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

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Cisco and Zscaler are both solutions in the Secure Web Gateways (SWG) category. Additionally, 100% of Cisco users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 98% of Zscaler users who would recommend it.

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Cisco ScanSafe Web Security SaaS [EOL] and Zscaler Internet Access 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: September 2026).

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Secure Web Gateways (SWG)

September 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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VikasTiwari

Senior Network Engineer at Anthology

Cloud security has transformed remote access and now supports zero trust for all users

The best features Zscaler Internet Access offers are Secure Web Gateway, URL filtering, SSL inspections, and policy-based access control. I find myself relying on Secure Web Gateway, URL filtering, SSL inspection, and policy-based access control the most because these are the main and top-most features I use regularly. Zscaler Internet Access has all of these types of features for securing all internet access and web inspections, allowing me to control all traffic through these features. Zscaler Internet Access features include a Secure Web Gateway for URL filtering, file type control, and inline SSL inspections. The second feature is a cloud firewall with Layer 3 to Layer 7 filtering control and stateful inspections. No hardware inspection or hardware firewall is required. I can also perform segmentations by users, location, and application. There is a cloud CASB solution available as well. Additionally, there is an advanced threat protection feature with signature-based behavioral detections, inline IPS, and zero-day threat protections. The cloud sandboxing solution scans unknown files and provides machine learning-based verdicts to prevent zero-day malware delivery in my environment. There is also a DNS security feature that provides DNS tunneling detections, malicious domain controls, and faster threat containment at the DNS layer. The data protection feature includes inline DLP and CASB-style cloud app control, data sovereignty enforcement, and browser isolation, which executes risky sites in isolated cloud browsers and prevents endpoint compromises. Zscaler Internet Access has positively impacted my organization by reducing the dependency on on-premises hardware and improving security posture, enabling faster user onboarding, and providing better performance for remote users. It has resulted in a drop in security incidents related to web threats and improved visibility into user activity. An area for improvement includes fine-grained troubleshooting tools, better policy simulations, and optimizations around initial configuration complexity.

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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

"Granular setup, which was able to set different levels of filters using the OUs in the AD."

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

"We chose iboss for both zero trust and proxy (SWG) because their SWG was superior."

"The console is cloud-based, which is something I really appreciate."

"As I mentioned, the return on investment is significant, as it saved our office locations' bandwidth because when you are working remotely at home, your internet traffic routes directly to iboss and will not go to your office building, saving bandwidth bottlenecks and ensuring that issues with our building internet circuits will not impact your internet connectivity because you are directly going to the iboss data center."

"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."

"Iboss is a solution that prevents advanced persistent threats, and has a zero tolerance for attacks."

More iboss pros

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

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

"The web security is great."

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

"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."

"The solution is scalable, we have around 70,000 total users across various environments."

"I would recommend Zscaler Internet Access due to its ease of use and deployment, with a user-friendly interface."

"Zscaler Internet Access gives visibility, which is important to have, and the fact that it is usable everywhere is a significant advantage."

"We use ZIA for outbound internet connectivity. The internet traffic of on-prem users will be directed to the ZIA cloud for security checks and web filtering."

"Overall, we're very happy with our product."

"The most valuable features I found in Zscaler Internet Access are the restriction of users for a particular URL, the security feature related to stopping DDoS, and the VPN."

"Zscaler covers all the features needed to replace a VPN or proxy solution; they are good, and they've been on the market for 15 years now, so they are mature enough."

"The most valuable features of Zscaler Internet Access include its capacity to scale, the security implementation capabilities, the ability to integrate public IPs related to clients so traffic presents on the internet as a client, and the facility to interoperate with SSEs while maintaining the same security mechanisms from on-premises to cloud environments."

More Zscaler Internet Access pros

Cons

"Our biggest problem with their service was it did not recognize the device and filtering did not always work correctly."

"I have heard they are doing DDoS filtering, but I am not certain if they are implementing it correctly."

