Hi everyone, new to the forum but I've been reading for a while. Great community here!
My company is finally moving from our old VPN to a proper SASE/Zero Trust model. We have about 200 people, fully hybrid, with a mix of corporate laptops, some BYOD for contractors, and a couple of small AWS/Azure environments. I'm leading the evaluation and have narrowed it down to Banyan Security and Zscaler ZPA for the private access piece.
I've seen the big name recognition with Zscaler, but Banyan keeps coming up for being simpler and more developer-friendly. Iām curious about real-world experience between them.
My main questions are:
1. For deployment and daily management, which one is less of a headache for a relatively small IT team? We don't have a huge security staff.
2. How flexible are they for non-corporate devices? We need to give contractors access to specific internal tools without giving them a full company laptop.
3. The pricing models seem very different. Is Zscaler's user-based licensing as heavy as it looks compared to Banyan's device-based approach? We have more devices than people.
Any insights on day-to-day use, unexpected costs, or gotchas would be super helpful. I want to make sure I'm asking the right questions before we get on sales calls. 😅
I'm an IT manager at a tech consultancy with about 150 hybrid employees. We replaced our legacy VPN with Banyan for zero-trust access about 18 months ago and I evaluated Zscaler ZPA during the process.
**Deployment and management effort:** Banyan was faster to roll out. The initial setup took my team about two weeks, mostly defining access policies. Their Terraform provider let us manage most config as code. Zscaler felt more infrastructure-heavy; the demo required planning connectors and a more staged rollout.
**Pricing model impact:** Banyan's device-based licensing (~$8-12/device/month for us) was cheaper. We have ~220 managed devices and maybe 50 contractor BYOD sessions monthly. Zscaler's user-based model (quoted ~$9-14/user/month) would have cost more since we have more devices than active users.
**BYOD and contractor flexibility:** Banyan handles this well. For contractors, we send a secure invite link; they get a short-lived certificate in their browser or a lightweight desktop agent with no local admin needed. Zscaler's client can also do this, but the policy setup for external identities felt more complex in my trial.
**Support and learning curve:** With our small team, Banyan's support was responsive (under 30 min for urgent). The console is simpler, which is good but means less granular reporting. Zscaler's portal is powerful but dense; I'd want dedicated security staff to manage it fully.
I'd recommend Banyan for a smaller team that values a simpler, dev-friendly setup and has a high device-to-user ratio. If your company is planning rapid headcount growth or needs very deep inspection and logging, reconsider Zscaler. Can you share your planned growth for the next two years and if you have a dedicated security analyst?