hope we will have with another solution."

"Menlo Secure is a smaller company with limited resources and funding, which makes it challenging to compete with larger companies such as Palo and Cisco."

"The user monitoring could still be improved."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is not expensive, and it is also not cheap. iboss is priced right in the sweet spot for the number of features it offers."

"The overall pricing for iboss is very competitive and transparent."

"We have not priced the solution recently, but they were competitive with other vendors in the past."

"It is probably in line with other solutions, but I do not deal with the financial side."

"It is expensive compared to one of its competitors."

"We had the cost of purchasing a new appliance along with the implementation and licensing costs. However, the following year, the cost of just licensing was similar to what was paid the previous year for a new appliance along with the implementation and licensing costs."

Information not available

"We save a ton of money and time. Previously, the numerous hits that we were receiving from our security tools, prior to implementing them, had to all be chased down, dispositioned, and endpoints had to be reimaged. It was just a ton of effort to do all that. That is where the savings from time and money come in."

"It is appropriately priced for what they're doing for us. Considering the protection provided, I feel their pricing is spot-on."

"The solution is expensive. It's more expensive than the solution I previously used. Compared with the other cloud-based solutions, it's very competitive."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Comms Service Provider

Construction Company

No data available

Manufacturing Company

13%

Construction Company

11%

Outsourcing Company

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	12
Midsize Enterprise	7
Large Enterprise	10

No data available

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with iboss?

I think iboss could be improved by making reporting and dashboard customization more flexible, and simplifying troubl...

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What is your primary use case for iboss?

I use iboss as a cloud-based secure web gateway to provide secure internet access, web filtering, and protect remote ...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for iboss?

My experience with iboss's pricing structure, setup cost, and licensing model has been positive, straightforward, and...

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What needs improvement with Menlo Security Secure Web Gateway?

There aren't specific areas for improvement; however, they're not as well known as the big vendors such as Palo Alto....

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What is your primary use case for Menlo Security Secure Web Gateway?

People are mainly using it for zero trust web access. Menlo Secure is built from the ground up to provide zero basic ...

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What advice do you have for others considering Menlo Security Secure Web Gateway?

Secure file sharing and data protection is not exactly what Menlo Secure is designed to do. While it can handle some ...

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Comparisons

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Compared 10% of the time

Netskope vs iboss

Compared 9% of the time

Fortinet FortiGate vs iboss

Compared 7% of the time

Cisco Umbrella vs iboss

Compared 6% of the time

FortiSASE vs iboss

Compared 6% of the time

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Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway vs Cisco ScanSafe Web Security SaaS [EOL]

Compared 26% of the time

Cisco Umbrella vs Cisco ScanSafe Web Security SaaS [EOL]

Compared 24% of the time

Zscaler Internet Access vs Cisco ScanSafe Web Security SaaS [EOL]

Compared 19% of the time

Infoblox Advanced DNS Protection vs Cisco ScanSafe Web Security SaaS [EOL]

Compared 9% of the time

Symantec Secure Web Gateway vs Cisco ScanSafe Web Security SaaS [EOL]

Compared 8% of the time

More Cisco ScanSafe Web Security SaaS [EOL] Competitors

Prisma Access Browser vs Menlo Secure

Compared 14% of the time

Check Point Harmony SASE (formerly Perimeter 81) vs Menlo Secure

Compared 12% of the time

Netskope Next Gen Secure Web Gateway vs Menlo Secure

Compared 10% of the time

Cloudflare One vs Menlo Secure

Compared 9% of the time

Cisco Web Security Appliance vs Menlo Secure

Compared 2% of the time

More Menlo Secure Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

iboss

September 2026

Download iboss product report

Buyer's Guide

Secure Web Gateways (SWG)

August 2026

Cisco ScanSafe Web Security SaaS [EOL] report

Download Cisco ScanSafe Web Security SaaS [EOL] product report

Buyer's Guide

Menlo Secure

September 2026

Download Menlo Secure product report

Also Known As

iBoss Cloud Platform

ScanSafe Web Security SaaS

Menlo Security Web Security, Menlo Web Security

Overview

Iboss offers a comprehensive cloud-based security platform valued for its scalability and autonomous features, ensuring robust security with easy deployment and management capabilities.

