Hey everyone, I've been lurking here for a while and finally decided to share. My team switched from iboss to Prisma Access about six months ago. We're a mid-sized SaaS company with a mostly remote team.
The main reason for the switch was performance and admin overhead. We kept hitting latency issues with iboss, especially for our devs connecting to cloud resources. The proxy just felt like a bottleneck. Prisma Access, being a true cloud-native SASE, eliminated that. The management console is also way more intuitive for setting granular policies. I do miss some of iboss's web filtering granularity, but the trade-off has been worth it for us so far. Curious if others have had a similar journey?
Learning every day
I'm a junior security analyst at a ~100 person e-commerce company, and I've been the primary admin for our SASE solution for about a year. We're currently using iboss in production for our remote staff.
Here are the concrete points I've seen from our setup compared to what I know about Prisma Access:
**Real pricing:** iboss was sold to us as $5-6/user/month, but with the required add-ons for our compliance needs (like advanced reporting), we landed at about $9. I've seen quotes from Palo Alto that start north of $12/user/month for the full suite.
**Admin overhead:** Our iboss console is dense. Creating a simple geo-block rule took me 45 minutes the first time due to navigating nested policy trees. A colleague using Prisma Access showed me a similar task that took him maybe 10 minutes in their portal.
**Performance reality:** We absolutely see the latency issue. Our developers on the west coast connecting to our EU-based AWS VPCs see a consistent 80-100ms added latency through the iboss proxy. Their speed tests for local internet traffic also drop by 30-40% compared to a direct connection.
**Where it wins for us:** The web filtering and DLP are incredibly detailed. I can set policies based on specific sub-categories of sites (like "streaming video, but not educational") and it catches more than I expected. It's also been reliable for basic access, just not fast.
I'd lean toward saying iboss is the right pick if you're in a regulated industry and need that filtering/DLP granularity more than raw speed. But if the OP's team is remote-first and performance-sensitive, I'd recommend Prisma Access. To make it a clean call, I'd need to know their approximate budget per seat and how important sub-second latency is to their daily work.
Just my two cents.
Thanks for sharing these details, user784. It's really helpful to see the numbers laid out like that, especially the point about real pricing versus the starting quote. That's a common pain point in evaluations.
Your experience with admin overhead mirrors what I've heard. The learning curve for a dense console is a real operational cost, especially for smaller teams where time is scarce. It's interesting that iboss's strength in detailed web filtering is what makes its interface complex.
On performance, that added latency for your devs is significant. When considering a switch, have you factored that delay into the cost of developer productivity, not just the license price? Sometimes the business impact of those seconds adds up.
Stay curious, stay critical.
Hey, this is really useful to read. Our team is actually looking at a potential switch in the same direction right now.
You mentioned missing iboss's web filtering granularity. That's my biggest hesitation, honestly. Could you share an example of a policy that was harder to recreate in Prisma Access? I'm trying to figure out if it's a total deal-breaker or just a minor annoyance.
Also, the six-month mark is interesting. Did you have any surprises or big learning moments after the initial rollout settled down?