Blue Coat ProxySG [EOL] vs Cisco Umbrella comparison

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Broadcom and Cisco are both solutions in the Secure Web Gateways (SWG) category. Additionally, 83% of Broadcom users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 97% of Cisco users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 3, 2026

Blue Coat ProxySG [EOL] and Cisco Umbrella compete in the cybersecurity space focusing on web filtering and secure internet access. Cisco Umbrella holds the advantage due to its alignment with modern cloud-based needs, offering comprehensive, scalable coverage.

Features: Blue Coat ProxySG [EOL] offers strengths in on-premises deployment with features such as robust web filtering, SSL decryption, and data loss prevention. Cisco Umbrella, adopting a cloud-based architecture, provides DNS-layer protection, secure web gateway capabilities, and advanced threat intelligence integration, making it well-suited for remote and hybrid workforce environments.

Room for Improvement: Blue Coat ProxySG [EOL] needs advancements in cloud integration, scalability, and automated policy management. Cisco Umbrella could enhance its support for non-DNS threats, increase integration capabilities with third-party solutions, and enrich its reporting features for more granular insights.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Cisco Umbrella is cloud-native, facilitating quick deployment with minimal on-premises requirements, supported by a highly responsive support infrastructure. Blue Coat ProxySG [EOL] involves complex on-premises deployments, requiring significant resources, with solid but less efficient support due to its end-of-life status.

Pricing and ROI: Blue Coat ProxySG [EOL] offers a lower initial cost but may incur higher long-term expenses due to maintenance challenges and scalability issues. Cisco Umbrella, despite a potentially higher upfront investment, promises better ROI through enhanced operational efficiency and cost-effective scalability, which aligns well with its extensive feature set.

To learn more, read our detailed Secure Web Gateways (SWG) Report (Updated: October 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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Suhas Suryavanshi

Information Security Engineer at M.Tech

Granular control over website access has lead to decreased bandwidth and increased performance

If you have previously worked on the product then it is quite simple. However, if you are new to it then the implementation is a little bit tricky. On the Cloud Proxy, the deployment takes less than one day. If you are using the ProxySG or the on-premises solution, it will take one to two weeks depending on the policy configuration, the size of the organization, and what kinds of policies are needed. The number of staff you need to maintain the solution depends on the size of the organization, and how many changes occur on a daily basis. If you have one thousand employees then you need at least one employee to look after it.

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KamranJameel

Head Of IT at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees

Secure browsing has protected users from DNS threats and improves malware defense

The major issue is that sometimes when you install the client, it shows you protected and displays that it is live with the backend servers and everything. However, in reality, it was not getting any feed from the main client and is just sending your traffic to open DNS, which sometimes causes an issue because the protection you have implemented can be breached by users. The primary thing that Cisco Umbrella lacked most of the time is their client. Previously, they had a separate Cisco client. Now they have merged everything into the Cisco Secure Endpoint client—one client for everything, for Cisco Endpoint, for Cisco AnyConnect, and for Cisco Umbrella, which they did probably in 2025.

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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

"The security aspect of the solution, particularly the malware behind it, is excellent. That's something that really helped us out. It's not just a simple proxy that just blocks the insights of potential threats that come on behind it. They do malware detection and that helps us a lot."

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

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

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

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

"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."

"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."

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

More iboss pros

"Proxy Solution and ADN, specifically its integration capability with Blue Coat Director to apply seamless policy across all of Blue Coat, along with intuitive proxy policy deployment using VPN and the ability to forward-chain your proxy, make it overall a good solution though growth requires automation support."

"Since the implementation of this solution, the bandwidth has decreased and the performance in terms of Internet access has increased."

"We were able to monitor users' social media behavior and control certain activities to be allowed on the social media, which helped to prevent data loss and other activities that could result in a negative impact to the organization."

"It's a great solution for high load enterprise infrastructure to protect company networks from web threats."

"Customer Service: Blue Touch support is top notch and very responsive when I opened service requests."

"Proxy Solution and ADN and their integration capability with Blue Coat director are positive features."

"The functionality of this solution is one of the best, and it is leading the market."

