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Check Point Web Gateway vs Cisco Umbrella comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 21, 2025

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)
5th
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)
Check Point Web Gateway
Ranking in Secure Web Gateways (SWG)
10th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Cisco Umbrella
Ranking in Secure Web Gateways (SWG)
1st
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
121
Ranking in other categories
Internet Security (1st), Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) (2nd), Domain Name System (DNS) Security (1st), Cisco Security Portfolio (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Secure Web Gateways (SWG) category, the mindshare of iboss is 2.2%, up from 1.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Check Point Web Gateway is 1.2%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco Umbrella is 16.9%, down from 19.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Secure Web Gateways (SWG) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Cisco Umbrella16.9%
iboss2.2%
Check Point Web Gateway1.2%
Other79.7%
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
Nagendra Nekkala - PeerSpot reviewer
A user-friendly product that enables organizations to understand user behavior and create policies to block threats from internal and external users
The deployment is very easy. The deployment took one week. We need only one person to deploy and maintain the solution. It's easy to maintain it. The person maintaining the tool must perform data analysis of the blocked sites and the sites monitored by the management. The tool is deployed on the cloud.
Emilio Montoya - PeerSpot reviewer
Ensures internet navigation safety and boosts productivity
The features of Cisco Umbrella I prefer most are DNS protection and traffic redirect. 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. Cisco Talos has helped us reduce the impact of malware traffic. We can see the behavior and choose the correct sites. We're currently testing secure access with Umbrella in order to secure access to core applications. It's a product that the user doesn't even know is there, even though it is protecting them. It's not hard on the equipment. And, for us, it centralizes everything, which improves productivity. With the Experience Insights feature of Cisco Secure Access, we've seen impacts on the management of user connectivity by allowing us to deliver safe connectivity. We are testing the Secure Access product with Cisco Umbrella to improve our connectivity with our users in order to secure access to the corporate applications. Cisco Umbrella is in the cloud, which is nice.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"iboss is among the few products providing inline filtering where no application is needed on the device."
"We chose iboss for both zero trust and proxy (SWG) because their SWG was superior."
"First of all, the security policies are essential. I do not have to rely solely on Active Directory for our users."
"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."
"From a use-case scenario, what I like the most is the plug-in. I like the fact that we can do the filtering of these devices offsite independent of the network they are connected to, and we do not have to have traffic coming back inside our network."
"It was a very easy product to install. It can be deployed very fast."
"I would definitely recommend iboss for web filtering purposes to other organizations or individuals."
"Our primary use case for this product is DLP,"
"The stability of the tool is very good."
"It offers good security and we use it when we want to implement the best security in an organization due to the fact that it gives us broader visibility."
"It filters the URLs by reputation, denying access to those proven to be harmful and inspecting those which haven't been flagged yet to detect threats before the user can enter it."
"The most valuable feature that I see in the application is the filtering of the URLs."
"It has an excellent threat prevention mechanism."
"SmartConsole is intuitive."
"We are satisfied with the effectiveness of the multi-layered defense approach in Check Point Web Gateway."
"Application control gives IT teams an opportunity to set suitable policies that can be used by all teams when coding."
"The most valuable aspect is that it is hosted with Cisco and can detect any new anomalies, acting almost like an XDR."
"The most valuable features for us include tenant lock, content filtering, and DLP solutions, looking for PII and information being exfiltrated."
"Meraki features and cloud-based functionality are advanced and easy to manage centrally."
"We can have a full overview and a quick overview of all the DNS requests. For us, it's quite important."
"Reports provide insight into internet usage and information helpful in creating QoS rules."
"I have found the malware protection feature valuable. It is helpful and deliverable and is able to protect my entire organization from getting compromised. It also prevents us from visiting any malicious sites which are not visible to the users."
"It is a good cloud-based solution for DNS security."
"It's very stable, reliable and does its job."
 

