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F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM) vs TitanHQ WebTitan comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 4, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

iboss
Sponsored
Ranking in Secure Web Gateways (SWG)
10th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
16
Ranking in other categories
Internet Security (4th), Web Content Filtering (3rd), Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) (8th), ZTNA as a Service (11th), Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) (10th)
F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Man...
Ranking in Secure Web Gateways (SWG)
17th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
17
Ranking in other categories
Network Access Control (NAC) (8th), SSL VPN (5th), Remote Access (10th), Access Management (10th)
TitanHQ WebTitan
Ranking in Secure Web Gateways (SWG)
25th
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
Internet Security (7th), Web Content Filtering (2nd), Domain Name System (DNS) Security (8th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Secure Web Gateways (SWG) category, the mindshare of iboss is 2.0%, up from 1.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM) is 1.1%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of TitanHQ WebTitan is 1.3%, down from 1.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Secure Web Gateways (SWG)
 

Featured Reviews

Matt Crockford - PeerSpot reviewer
It's easy to roll out, and their understanding of our business made it seamless
One aspect we value about iboss is its simplicity. Their customer service is brilliant, and they are super responsive and knowledgeable. It's easy to roll out, and their understanding of our business made it seamless. We were impressed by the solution's mental health function, which can detect if someone needs help. It scans what users are browsing and flags warning signs so we can check to see if they are okay. We've had to use it a couple of times. The user interface is highly intuitive. Our IT team picked it up with minimal training. It's arranged so that it's easy to find where things are. Another advantage is the single pane of glass console, which gives you visibility into what's happening. We're not fully there yet because we haven't implemented zero trust, but we're excited about the possibilities from the demos we've seen. We launched a POC of iboss' ChatGPT Risk Protection feature two weeks ago. AI is a great tool, but you need to be careful what you put into it. My biggest fear is employees inputting sensitive corporate information or customer PII data into one of these chatbots. I was impressed by our trial of the feature. It's exactly what we wanted. Now, when a user goes to ChatGPT, there's a banner warning them not to share information, and we can block conversations containing customer data like bank details and email addresses. I don't want to stop people from using it, but we need visibility. We've only tried it on a test group of 15 people. You can configure it to look for specific keywords or integrate it with your DLP policy if you have that configured
Ashish Kumar Rai - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers remote access control, good GUI and easy to configure
I'd suggest improved documentation integration directly within the GUI. Right now, finding comprehensive documentation often requires going to external websites like the community portal. In the APM interface itself, they could add direct hyperlinks to relevant online documentation. This would provide easy access to admin guides and other resources when working within the GUI.
Pusa Alexandru-Catalin - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides basic email protection features but needs improvement in learning capabilities
TitanHQ does a middle-of-the-road job like Bitdefender and SensorNet, and it has a learning feature, though it's not as advanced as previous technology. In the past, I used a far superior product with no false alarms and minimum spam. This tool learned quickly from my inbox, offering simple yet useful features, such as two links embedded in the email footer indicating whether the email was spam or not.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Technical support is pretty sharp and very responsive."
"First of all, the security policies are essential. I do not have to rely solely on Active Directory for our users."
"Content filtering is the most useful feature of iboss."
"iboss is easy to use despite its complexity. Multiple engineers manage it, but it's significantly more straightforward to administer than traditional VPNs and web proxies."
"The security aspect of the solution, particularly the malware behind it, is excellent. That's something that really helped us out. It's not just a simple proxy that just blocks the insights of potential threats that come on behind it. They do malware detection and that helps us a lot."
"From a use-case scenario, what I like the most is the plug-in. I like the fact that we can do the filtering of these devices offsite independent of the network they are connected to, and we do not have to have traffic coming back inside our network."
"Its initial setup was straightforward."
"We were impressed by the solution's mental health function, which can detect if someone needs help. It scans what users are browsing and flags warning signs so we can check to see if they are okay. We've had to use it a couple of times."
"The performance of the solution is valuable."
"Our organization is small - a college with about 3,500 students. We use F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager to protect our site, especially from the Iranian attacks we faced last year. We restrict access to only inside the country."
"The tool is reliable and easy to configure."
"The solution is stable and reliable."
"I recommend F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM) to others due to its reliability, and it is perceived as critical to security infrastructure."
"We have seen a return on investment from F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager. It provided access at a time when we didn't have it."
"The product allows us to create customized portals for your users."
"A lot of features are useful to me, including mostly the authentication, SAML, or SSO, with no sign-on."
"One of the most valuable features is the setup, right out-of-the-box. We rarely touch anything to do with WebTitan. That low administration is one of the huge features."
"If someone is doing research and they're being blocked, and if we feel that it's a legitimate use, we can get them into the site they're looking for."
"Among the valuable features of WebTitan are the ability to white-label it, which is important for us, the fact that it is fully a cloud platform... and the ability to integrate with Active Directory"
"This tool learned quickly from my inbox, offering simple yet useful features, such as two links embedded in the email footer indicating whether the email was spam or not."
"The monitoring abilities of the product are the most valuable for us. As you deploy it, you can adapt it. As you monitor, if employees go to things that you don't like, or to things that you need to allow, the ability to monitor and see how much is necessary—where they're getting shot down or blocked—is helpful."
"The solution offers very good self-authentication. It has a lot of protocols and ways to authenticate users by ID, or by Active Directory Integration. It's able to take credentials from the Active Directory Domain Controllers."
"The DNS proxy is also valuable. It has nothing to do with blocking websites, which we can do by sending all our DNS requests through WebTitan. However, the DNS proxy gives us more information about the machine sending the request. If you cross-reference that information with WADA, you can determine which user is making the request and create a user-specific policy or profile."
"Not a whole lot of oversight is required after WebTitan is installed. I get email notifications and occasionally browse the reporting. This is pretty important because I don't have the bandwidth to actively monitor all this stuff 24/7. It is just not possible. Therefore, it is important that it doesn't require a lot of my time once it is deployed and working."
 

