Hey everyone, new here. I'm looking at cloud security solutions and keep seeing the same three names: Umbrella, Zscaler, Netskope.
Are there any solid alternatives I should be researching? I'm mostly focused on protecting remote users and web filtering. Budget is a concern, so the big enterprise suites feel like overkill. What's working for you?
I'm Lisa, lead revenue-ops at a 350-person B2B SaaS company. We migrated off a legacy on-prem proxy two years ago and now run Perimeter 81 in production for our globally distributed team.
Core Comparison:
1. **Target Audience & Pricing Fit**: Perimeter 81 is built for mid-market tech companies. We pay approximately $6 per user per month for their secure web gateway and firewall-as-a-service bundle. The big three often start at $12+ per user for comparable modules. A hidden cost to watch is data retention; advanced logging for compliance can add 20-30% to the base.
2. **Deployment & Agent Management**: We had a functional agent on all Windows and macOS endpoints via Intune/Jamf in under 48 hours. The DNS-based filtering required only a change to our public DNS records. The main config gotcha was needing to create location-based firewall rules before enabling full tunnel mode to avoid cutting off access to local printers and devices.
3. **Performance & Limitations**: Throughput is sufficient for a knowledge workforce. In our environment, we see no noticeable latency for web traffic. The clear limitation is in advanced CASB functionality; it has basic API integrations for SaaS apps like Salesforce and O365 for shadow IT discovery, but lacks the deep, automated session-level controls of Netskope. It is a firewall and web filter first.
4. **Vendor Support & Roadmap**: Their technical support responds within SLA (we have business hours) and engineers understand common identity provider (Okta, Azure AD) integrations. Their roadmap is transparent, but feature velocity is slower than Zscaler's. You trade cutting-edge for stability and simplicity.
My pick is Perimeter 81 for your stated focus on remote users and web filtering on a budget. If your compliance needs require deep SSL inspection for all traffic or you have a significant legacy data center footprint, tell us that - it would change the recommendation.
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