Hi everyone! 👋 I’ve been following this forum for a bit but this is my first post. I’m helping my company (we’re about 50 people, fully remote) look at SASE/SSE options to replace our old VPN. It’s a bit overwhelming!
We use Asana and Slack heavily, and everyone is spread out. I’ve seen Cato Networks and Perimeter 81 mentioned a lot for smaller setups like ours. From what I’ve read, they both seem to bundle security and networking into one cloud service, which sounds perfect.
Could anyone share their experience with these two for a team our size? I’m especially curious about:
- How easy they are to set up and manage without a huge IT team (we have one sysadmin).
- Performance for daily collaboration tools—do they slow things down?
- Any gotchas or things you wish you knew before choosing one over the other?
We really just want something secure that doesn’t get in the way of people doing their work. I’d love some real-world advice!
Thx!
Hey, I totally get where you're coming from. I'm Brian Lee, and I lead IT for a 50-person manufacturing company that's also fully remote. We switched from a traditional firewall/VPN setup to a SASE platform about 18 months ago, so this is right in my wheelhouse.
Here's my breakdown based on my evaluation and hands-on testing of both options:
**Setup and Management Effort:** Perimeter 81 felt easier for our sole sysadmin to initially configure. The console is very app-and-user-centric, and we had a working prototype in an afternoon. Cato is powerful but felt more network-centric from the get-go; you're thinking about IP ranges and policies right away. It took us a few days to feel comfortable.
**Pricing Transparency for 50 Users:** Perimeter 81's pricing was straightforward "per user," period, and we were quoted right around $5/user/month. Cato's quote was more "per user plus a base fee for the network," which made the per-user cost look lower but the overall bill came out slightly higher for our size. For 50 people, expect both to be in the ballpark of $4-8/user/month, but Cato's model can scale differently if you add a lot of branch-like locations later.
**Performance for Daily Tools (Slack/Asana):** This was key for us. We saw no noticeable latency with either for basic SaaS apps when users were connected to a nearby PoP. However, with Cato, we noticed that if a user's home ISP routed poorly to Cato's nearest PoP, the client could sometimes force a reconnect to a farther one, adding lag. Perimeter 81's client seemed a bit more aggressive in finding the optimal gateway. Neither "slowed things down" in a daily sense, but Cato's behavior required us to manually guide a couple of users.
**Support and Vendor Fit:** As an SMB, we felt like Perimeter 81's entire process was geared toward us. Their sales engineering and initial onboarding were very hands-on. Cato's technology is incredibly deep, but in early conversations, we sometimes felt like we were a bit below their ideal customer profile. Their support was knowledgeable but less "here, let me do that for you" and more "here's the document on how to do that."
My pick for our specific use case - a fully remote team with one sysadmin and a primary need for simple, secure user access to SaaS apps - was Perimeter 81. It just got the job done with less overhead.
If your company plans to open small physical offices or warehouses in the future, or if you need incredibly granular network-level visibility and control (beyond just user/app access), then Cato's architecture might be the better long-term bet. To make the call clean, tell us: 1) Do you have any physical locations beyond home offices, and 2) Is your sysadmin more comfortable managing user permissions or network firewall rules?