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Cisco Web Security Appliance vs TitanHQ WebTitan comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 4, 2024

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
Sponsored
Ranking in Secure Web Gateways (SWG)
7th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
Internet Security (3rd), Web Content Filtering (1st), Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) (7th), ZTNA as a Service (8th), Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) (8th)
Cisco Web Security Appliance
Ranking in Secure Web Gateways (SWG)
11th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
31
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
TitanHQ WebTitan
Ranking in Secure Web Gateways (SWG)
24th
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
Internet Security (10th), Web Content Filtering (4th), Domain Name System (DNS) Security (10th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Secure Web Gateways (SWG) category, the mindshare of iboss is 2.1%, up from 1.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco Web Security Appliance is 2.4%, down from 2.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of TitanHQ WebTitan is 1.2%, down from 1.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Secure Web Gateways (SWG)
 

Featured Reviews

Matt Crockford - PeerSpot reviewer
It's easy to roll out, and their understanding of our business made it seamless
One aspect we value about iboss is its simplicity. Their customer service is brilliant, and they are super responsive and knowledgeable. It's easy to roll out, and their understanding of our business made it seamless. We were impressed by the solution's mental health function, which can detect if someone needs help. It scans what users are browsing and flags warning signs so we can check to see if they are okay. We've had to use it a couple of times. The user interface is highly intuitive. Our IT team picked it up with minimal training. It's arranged so that it's easy to find where things are. Another advantage is the single pane of glass console, which gives you visibility into what's happening. We're not fully there yet because we haven't implemented zero trust, but we're excited about the possibilities from the demos we've seen. We launched a POC of iboss' ChatGPT Risk Protection feature two weeks ago. AI is a great tool, but you need to be careful what you put into it. My biggest fear is employees inputting sensitive corporate information or customer PII data into one of these chatbots. I was impressed by our trial of the feature. It's exactly what we wanted. Now, when a user goes to ChatGPT, there's a banner warning them not to share information, and we can block conversations containing customer data like bank details and email addresses. I don't want to stop people from using it, but we need visibility. We've only tried it on a test group of 15 people. You can configure it to look for specific keywords or integrate it with your DLP policy if you have that configured
Vusa Ndlovu - PeerSpot reviewer
Advanced protection features offer robust security while integration process presents challenges
With the WebAssign integration, it is not easy when I am integrating policies within the company, especially with NAND and wireless policies. The challenge arises when traffic is blocked from either wireless or wired connections. Although implementing it as a standalone is quicker, integrating BYOD with Cisco I and FTB can be tiring. Once it is done correctly, the functionality and reports become valuable, although the implementation part can still be challenging.
Pusa Alexandru-Catalin - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides basic email protection features but needs improvement in learning capabilities
TitanHQ does a middle-of-the-road job like Bitdefender and SensorNet, and it has a learning feature, though it's not as advanced as previous technology. In the past, I used a far superior product with no false alarms and minimum spam. This tool learned quickly from my inbox, offering simple yet useful features, such as two links embedded in the email footer indicating whether the email was spam or not.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Iboss is a solution that prevents advanced persistent threats, and has a zero tolerance for attacks."
"Its initial setup was straightforward."
"Granular setup, which was able to set different levels of filters using the OUs in the AD."
"Because of iboss, I did not have to assign web filtering tasks to my techs on a daily basis."
"The iboss system is highly reliable. The false positive rates are small compared to some other systems we've experienced through other partner agencies who use competing solutions."
"I would definitely recommend iboss for web filtering purposes to other organizations or individuals."
"Technical support is pretty sharp and very responsive."
"Content filtering is the most useful feature of iboss."
"The solution provides good web reputation and anti-malware protection."
"The most valuable features of the solution are the functions of proxy for the users who use the internet and the security it offers against the not-so-secure web pages."
"The most valuable feature of Cisco Web Security Appliance is the provided anti-malware functionality and URL categorization. I can block access to malicious websites. 99 percent of the cases are related to a malicious website. If I cannot browse those malicious websites, then we are 99 percent protected."
"It's a scalable product."
"Great for assisting with connections to networks or apps."
"Cisco Web Security Appliance is user-friendly and easy to manage. It protects your environment while accessing the internet."
"The best feature of Cisco Web Security Appliance is its policy framing. It also has a good UI and it can handle traffic well. Cisco Web Security Appliance is a good product."
"Cisco Web Security Appliance has very good security benefits for any company and is easy to integrate."
"The most valuable feature is web filtering, where we are able to blacklist and whitelist sites on the fly."
"The DNS proxy is also valuable. It has nothing to do with blocking websites, which we can do by sending all our DNS requests through WebTitan. However, the DNS proxy gives us more information about the machine sending the request. If you cross-reference that information with WADA, you can determine which user is making the request and create a user-specific policy or profile."
"Not a whole lot of oversight is required after WebTitan is installed. I get email notifications and occasionally browse the reporting. This is pretty important because I don't have the bandwidth to actively monitor all this stuff 24/7. It is just not possible. Therefore, it is important that it doesn't require a lot of my time once it is deployed and working."
"The web content filter is the most valuable feature."
"The solution offers very good self-authentication. It has a lot of protocols and ways to authenticate users by ID, or by Active Directory Integration. It's able to take credentials from the Active Directory Domain Controllers."
"The web filtering is the most valuable feature. The OTG client was the determining factor."
"It's extremely stable. I would say it's flawless. We did have some concerns that, if it did fail, all internet access would stop for our people because the proxy wouldn't be there. That concern has subsided over the years because it's proven that it doesn't really fail."
"The monitoring abilities of the product are the most valuable for us. As you deploy it, you can adapt it. As you monitor, if employees go to things that you don't like, or to things that you need to allow, the ability to monitor and see how much is necessary—where they're getting shot down or blocked—is helpful."
 

