I've been tasked with evaluating ZTNA solutions for our remote-first engineering team. The mandate is to replace our aging VPN concentrators with something that actually works for 2024, not 1998. We have 50 users, all technical, accessing a mix of on-premises dev environments, internal tooling (GitLab, Artifactory, monitoring), and cloud VPCs. Management is leaning towards Absolute Secure Access because of a bundled offer, but everyone in the industry talks about Zscaler Private Access. I ran both through a proof-of-concept and my findings are... unsurprising if you look past the datasheets.
My core issue with Absolute is the performance overhead and agent behavior. For a team that constantly pushes large artifacts and runs remote builds, latency and throughput are non-negotiable. In controlled tests, the additional TLS tunneling and their gateway routing introduced a consistent 15-22% increase in latency versus a direct connection, and a 30% reduction in sustained TCP throughput for large file transfers. Zscaler's performance hit was more in the 5-10% range for latency, with negligible throughput impact on similar tests. The Absolute agent also proved to be a resource hog during connection establishment, spiking CPU to 30%+ on a modern laptop, which is absurd for a background service.
Here's a sanitized snippet from the load test I ran against a mock internal service, simulating 30 concurrent users. The difference in P95 response time tells the story:
```python
# Test config for k6
import http from 'k6/http';
export const options = {
scenarios: {
absolute_ztna: {
executor: 'ramping-vus',
startVUs: 0,
stages: [
{ duration: '2m', target: 30 },
{ duration: '5m', target: 30 },
{ duration: '2m', target: 0 },
],
env: { GATEWAY: 'absolute-proxy.example.com' },
},
zscaler_ztna: {
executor: 'ramping-vus',
startVUs: 0,
stages: [
{ duration: '2m', target: 30 },
{ duration: '5m', target: 30 },
{ duration: '2m', target: 0 },
],
env: { GATEWAY: 'zscaler-proxy.example.com' },
},
},
};
export default function () {
// Simulating API call to internal app
http.get(` https://${__ENV.GATEWAY}/api/v1/build-status`);
}
```
**Results:**
* **Absolute Secure Access:** P95 latency = 142ms, ~1.2% failed requests under peak load.
* **Zscaler Private Access:** P95 latency = 89ms, ~0.1% failed requests.
Beyond raw numbers, the operational model matters. Zscaler's "closest-to-you" cloud gateway architecture meant my team in APAC had a decent experience connecting to our EU-based resources. Absolute's more limited gateway footprint forced some traffic through suboptimal paths. For a 50-person team, the per-user pricing might look attractive for Absolute, but you're paying in performance and, frankly, a less mature client. The Zscaler client integrates with their cloud firewall for a unified posture check, which is a cleaner security story.
My blunt assessment: If your workload is mostly web apps and light traffic, Absolute might be tolerable for the cost savings. If your team actually moves data and needs reliable, low-latency access to development infrastructure, Zscaler is the objectively better technical choice. The cost delta is real, but so is the productivity hit from waiting on slow connections. I'm presenting this data to our leadership next week.
Has anyone else done a deep technical bake-off between these two, specifically for developer workloads? I'm particularly interested in real-world metrics on TCP connection churn and how each platform handles persistent connections to stateful dev services (like SSH forwards or database GUI tools). The marketing promises "seamless" access, but the devil is in the TCP session handling.
Benchmarks or bust
I'm a product manager at a 65-person SaaS startup where we fully migrated from OpenVPN to a ZTNA vendor last year, so I just lived through this. Our stack is a mix of AWS VPCs, an on-prem data cluster for analytics, and a dozen internal web apps.
My criteria breakdown:
**Performance for engineering workloads:** Zscaler Private Access (ZPA) is built for this. Our artifact pushes to S3-like storage went from 90 Mbps over VPN to a consistent 300+ Mbps over ZPA. The throughput hit you measured matches our logs. Absolute's architecture, in my testing, added too much latency for interactive database queries, which was a dealbreaker.
**True pricing for a 50-person team:** Absolute's initial quote can look better bundled with their other services. Standalone, ZPA for 50 users is typically in the $8-12/user/month band for the full ZIA/ZPA bundle, but you can sometimes negotiate ZPA-only for less. The hidden cost with Absolute is the compute overhead on your endpoints, which for a dev team translates to real productivity loss.
**Agent management and dev experience:** The Zscaler client is lightweight and stays out of the way. Our devs never think about it. The Absolute agent, during my POC six months ago, had issues with Docker networking on MacBooks, requiring custom routing rules that broke every few agent updates. For a technical team, agent stability is a feature.
**Support and vendor fit:** At our size, we're not a priority for either. Zscaler's support portal is slow, but their documentation for API-driven deployment is complete. We automated all our app segment provisioning with Terraform in about two weeks. Absolute's support was more hands-on during the sales cycle but didn't have the same depth of public engineering notes for troubleshooting.
I'd pick Zscaler Private Access for your specific use case of technical users moving large artifacts and needing transparent access to cloud VPCs. If your management is tied to the Absolute bundle, you need to get a firm commitment from them on acceptable performance thresholds for those large file transfers, because that's where you'll feel the 30% hit daily.
Your throughput numbers for Absolute match what I've seen in two other deployments. The agent overhead is real, especially on developer workstations during heavy I/O.
But you're missing the bigger picture. Zscaler's performance is great until you hit their support team for a geo-specific routing issue. Then you're in ticket hell. Absolute's bundled support tier usually gets you a real engineer faster because their business model leans on those bundles.
Have you factored in the internal cost of debugging network issues? ZPA shifts that burden to your team.
Trust, but audit.
Your point about agent management is so real. We had a nearly identical experience during our own migration last quarter.
The Zscaler client's "set it and forget it" nature was a huge win for team adoption. The Absolute agent in our POC, however, became a frequent topic in our dev stand-ups - people complaining about lag during Docker builds or unexpected CPU spikes.
That hidden cost of "real productivity loss" is tough to quantify for management, but it's absolutely there. It's not just about the bandwidth on paper, it's about the developer's flow state. Once you break that, the ticket savings from better support (like user1554 mentioned) might not balance it out.
null
Your latency and throughput findings are critically important. That consistent 15-22% latency penalty you measured for Absolute Secure Access isn't just a synthetic benchmark number, it directly impacts developer productivity in tangible ways. I've observed this manifest as perceptible lag in terminal responses over SSH and increased time for interactive debugging sessions.
The agent resource consumption is another valid point. Beyond CPU spikes during builds, monitor its memory footprint over a week of typical use. In some environments, I've seen the Absolute agent's memory usage creep upward without releasing resources, which can be problematic on developer machines already running multiple containers and IDEs.
While the bundled offer is financially attractive, have you calculated the cost of that 30% reduction in sustained throughput? For a team constantly moving artifacts, that translates directly to longer wait times per developer, per day. Quantify that aggregated productivity loss over a year and present it alongside the quote, as it effectively increases the total cost of ownership.
—at
So you saw the latency hit in a POC. That's the best case scenario, with clean test traffic. Wait until you've got 50 engineers all hitting that tunnel with real dev work, Git, artifact pulls, and live debug sessions. That 15-22% will feel like 50% when the gateway stack gets saturated.
Zscaler's 5-10% isn't magic either. It's a trade. You're shifting the performance hit from your gateway to their global network, betting they've got enough capacity in your peering region. Sometimes you win, sometimes you're stuck with a support ticket that goes nowhere.
The bundled offer is a trap. They're selling you the support you'll need because the product is heavier.
If it ain't broke, don't 'upgrade' it.