Renowned for its robust security architecture, Iboss integrates seamlessly within diverse networks, delivering efficient granular filtering and advanced content categorization. Its single pane of glass console provides ease of management, allowing rapid scalability suitable for rapidly deploying environments. Operates in BYOD setups due to inline filtering without device installation. Integration with cloud-based applications enhances user control, and features like SASE, SSL inspection, and ChatGPT risk protection stand as highlights. Despite its strengths, users have pointed out areas for enhancement like direct navigation in reports, SSL decryption, and better cloud integration while having room to improve data loss prevention.

What are the most important features of Iboss?

Scalability: Supports rapid deployment across diverse networks.
SASE: A consolidated approach to secure access.
SSL Inspection: Ensures safe data transmission.
Granular Filtering: Detailed control over accessible content.
Single Pane Management: Unifies control through a centralized console.

What benefits should users consider in reviews?

Cost-effectiveness: Offers competitive pricing with robust features.
Autonomous Operation: Reduces management overhead.
Responsive Support: Provides assistance when needed.
Flexible Deployment: Available for both cloud and on-premises environments.

The usage of Iboss spans educational institutions, specifically K-12, to enforce internet policies, protect data, and support remote work environments. It provides web filtering and security frameworks to ensure safe browsing. Its platform-as-a-service model offers flexibility for both cloud-based and on-premises requirements, integrating seamlessly to deliver enhanced security features suitable for various deployment needs including zero trust, CASB, and network security for work-from-home setups.

iboss

Cisco ScanSafe is a cloud hosted web filtering service which enables you to create, enforce and monitor Web usage policies. Layering real time rule-based filters with up-to-date and accurate categorization database, Web Filtering enforces your organization's acceptable usage policy, protecting you from the legal liabilities of inappropriate content, reducing bandwidth congestion and improving employee productivity.

Cisco

Menlo Security Secure Application Access

Menlo Security Secure Application Access makes zero trust access easy, giving users secure connectivity to private applications, including web and legacy applications. At the core of Secure Application Access is the Menlo Secure Cloud Browser, which fetches, secures and delivers the content for users.

In addition to providing simple-to-deploy, clientless ZTA, Secure Application Access and the Menlo Secure Cloud Browser protect applications from attacks such as session hijacking, cookie manipulation, and other tactics that employ protocol manipulation.

Secure Application Access protects applications from Internet threats and provides granular controls for added protection of the application and associated data. These security controls include Read-only/Read-write, Upload/download, Copy/paste, AV scanning, Sandboxing, and Data Loss Prevention.

Last Mile Data Protection

Menlo Last-Mile Data Protection identifies and prevents sensitive data from leaving your company by meticulously inspecting all file uploads and user input across browsing sessions. Leveraging the Secure Cloud Browser, users are protected from the internet and you can protect your organization from data loss with comprehensive traffic monitoring and controls. This approach addresses the growing concerns surrounding data leakage in the age of AI tools like ChatGPT.

By identifying sensitive data through file types, regular expressions, or predefined libraries, Menlo Last-Mile Data Protection empowers security teams to regulate data input into AI platforms and prevent unauthorized uploads. This capability provides crucial protection for intellectual property, PII, and other confidential information.

The solution leverages the Menlo Cloud Security Platform's visibility and control over traffic to reliably detect and prevent data leaks originating from both browser submission forms and non-browser traffic. With the ability to inspect encrypted web traffic, Menlo Last-Mile Data Protection enforces DLP policies consistently across all users and devices, ensuring comprehensive data protection.

Menlo Security

Sample Customers

More than 4,000 global enterprises trust the iboss Cloud Platform to support their modern workforces, including a large number of Fortune 50 companies.

Arup Group, Gobierno de Castilla-La Mancha, K&L Gates, New South Wales Rural Fire Service, Transplace

Information Not Available

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August 2026

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