"It features intuitive proxy policy deployment using a VPN."

"The best possible thing is that it is very easy to deploy, easy to configure, and very fast to get onboarded with a customer because this is a cloud-based service."

"I would describe the experience deploying Cisco Umbrella overall as super easy. It was awesome. It was lovely to deploy it."

"The solution is extremely stable. It has excellent performance."

"It was really valuable to me in protecting the outgoing data of the company, we got no viruses and no issues on any computer on the network, which is quite unusual, and it was a very successful product that I'd certainly recommend to any business looking to just add another layer of security around their company."

"This is a good solution, and there are many advantages to this solution."

"With Cisco Talos's threat intelligence, we reduce the impact of malware traffic in our network, and we currently see the behavior of equipment and choose the correct sites."

"It enables us to go granular in the customization of blocking some categories on the DNS."

"We use various types of Umbrella and I'd recommend the solution as one of the best on the market that works well in different environments and is extremely easy to deploy."

More Cisco Umbrella pros

Cons

"The endpoint-type solution is an area that needs some improvement."

"The solution could be stronger on the integration side and offer more cloud applications like G Suite or Oracle."

"Sometimes, obviously, there are bugs."

"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."

"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."

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

"I appreciate that iboss's single pane of glass console gives centralized visibility into web traffic, user activity, security policies, and alerts from one dashboard, allowing us to quickly investigate incidents and monitor policy violations without switching between multiple tools, improving operational efficiency; however, the dashboard customization and reporting could be more flexible."

More iboss cons

"Blue Coat advertises the ProxySG as a WAF, but it really isn’t."

"We cannot automate the product since the IP address can only be assigned after acquisition of the serial number."

"They need to improve the intellectual analysis for APT vectors from web."

"It lacks deployment over multiple platforms and integration with SDN architecture."

"The GUI works, but could be better."

"There were benefits but the evolution is slow, hence wanting to move on with the product."

"It would be great if the product had inbuilt queuing for Quality of Service."

"The pricing could be improved."

"It would be useful if they had a malware protection engine running inside their own VM."

"I feel that the application needs other characteristics that are available with other applications in the market."

"Support for multiple domains is important to us."

"It had the ability to do a lot of app control. So, every single app that went through that portal was registered, but there is a general issue with the whole app control. As soon as you add a mobile phone to your network, all of the apps get registered through the system, and you can approve, reject, or just let them go through. When I looked at it, it was impossible to manage app control. There was just so much data. I didn't apply that service because I just didn't have the time to manage it. It would be good if there was a way to categorize applications."

"We've noticed some issues with the SWG where, when I'm connected, it thinks I'm in Miami, Florida instead of Savannah, Georgia."

"The reporting could be improved by way of the information that's displayed. For example, when you pull a report, it shows an internal employee going to many websites, but you can spin that right down by saying a lot of it is being cached."

"The integration with other solutions is a little complex. If you want to integrate with something like ArcSight or LogRhythm or Splunk, you need to do a lot of configuration. There are no easy ways to implement it."

More Cisco Umbrella cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"Additional features, such as Flash Proxies, have their own licensing fees that depend on what the requirements are."

"Cisco Umbrella is expensive and could be cheaper."

"Cisco is expensive. For example, we are looking at Nexus Dashboard, and it's costing about 250,000 euros. I ask, "What do I get from it?" I'm still not convinced that we have to spend on it, so pricing is a problem."

"There are no hidden costs with Umbrella. Everything is included in the package."

"I rate the tool's pricing a five out of ten."

"You get what you pay for."

"Cisco Umbrella is not a cheap product. However, it's not a matter of the cost; it's more a matter of the value of security. It is easy to measure this value when you have a security incident. I think the price is a good trade-off for a product that can help you avoid security threats."

"There is room for improvement when it comes to the cost."

"You can request an evaluation license."

More Cisco Umbrella 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

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

Outsourcing Company

Financial Services Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	14
Midsize Enterprise	8
Large Enterprise	15

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	51
Midsize Enterprise	31
Large Enterprise	51

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with iboss?

iboss could be improved by making the dashboard more user-friendly, providing more detailed real-time alerts, and imp...