Cons

"Sometimes, obviously, there are bugs."
"Sometimes when you call in support, you get someone who is just following a sheet. It feels like a runaround. You feel that you are running into that support wall."
"Our biggest problem with their service was it did not recognize the device and filtering did not always work correctly."
"Sometimes the agent stops working in iboss, and we have to reinstall the agent."
"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."
"The solution could be stronger on the integration side and offer more cloud applications like G Suite or Oracle."
"Regarding pricing, setup costs, and licensing, iboss is not cheap, and that's my only concern."
"The reporting feature needs improvement."
"The support for this solution could be improved. We have experienced issues with their SMARTnet support system."
"We would like to see a security service head, where we can combine all the security into one solution."
"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."
"The product is great, however, incorporating features offered by competitors would be beneficial."
"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."
"The tool needs to improve cloud-based decryption."
"The solution is not very compatible with other products."
"Cisco lacks a GUI-based troubleshooting feature compared to products by other vendors."
"The only thing I can think to change would be to give more options under the various categories for what you want to be blocked. There should be a way to be super specific."
"For security, it's very restrictive. For us, it blocks a lot, even too much, so we have had to create exceptions. A new implementation takes a bit of time to train it up, to put in all the exclusions, but once you have that done, it's just a matter of adding things as they come up."
"On occasion, we whitelist a site and it still gets blocked. To get it working, we have to remove it and then re-add it a couple of times, until it finally takes hold."
"WebTitan could improve the software module and the platform's overall stability, and its competitors have a more sophisticated user interface. We have found some bugs as well as some issues with functionality and security that we've already forwarded to TitanHQ."
"We have spoken with TitanHQ in the last month about improvements in functionality because we have used other similar platforms and have a different view of things. We have some concerns about the search and the filters. We need to quickly search which users can or cannot access a particular site and why."
"I've been trying to install an OTG on Windows 7 machines, and I simply can't get it to work."
"The technology employed by TitanHQ doesn't learn enough and is still on the basic side."
"There are some small bugs in the real-time login environment. There is a real-time login and you can see which URLs are blocked or allowed for every user. They should make sure this is resolved in future releases."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is expensive compared to one of its competitors."
"We have not priced the solution recently, but they were competitive with other vendors in the past."
"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 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."
"The overall pricing for iboss is very competitive and transparent."
"I rate the product price a ten on a scale of one to ten, where one is low price and ten is high price."
"Regarding Cisco price-wise, it is always on a bit on the higher side."
"The tool's licensing is yearly."
"I know from the manager that the price is too high and that other solutions offer the same features for less."
"Licensing fees are based on the number of users."
"Cisco Web Security Appliance is not the cheapest solution on the market, but it's well worth it."
"I rate Cisco WSA a seven out of ten since it is costly."
"The solution's cost depends on how many users you purchase. It was maybe $3 or $5 per user, which is a bit expensive."
