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 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."
"Cisco Web Security Appliance can integrate with Active Directory, enabling us to manage all the end-users within AD. It's helpful for setting rules based on individual users and groups. For example, you can configure policies for inbound and outbound traffic."
"The tool has good Umbrella DNS security."
"This appliance gives me good visibility in the userbase and their activities."
"The technical support is good. It is reactive and the documentation is very specific and very useful."
"It also has high availability."
"The tool has good Umbrella DNS security."
"The deployment process is very simple."
"Cisco Web Security Appliance is user-friendly and easy to manage. It protects your environment while accessing the internet."
"Reporting and automatic updates of website categorization."
"It has protected clients against cyberattacks."
"The spam filter is very effective."
"I like the product's scalability and stability."
"The solution provided our organization with easy and secure internet access."
"I have found the simplicity of the solution valuable. The dashboard and reports are good as well."
"There is some sandboxing available, which is quite useful."
"The product's user management is an area where my company does not face any challenges."
"Lookout was moving into the SSE space. And so their work on SecureWeb Gateway and SD-WAN is still sort of evolving."
"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."
"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 solution needs to be more user-friendly and easier to navigate."
"I would like more automation."
"The solution could improve the graphical user interface. It is not up to the regular standard of what we would expect from Cisco. Additionally, they need to improve the categorization when blocking in the settings. The CLI could have a better view than the graphical user interface but I did not investigate further."
"The tool needs to improve cloud-based decryption."
"It should have a user-based quota, per-user quota, that can be defined on the appliance."
"The licensing model needs to be more flexible."
"The one thing I don't like about Cisco is that they are very much fragmented in terms of providing the complete solution. They keep on breaking their different feature sets into different boxes."
"As Cisco Web Security Appliance is eight years old, though it's simple to access its UI, the UI needs a little bit of updating. If it could be more interactive similar to the latest gen solutions, that would improve the product. Adding a few more integrations would also make Cisco Web Security Appliance better."
"It's the support that's the problem because that's a different question from the product itself — it's the Achilles heel."
"Reports in the sand-boxing, ease of deployment of sensors to ready to go server with one click of a button."
"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 product needs to have more mobility."
"The initial setup can be complex."
"The automation lifecycle, integration, and export functionality could all be improved."
"The Sandbox solution should be integrated with the NIST to handle whatever new vulnerabilities or new sites are identified as potential threats."
"An area for improvement would be the classification of websites - it can take a long time for new websites to be classified."
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Cisco Web Security Appliance is ranked 10th in Secure Web Gateways (SWG) with 28 reviews while Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway is ranked 6th 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 "Flexible, robust, easy to install, and the technical support is helpful". 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, Skyhigh Security and Netskope Next Gen Secure Web Gateway, whereas Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway is most compared with Zscaler Internet Access, Cisco Umbrella, Symantec Proxy, Fortinet FortiGate SWG and TitanHQ WebTitan. See our Cisco Web Security Appliance vs. Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway report.
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