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What is your primary use case for iboss?

iboss is primarily used for cloud security, helping to protect users when they access websites and cloud applications...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for iboss?

The pricing and licensing for iboss were reasonable for the security features. The setup costs were manageable, thoug...

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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 the better security solution - Cisco Umbrella or Microsoft Cloud App Security?

Cisco Umbrella is an integral component of the Cisco SASE architecture. It integrates security in a single, cloud-nat...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco Umbrella?

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing reveals that the pricing is acceptable, but it is marginally a ...

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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 7% of the time

FortiSASE vs iboss

Compared 5% of the time

Zscaler Internet Access vs iboss

Compared 5% of the time

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Zscaler Internet Access vs Blue Coat ProxySG [EOL]

Compared 27% of the time

Steelhead vs Blue Coat ProxySG [EOL]

Compared 22% of the time

Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway vs Blue Coat ProxySG [EOL]

Compared 20% of the time

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Zscaler Internet Access vs Cisco Umbrella

Compared 23% of the time

Palo Alto Networks DNS Security vs Cisco Umbrella

Compared 13% of the time

Cisco Secure Access vs Cisco Umbrella

Compared 4% of the time

Fortinet FortiGate vs Cisco Umbrella

Compared 3% of the time

Check Point Web Gateway vs Cisco Umbrella

Compared 2% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

iboss

October 2026

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Buyer's Guide

WAN Optimization

October 2026

Download Blue Coat ProxySG [EOL] product report

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Umbrella

October 2026

Download Cisco Umbrella product report

Also Known As

iBoss Cloud Platform

No data available

OpenDNS

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

ProxySG appliances provide complete control over all your web traffic, delivering world-class threat protection. Robust features include user authentication, web filtering, data loss prevention, inspection, and visibility of SSL-encrypted traffic, content caching, bandwidth management, stream-splitting and more.

Broadcom

Cisco Umbrella provides fast-deploying DNS-layer security with powerful threat protection capabilities. Trusted by over 30,000 entities, it ranks highly in DNS security and effectively supports secure remote work environments.

Cisco Umbrella offers comprehensive DNS security, web filtering, and ease of use, enhancing network security through robust threat protection and malware prevention. It processes over 600 billion requests daily, making it a leader in its field. The seamless integration with existing infrastructures and cloud-based nature makes it suitable for remote and distributed work environments, ensuring consistent security throughout. Management is streamlined with a single-pane interface that simplifies administration, while in-depth reporting capabilities provide valuable insights for continuous monitoring.

What are the key features of Cisco Umbrella?

DNS Security: Provides leading protection by managing DNS queries and blocking malicious sites.
Web Filtering: Offers granular control over web content to safeguard internet usage.
Ease of Integration: Fits well into existing infrastructures, simplifying deployment and use.
Intuitive Management: Single-pane management streamlines administration and enhances usability.
Cloud-Based Flexibility: Supports secure remote work environments.

What benefits can users expect from using Cisco Umbrella?

Superior Threat Protection: Reduces risk by effectively detecting and preventing cyber threats.
Consistent Security: Provides uniform protection across network environments.
Efficiency and Visibility: Leverages comprehensive reporting for better security insights.
Easy Deployment: Quick and straightforward setup with minimal disruption.

Cisco Umbrella is widely adopted in industries requiring advanced DNS-level security to counteract malware, phishing, and cyber threats. Its ability to monitor and protect remote and roaming employees makes it an attractive option for sectors highly dependent on cloud services. By managing DNS queries and blocking harmful sites, Cisco Umbrella enhances cybersecurity across networks, providing an added layer of protection for businesses worldwide.

Cisco

Sample Customers

Trusted by global enterprises and government agencies.

Global Technology and Material Manufacturer

Chart Industries, City of Aspen, Eastern Mountain Sports, FLEXcon, George Washington University, Jackson Municipal Airport Authority, Ohio Public Library Information Network, PTC, Richland Community College, Smart Motors, Tulane University, VeriClaim

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October 2026

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