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 most valuable features are the antivirus as a whole, the anti-malware, and all of the protection features that scan our enterprise devices."
"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."
"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."
"The solution is stable."
"Since working with the tool, we have not found any threats in our organization."
"The most valuable feature is that we can use it as a proxy."
"The product is stable."
"Cisco Web Security Appliance has very good security benefits for any company and is easy to integrate."
"The setup was very easy and straightforward."
"What we liked best about it was the ability to apply policy to either a user ID or an IP-based network."
"Cisco Web Security Appliance is user-friendly and easy to manage. It protects your environment while accessing the internet."
"The deployment process is very simple."
"Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway does most of its job well, but I especially like its data security feature."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to allow or block sites by category."
"Real-time category protection."
"It has protected clients against cyberattacks."
"Most valuable features are content filtering and monitoring."
"I like the product's scalability and stability."
"The most valuable feature is the categorization, where you can allow general access to an application but limit specific features."
"SWG allows me to track internet usage patterns, helping optimize bandwidth and understand how much time each employee spends online."
"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"
"Lookout was moving into the SSE space. And so their work on SecureWeb Gateway and SD-WAN is still sort of evolving."
"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."
"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."
"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 FTD 21 model's Firepower Threat Defense does not have the multi-instance feature for the virtualization with the physical equipment."
"It should have a user-based quota, per-user quota, that can be defined on the appliance."
"We would like to see a security service head, where we can combine all the security into one solution."
"They need a better graphical interface, and they need a better ISE mechanism."
"There are certain shortcomings related to the product's management capabilities, where improvements are required. The solution needs to provide better management of the category of web pages."
"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 Sandbox solution should be integrated with the NIST to handle whatever new vulnerabilities or new sites are identified as potential threats."
"The deployment is a bit complex and it requires expertise to deploy, which is something that should be improved and made easier to do."
"The firewall doesn't have any features because some customers are requesting they will install the firewall without licensing. At this time we cannot go further without licensing. Licensing is a must with Forcepoint Web Security firewalls."
"It takes 20 to 30 minutes for policy replication."
"Sometimes attacks or a new ransomware gets through."
"Security of browsing."
"A feature we wish to see addressed in the next release of Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway involves its administration."
"It has a problem with tablets and the iPhone. It's not filtering on these platforms. It filters on Windows but not iOS or Android."
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Cisco Web Security Appliance is ranked 9th in Secure Web Gateways (SWG) with 29 reviews while Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway is ranked 5th 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 "Ensures security for remote workers". 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, Netskope Next Gen Secure Web Gateway and Symantec Proxy, whereas Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway is most compared with Zscaler Internet Access, Cisco Umbrella, Symantec Proxy, Fortinet FortiProxy and Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks. See our Cisco Web Security Appliance vs. Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway report.
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