"Our iboss subscription access should be more secure with an OTP or VPN etc. It is easy to gain access if, for example, hackers obtain my username and password."

"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."

"One thing I would like to see differently with their Zero Trust platform is that some of the AI aspects related to high-risk activities have more false positives."

"The easiest device I have set up was the Barracuda line of products."

"For zero trust implementation, we encountered complexity issues, especially with a large infrastructure company ExxonMobil."

"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."

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

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

"The price of the solution could be improved."

"The tool should improve the predefined dictionaries."

"The OS capabilities and WSL support could be improved."

"Zscaler should continue to make the user interface better. They should also improve the backup network and continue to expand it so that it can handle larger numbers of customers."

"Do not expect to pay for the service and start using it, like Gmail. Zscaler requires a proper implementation to be done to make it successful."

"Zscale is providing a proxy IP, and most government sites will block traffic from a proxy. Also, we see some performance issues on the cloud side during DC failover."

"Sometimes it's not easy to use during large deployments of workstations. It's a bottleneck from a network point of view."

"Zscaler does not provide dedicated IPs to each customer. Hence, they share a pool of IPs provided by Zscaler. There is a chance of blacklisting these IPs. I also do not like the multi-management portal."

More Zscaler Internet Access cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

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

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

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

"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."

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

Information not available

"It is costlier than other solutions."

"The price is competitive. It's not cheap and it's not expensive."

"Because it's a cloud solution, we pay on a yearly basis. It is affordable and includes tech support and all features."

"The solution is a little bit expensive. On a scale of one to five, I would rate it as a three."

"The pricing is fair based on its competitive market."

"We have found the solution to be expensive."

"Be aware that you will need to invest some time and money to adapt your environment for Zscaler (traffic redirection, software deployment, authentication, etc)."

"Zscaler is transparent about its pricing model."

More Zscaler Internet Access pricing and cost advice

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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

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Computer Software Company

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	13
Midsize Enterprise	7
Large Enterprise	11

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	17
Midsize Enterprise	9
Large Enterprise	39

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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Which is the better security solution - Cisco Umbrella or Zscaler?

Cisco Umbrella and Zscaler Internet Access are two broad-spectrum Internet security solutions that I have tried. Zs...

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Which is better, Zscaler internet access or Netsckope CASB?

We researched Netskope but ultimately chose Zscaler. Netskope is a cloud access security broker that helps identify ...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Zscaler Internet Access?

We have not purchased Zscaler Internet Access through the AWS Marketplace; the licensing process was handled separate...

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Comparisons

Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks vs iboss

Compared 10% of the time

Netskope vs iboss

Compared 8% of the time

Fortinet FortiGate vs iboss

Compared 8% of the time

Cisco Umbrella vs iboss

Compared 6% of the time

Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange Platform vs iboss

Compared 4% of the time

More iboss Competitors

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

Compared 24% of the time

Cisco Umbrella vs Cisco ScanSafe Web Security SaaS [EOL]

Compared 23% of the time

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

Compared 8% of the time

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

Compared 8% of the time

Infoblox BloxOne Threat Defense vs Cisco ScanSafe Web Security SaaS [EOL]

Compared 8% of the time

More Cisco ScanSafe Web Security SaaS [EOL] Competitors

Cisco Umbrella vs Zscaler Internet Access

Compared 29% of the time

Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks vs Zscaler Internet Access

Compared 5% of the time

Netskope vs Zscaler Internet Access

Compared 5% of the time

Fortinet FortiGate vs Zscaler Internet Access

Compared 4% of the time

Check Point Harmony SASE (formerly Perimeter 81) vs Zscaler Internet Access

Compared 2% of the time

More Zscaler Internet Access Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

iboss

September 2026

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Buyer's Guide

Secure Web Gateways (SWG)

September 2026

Cisco ScanSafe Web Security SaaS [EOL] report

Download Cisco ScanSafe Web Security SaaS [EOL] product report

Buyer's Guide

Zscaler Internet Access

September 2026

Download Zscaler Internet Access product report

Also Known As

iBoss Cloud Platform

ScanSafe Web Security SaaS

ZIA

Overview

iboss is the Zero Trust SASE platform that gives organizations complete visibility and governance over their AI, data, and applications through one unified platform, one console, one policy engine, and one data lake.

