Blue Coat ProxySG [EOL] vs Cisco Umbrella comparison

Why PeerSpot?

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.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 8, 2026

Blue Coat ProxySG [EOL] and Cisco Umbrella compete in the web security solutions category. Cisco Umbrella seems to have the upper hand due to its cloud-based protection that offers scalability and easier maintenance.

Features: Blue Coat ProxySG [EOL] offers robust security, content filtering, and high-performance web acceleration. It provides ICAP integration and can function as both a forward and reverse proxy. Cisco Umbrella provides cloud integration, real-time threat intelligence, DNS layer security, and single-pane-of-glass management.

Room for Improvement: Blue Coat ProxySG [EOL] could improve by automating processes and enhancing scalability. It also needs better cloud integration and easier policy management. Cisco Umbrella could enhance its offline performance, integrate more seamlessly with third-party solutions, and improve the granularity of content filtering.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Blue Coat ProxySG [EOL] generally requires complex on-premise setup, while Cisco Umbrella offers straightforward cloud-based deployment. Cisco also provides comprehensive customer support, leading to higher overall satisfaction.

Pricing and ROI: Blue Coat ProxySG [EOL] incurs higher costs due to hardware requirements and in-house expertise, affecting ROI. Cisco Umbrella’s model reduces setup time and costs, providing a quicker return on investment and appealing scalability for organizations.

To learn more, read our detailed Secure Web Gateways (SWG) Report (Updated: October 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Secure Web Gateways (SWG)

October 2026

Download the complete report

Helped 921,523 peers since 2012

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.

Read full review

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.

Read full review

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution has massively improved our security posture, giving us full visibility into what our staff does online."

"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."

"From a corporate perspective, I understand that it's important to keep the company data safe."

"Technical support is pretty sharp and very responsive."

"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."

"Its initial setup was straightforward."

"It was a very easy product to install. It can be deployed very fast."

"Overall, the major benefit from Browser Isolation is improved security without compromising employee productivity."

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."

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

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

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

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

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

"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."

"OpenDNS is either a good complement to your existing web content filtering solution at the enterprise level, or it is a good free or easy-to-deploy alternative for home and SMB use."

"The most valuable feature for us is the DNS-based protection."

"Umbrella enables customers to be secure. We are happy with this and this is the most important benefit for customers."

"The DNS data exfiltration and the blocking of DNS tunneling are the most effective features for threat prevention in our company."

"I have found the malware protection feature valuable; it is helpful and deliverable and is able to protect my entire organization from getting compromised, and it also prevents us from visiting any malicious sites which are not visible to the users."

"Cisco Umbrella is absolutely stable."

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

"Cisco's support is fantastic, providing assistance when needed, especially during the initial installation process."

More Cisco Umbrella pros

Cons

"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."

"For zero trust implementation, we encountered complexity issues, especially with a large infrastructure company ExxonMobil."

"Our biggest problem with their service was it did not recognize the device and filtering did not always work correctly."

"Regarding pricing, setup costs, and licensing, iboss is not cheap, and that's my only concern."

"Iboss is growing so fast that it is often hard for them to keep up with the challenges."

"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."

"Sometimes, obviously, there are bugs."

"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, and that is where in 2025 we had to migrate to the Palo Alto-based platform."

More iboss cons

"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."

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

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

"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."

"The solution could be faster as the process is very slow."

"Lower costs including licensing, support, and renewals would be beneficial."

"I would like for them to continue building on IPS and IDS functionalities."

"The product can be pretty expensive."

"Hopefully, it works with the Canvas and starts feeding results into the AI canvas. That would be excellent."

"It's somewhat pricey for us, however, it's an awesome solution."

"iOS devices and mobiles are huge in my environment right now, and I cannot run them on Cisco Umbrella 24/7."

"I don't think our workers like it all that much. It has actually made employee morale worse because we block a lot of stuff."

More Cisco Umbrella cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The overall pricing for iboss is very competitive and transparent."

"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."

"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."

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

"It is expensive compared to one of its competitors."

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

"The pricing is fair."

"Our licensing fees are on a yearly basis."

"We did a good negotiation, and at the moment, its price is fine."

"Pricing and licensing of Cisco Umbrella is a bit confusing because you have to separate the DNS solution and the full-feature solution. Cisco in Portugal helped us understand which one was the right one for us."

"Pricing depends on the automation requirements of the organization."

"It needs a better price point."

"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."

"The product is pricey compared to Cisco Firepower."

More Cisco Umbrella pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Secure Web Gateways (SWG) solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

921,523 professionals have used our research since 2012.

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	15
Midsize Enterprise	8
Large Enterprise	16

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

Ask a question

Earn 20 points

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

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

More iboss Competitors

Zscaler Internet Access vs Blue Coat ProxySG [EOL]

Compared 26% of the time

Steelhead vs Blue Coat ProxySG [EOL]

Compared 21% of the time

Forcepoint Secure Web Gateway vs Blue Coat ProxySG [EOL]

Compared 21% of the time

More Blue Coat ProxySG [EOL] Competitors

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

More Cisco Umbrella Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

iboss

October 2026

Download iboss product report

Buyer's Guide

WAN Optimization

November 2026

Download Blue Coat ProxySG [EOL] product report

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Umbrella

November 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

Buyer's Guide

Secure Web Gateways (SWG)

October 2026

Download Free Report

Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco, Fortinet, Zscaler and others in Secure Web Gateways (SWG). Updated: October 2026.

DOWNLOAD NOW

921,523 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our list of best Secure Web Gateways (SWG) vendors.

We monitor all Secure Web Gateways (SWG) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.