"The cost could be lower, though it is not currently prohibitive for larger companies."
"It's very aggressively priced, which is something that we definitely like."
"WebTitan helps reduce costs associated with web filtering. In the event that somebody was compromised due to browsing the Internet, there will be at least one device offline. The time and energy spent cleaning that thing up and getting it back online, as well as having that user set up with some sort of a solution so they can continue working, makes it well worth the money. If a single device has been compromised, my time and the potential of having to buy additional hardware is worth at least a couple thousand dollars. Worst case scenario, if our entire organization or the majority of our organization got compromised, then it could get into the 50,000-plus for recovery. It depends on if it is a massive ransomware attack where it has pretty much crippled our entire business."
"It's very reasonably priced. We don't have to go for a monthly plan or anything like that. There are no extra costs in addition to the standard licensing fee."
"The pricing of WebTitan is good. It's the right price. We paid more and more for Cisco Umbrella."
"The pricing is good. It's a substantial cost, but they've held their prices over the years, which has been good."
"The licensing, although I can't remember the exact cost, was very affordable. I want to say it was maybe $40 per license."
"There are lots of products out there, and most of them are a lot more expensive. Overall, I'm very happy with SpamTitan. It has been a great solution for a very small library."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
16%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Non Profit
8%
Computer Software Company
18%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Educational Organization
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with iboss?
For zero trust implementation, we encountered complexity issues, especially with a large infrastructure company Exxon...
What is your primary use case for iboss?
Previously when I used iboss, we did the POC for iboss for ExxonMobil. Four or five people wanted to move from our ol...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for iboss?
Regarding pricing, setup costs, and licensing, iboss is not cheap, and that's my only concern. There are cheaper alte...
What do you like most about Cisco Web Security Appliance?
The most valuable features of the solution are the functions of proxy for the users who use the internet and the secu...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco Web Security Appliance?
Comparing with other products, Cisco has more functionality, but pricing is a challenge. Cisco is not a product for s...
What needs improvement with Cisco Web Security Appliance?
With the WebAssign integration, it is not easy when I am integrating policies within the company, especially with NAN...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for TitanHQ WebTitan?
The pricing of TitanHQ is more or less similar to other tools. I would be willing to pay more for a better service.
What needs improvement with TitanHQ WebTitan?
The technology employed by TitanHQ doesn't learn enough and is still on the basic side. I had previously used 'only m...
What is your primary use case for TitanHQ WebTitan?
I mainly use TitanHQ for email protection, specifically for no false alarms and minimal spam.
 

Also Known As

iBoss Cloud Platform
Cisco WSA, Cisco Web Security
WebTitan, WebTitan Web Filter
 

Overview

 

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.
New South Wales Rural Fire Service, Caixa Seguradora
Clarks, Pepsi, Purple, Comcast, Virgin, McDonalds, Sprint, Adtran, Xirrus, Eir, ViaSat
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco Web Security Appliance vs. TitanHQ WebTitan and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
865,384 professionals have used our research since 2012.