Best SASE for a 5-eng startup on AWS with remote workers

I lead engineering for a six-person SaaS company. We run entirely on AWS with a similar remote setup, and we've had Cato SASE in production for about 18 months, handling all our zero-trust access and cloud security.

Core Comparison:
1. **Pricing and Predictability** - Cato is priced per user and per socket, not per data volume. For a team of 5-10, expect ~$55-75/user/month for the full SASE stack (networking, ZTNA, SWG). The hard cost is the socket (~$200/month) if you deploy one in AWS. This is predictable, but the per-user price means a simple contractor account costs the same as a full-time engineer.
2. **AWS Integration Effort** - Initial setup took two days. We deployed a Cato Socket (a small EC2 instance) into our primary VPC. The routing changes (modifying VPC route tables to point to the Socket for private subnet access) were the most intricate part, but their docs are precise. We did not use their PoP model as we wanted the socket for lower latency to our RDS instances.
3. **Policy Management for Lean Teams** - The policy editor is unified, which is a major win. Creating a Zero Trust rule like "Allow Engineering group to access RDS port 5432" is one policy combining user identity and resource. For contractors, clientless access to a web app took 15 minutes to configure. You don't need deep networking knowledge, but you must understand your own AWS resource addressing (security groups, subnets).
4. **Performance and the Primary Limitation** - All traffic, including AWS-bound traffic, routes through Cato's global private backbone. This adds ~10-25ms of latency in our experience, as our packets go from AWS -> Cato Socket -> Cato PoP -> internet. For SSH or database work it's fine, but it's a hard architectural fact. The throughput for us has been more than sufficient, holding steady at about 950 Mbps through the socket during load tests.

My pick is Cato for your stated use case, because the unified policy management for a small team outweighs the latency trade-off. If your engineers are extremely latency-sensitive to your AWS resources, you should evaluate the true latency penalty by testing a socket in your region.

That's a super helpful breakdown of the real-world numbers and setup time, thanks for sharing. The point about the socket cost being a fixed factor while user pricing applies equally to contractors is a great catch - it makes their model less flexible for short-term, limited-access needs.

I'm curious about the unified policy editor you mentioned. How granular does the user/group identity get? If someone's in the "Engineering" group, can you easily set policies based on their device posture (like requiring a managed machine) as part of that same rule, or is that a separate layer? That's often where the complexity creeps back in for us.

Thanks for laying out your needs so clearly. Your setup sounds almost identical to ours from six months ago, before we switched to a SASE provider.

For AWS integration, we deployed a socket. It took about a full day to get the routing right in our VPC. The policy management is where it gets interesting for a small team. The unified editor is powerful, but we found that building rules from scratch felt like overkill. We ended up relying heavily on their default application and risk-based policy templates, then tweaking those. It saved us from getting lost in the weeds.

My main question on pricing, which you hinted at, is about the clientless access feature. Is that included in the standard per-user fee, or does enabling it for a contractor's web app access trigger a different SKU or add-on cost? That's the kind of surprise I'm always trying to avoid.

Great point on the unified policy editor being a win for lean teams. It's a double-edged sword though - it's easy to lock yourself out with a bad rule because the network and security policies are mashed together. Happened to me once, and we had to fall back to a local admin account on the socket.

For a five person shop, that default policy template approach you mentioned is the only sane way to start. Rolling your own from scratch is a recipe for a long weekend.

Cato's model is predictable, but their logging is a weak point for compliance. You mentioned not needing a networking PhD for visibility, which is fair, but if you ever need to prove access for an audit, their aggregated event summaries are insufficient. You can't reconstruct a full session.

The clientless access for contractors is included, but that's where the per-user cost bites. You're paying the full ZTNA rate for someone who might need a browser connection twice a month. For a tiny team, that inefficiency adds up.

On setup, deploying the socket was straightforward. The real time sink was re-working our security groups afterward. Cato's model assumes it becomes the primary enforcement layer, so you'll spend time cleaning up old, overly permissive rules you thought you could keep.

Yep, that logging point is critical. Had a client get a surprise SOC 2 request and we had to scramble because the session details they needed were buried. The summaries are fine for day-to-day "is it working" checks, but they're not forensic. You're right, you can't reconstruct the full chain.

Your point about cleaning up security groups is also a hidden project cost. It feels logical to let Cato handle it all, but untangling those old, overly-broad AWS rules takes real mental energy. We made the mistake of thinking we could phase them out gradually and it just created confusion during troubleshooting.

Cato's "single cloud" marketing is compelling for lean teams, I'll give them that. But the real gotcha for a five-person shop is the lock-in. That socket you deploy becomes your new network choke point, and unwinding those VPC route table changes is a nightmare if you ever want to switch.

On your point about predictable costs scaling with users, it's predictable until you need to add a contractor for two weeks of clientless access. You're suddenly debating a $75 seat for a temp, which feels absurd.

And "decent visibility" is a stretch. Their logging is fine for checking if things are up, but try figuring out why a connection failed last Tuesday. You can't. It's aggregated to the point of being useless for real troubleshooting. For a startup, that's a hidden time tax.

Great to see others in the same boat. I've been researching this for my team too.

The setup and policy management feedback here is really useful, especially about the hidden effort to clean up old AWS security groups. That's a project I hadn't considered.

On the pricing model, the contractor cost issue seems like a real flaw for a small, flexible team. Is there any way to get clientless-only access at a lower tier, or are you stuck buying the full ZTNA seat every time?

The unified editor's granularity is a clever illusion, sold as simplicity. You can indeed tie user groups to device posture in a single rule, but the devil is in the conditional logic. If someone in the "Engineering" group is on an unmanaged machine, the rule's outcome isn't just "block" it's a complex failure state that their aggregated logs will simply call "policy violation." You'll spend more time reverse-engineering what the rule *actually* evaluated than if you had separate, explicit layers for identity and posture to begin with. That's where the marketing gloss fades and the troubleshooting reality begins.

Yeah, the user/group granularity is good on paper. You can indeed add a device posture check into the same rule for an "Engineering" group, like requiring a managed machine.

But the problem isn't the setup, it's the debugging. When a rule blocks someone, the log just says "policy violation" for the whole combined rule. You have to manually check if it was the user group, the device check, or both that caused the block. For a team of five, that's a lot of time wasted on guesswork.

It feels like they combined two complex things and called it simple, but the complexity just moved from setup to troubleshooting.

That "day to get the routing right" is so real. We hit the same VPC routing snag - thought we'd have the socket up in an hour. Spent the afternoon untangling route priorities.

On your pricing question, clientless is usually included, but the seat cost applies to any user in the system, even a contractor. So you're paying the full monthly fee for that sporadic access. No separate SKU, but it still stings for a temp.

Locking yourself out is scary, I hadn't considered that. Are you saying the default policy templates are safe from that risk? Or can those cause the same lockout if you tweak them?

From what I've read while looking into this, the default templates are usually safe because they often have an "allow admin" rule built-in or pre-placed at the top. The risk comes in when you start editing or re-ordering them. If you move that admin rule down, or accidentally create a more specific block above it, that's when you can lock yourself out.

It's a good reason to always have a separate, local admin account set up on the appliance or in AWS as a backup, just in case.

Good point about the local admin backup, that's a lifesaver. But in a cloud-first setup, I've seen teams skip that step because they think "it's all in AWS IAM anyway." Then they get locked out of the SASE console and realize their IAM admin doesn't have a backdoor to the vendor's rule engine.

It's a weird, hybrid layer of access control you have to manage separately. Makes me wonder if any SASE vendors offer a true break-glass procedure using your cloud provider's root account to reset policy.