Cons

"The reporting feature needs improvement. It doesn't give you the expected results. It is quite difficult to get the specific reports needed, and it is not as intuitive as the rest of the platform."
"Our biggest problem with their service was it did not recognize the device and filtering did not always work correctly."
"Fold that in with the risk intelligence they're getting from all of the different subscriptions they are a part of. Now, these security companies subscribe to things like emerging threats, databases, etc. You can fold all this intelligence to decide what's happening on an endpoint. I would love to see them start moving into that space. That would compete directly with Microsoft. Maybe that's why they haven't. Having that ability native within the solution would be great. The other area in which I would love to see improvement is more detailed descriptions of why they block websites."
"Iboss is growing so fast that it is often hard for them to keep up with the challenges."
"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."
"To scale up, a new iboss Node Blade Chassis must be purchased."
"The solution could be stronger on the integration side and offer more cloud applications like G Suite or Oracle."
"It is not user-friendly."
"Check Point Web Gateway could add an end point access function."
"For the most modern versions, there currently is no documentation, or it is more difficult to find it."
"Their product coverage is not as extensive as some competitors. They have fewer products and features compared to competitors."
"Deployment issues on Linux have been noted, especially with agents on endpoints."
"The support must be faster."
"The learning curve is complex for new users."
"Perhaps the latency in the administrative part of the portal would be a point of improvement."
"With any Cisco product, it's the licensing side of things that needs improvement."
"It should have a real-time malware classification engine. It should check the malware on the website. It would be good if it had a real-time malware check for the websites because currently, it just compares the DNS queries of the blacklist. It should also have malware control over file execution and the types of files that the users are allowed to download."
"I feel that the application needs other characteristics that are available with other applications in the market."
"For us, as an MSP, the initial licensing changes were a roadblock, and they still could be a lot clearer. Specifically, it's an honor-based licensing system. We'd like it to be more specific to our traffic or our users so that we can make sure that the customer is paying for all their licensing."
"It has happened in the past that Cisco Umbrella has denied us access to secure websites."
"The firewall capabilities could be better. Cisco is starting to introduce some layer 7 capabilities now, but there's still some room to grow. They should continue with the development of Umbrella so that it is a full-blown cloud-managed firewall solution."
"If a hardware platform were provided for Umbrella, that would definitely improve the market for it... Especially when we are addressing governmental customers, they hesitate to connect to the cloud. That is where we need a hardware platform so that the solution can be used on-premises as well."
"I would like to see more integration between Cisco Umbrella and Cisco DNA Center."
 

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 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."
"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."
"Our customers pay a licensing fee annually or once in three or five years, per their requirements."
"There is a need to make yearly payments towards the licensing charges attached to the product. The product is neither too expensive nor too cheap, so it comes at a good price point for my company."
"The price is on the higher side, even when compared to Azure Firewall Premium."
"If one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the tool's price as a seven out of ten."
"This program is very, very expensive."
"The product is not cheap. It is expensive."
"The price is very high."
"It is expensive. Licensing is on a yearly basis. You need to do the support subscription."
"The price is quite good."
"I am not sure, I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I think it's $1.00 or so per device/month."
"It was a little bit expensive on a per seat basis, but the company I was running was only a midsize Australian company, and it was a reasonable budget per computer for that system. It started off being a free product, and then Cisco bought it, and it went to a reasonable price. I was using Cisco AMP as well. So, my per computer cost was reasonably high, but for a small company, it was within an acceptable level."
"There is room for improvement when it comes to the cost."
"The pricing was marvelous."
"We did a good negotiation, and at the moment, its price is fine."
"We were using the free version, and we implemented the paid version about two months ago. I'm paying a fair price, but everything is negotiable with Cisco. One of the benefits that I got by having Cisco Umbrella is the licensing of the Cisco AnyConnect VPN client."
"The price depends on the use case, and it's a bit linear. But it depends on the customer's strategy and how Cisco plans to optimize the costs."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
6%
Government
21%
Healthcare Company
12%
Computer Software Company
12%
Security Firm
8%
Computer Software Company
18%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Healthcare Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise5
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business20
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise8
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business49
Midsize Enterprise30
Large Enterprise51
 

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 Check Point Web Gateway?
You don't have to wander around the tool since it is very simple. You can grab and get a hold of the tool very quickly.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Check Point Web Gateway?
It will be the same pricing as other solutions. Fortinet is the cheaper product, while Palo Alto and Check Point Web ...
What needs improvement with Check Point Web Gateway?
What I don't appreciate about Check Point Web Gateway is that sometimes we encounter problems with them asking too ma...
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...
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...
What do you like most about Cisco Umbrella?
Cisco Umbrella is easy to monitor, manage, and deploy.
 

Also Known As

iBoss Cloud Platform
No data available
OpenDNS
 

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.
Morton Salt, Medical Advocacy and Outreach, BH Telecom, Lightbeam Health Solutions, X by Orange, Cadence, Nihondentsu, Datastream Connexion, Good Sam, Omnyway, FIASA, Pacific Life, Banco del Pacifico, Control Southern, Xero, Centrify, Tradair, Laterlite, Phoenix International, Unisinos, Wilkin Chapman, Connexus Energy, Mutua Universal, Smart & Final, Central New Mexico Community Colleg, Grupo Financiero Multiva
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
Find out what your peers are saying about Check Point Web Gateway vs. Cisco Umbrella and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
868,706 professionals have used our research since 2012.