Your endpoints may already stop malware. Your data and application activity can still be invisible. iboss decrypts and understands every connection, then turns that signal into answers security leaders can act on.

The platform leads with three capabilities in this order: AI Security and Visibility, Data Security and Visibility, and App Visibility and Control. Zero Trust Network Access, VPN replacement, and SD-WAN sit underneath as the access fabric that carries those three. Trusted by global enterprises and government agencies.

What are the most important features of Iboss?

- AI Security and Visibility: conversation capture, shadow-AI discovery, AI DLP, and agent governance across Claude, Co-Work, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok, and emerging services.

- Data Security and Visibility: full SSL/TLS decryption, deep content inspection, MIP label compliance, and one-click compliance reporting.

- App Visibility and Control: signatureless CASB, dual risk scoring, in-app controls, and SSPM for major SaaS.

- Containerized Zero Trust SASE: dedicated containers, isolated SSL keys, one console, one policy engine, one data lake.

- Access fabric: ZTNA, VPN replacement, and SD-WAN under the same platform.

What benefits should users consider in reviews?

- Complete visibility over AI, data, and applications from one platform instead of separate point tools.

- Encrypted traffic is inspected by default so data decisions use content and context together.

- Shadow SaaS and new web tools appear as they are used, with enforceable controls in one console.

- Native data sovereignty through dedicated containers, in-region inspection, and per-customer SSL key custody.

- Scale proven in published materials: 10M+ users, 100+ countries, 150B+ transactions, 2.5B+ threats blocked.

Economic buyers are CISOs, CIOs, and VPs of Security. Champions include security architects, network and infrastructure leaders, SecOps, and GRC. Primary segments: enterprise and business, financial services, government (including FedRAMP Gov Cloud), healthcare, manufacturing, legal and professional services, retail and hospitality, and MSP/MSSP partners. Education, including K-12, is one vertical among these.

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

Zscaler Internet Access provides internet security through cloud-native architecture, ensuring threat protection and traffic management without relying on traditional VPNs and firewalls.

It enhances security by offering features such as CASB and DLP. With its cloud-native proxy architecture, it facilitates seamless security with reduced latency and high availability. Organizations value the scalability and centralized policy management, integrating seamlessly with existing systems for remote work. It ensures secure traffic management by delivering advanced threat protection and support for applications through SSL inspection and sandboxing. Enhanced measures for DLP, better integration with tools like MFA, and optimized reporting are areas for growth.

What are the key features?

Website Filtering: Controls access to harmful sites to protect users.
SSL Inspection: Shields against threats bypassing traditional defenses.
Cloud Sandbox: Provides advanced threat protection through testing.
CASB: Offers cloud application visibility and security enforcement.

What benefits should users seek?

Scalability: Easily adjusts to growing requirements without manual intervention.
Centralized Management: Simplifies policy implementation across locations.
Seamless Integration: Reduces need for traditional VPNs by integrating with remote infrastructure.

Many industries leverage Zscaler Internet Access for securing internet traffic and safeguarding against threats like malware and DDoS attacks. It is integral as a secure web gateway to fulfill data loss prevention, bandwidth control, and filtering needs, allowing remote users robust access and protection globally. Companies employ it alongside existing tools for proper security and policy enforcement.

Zscaler

Sample Customers

Trusted by global enterprises and government agencies.

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

Ulster-Greene ARC, BanRegio, HDFC, Ralcorp Holdings Inc., British American Tobacco, Med America Billing Services Inc., Lanco Group, Aquafil, Telefonica, Swisscom, Brigade Group

Buyer's Guide

Secure Web Gateways (SWG)

September 2026

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