Cons

"The area I would like to see improvement in is the ability with in the reporter to navigate directly to the content the user is traversing. It is kind of there, but it's not perfect. Quite frequently, I receive links that lead me to pages with error messages."
"SSL decryption: We had issues with learners using apps instead of using web browsers. This type of encryption is tough for any appliance in a BYOD environment."
"I am currently doing a PoC of the zero trust aspect of it. Compared to other similar solutions, it is hard to get around each feature. It takes a while to get used to it."
"Our biggest problem with their service was it did not recognize the device and filtering did not always work correctly."
"The solution could be stronger on the integration side and offer more cloud applications like G Suite or Oracle."
"Their on-premise hardware's network interface is capped at one gigabit, which is sort of a problem. If you stand a filter up where all traffic flows through that, according to them, in order to go above a gigabit, you have to have multiple devices, which in today's IT seems a little bit silly. They could easily put in an SFP port into their device that could accommodate 10 gigs or at least offer a box."
"The dashboards for local use could be better."
"File integrity monitoring would be very advantageous as an additional feature."
"If I could copy and paste objects instead of picking and configuring them from scratch each time, it would be great."
"F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM) does not have a direction for SaaS."
"The solution is quite costly."
"The main improvement needed for F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM) is to integrate into the cloud-delivered services from F5."
"I have had a lot of issues in the past few months with the agents, which was disappointing."
"The solution’s GUI looks very old."
"F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager has room for improvement in integration with other products."
"The technical support’s response time must be improved."
"There are some small bugs in the real-time login environment. There is a real-time login and you can see which URLs are blocked or allowed for every user. They should make sure this is resolved in future releases."
"The technology employed by TitanHQ doesn't learn enough and is still on the basic side."
"The technology employed by TitanHQ doesn't learn enough and is still on the basic side."
"WebTitan could improve the software module and the platform's overall stability, and its competitors have a more sophisticated user interface. We have found some bugs as well as some issues with functionality and security that we've already forwarded to TitanHQ."
"It works for us, and I have no real complaints about it. It is self-intuitive, but it could have intuitive help where you don't have to email somebody asking how you do something. They might already have it, but I've never used it."
"One issue that they have just solved is that there's a new interface for paying bills. I had an issue when I tried to pay with our debit card last year, but with the new payment interface, they have solved that."
"The documentation could always be better. That's true for any organization."
"We have spoken with TitanHQ in the last month about improvements in functionality because we have used other similar platforms and have a different view of things. We have some concerns about the search and the filters. We need to quickly search which users can or cannot access a particular site and why."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is expensive compared to one of its competitors."
"We had the cost of purchasing a new appliance along with the implementation and licensing costs. However, the following year, the cost of just licensing was similar to what was paid the previous year for a new appliance along with the implementation and licensing costs."
"The overall pricing for iboss is very competitive and transparent."
"We have not priced the solution recently, but they were competitive with other vendors in the past."
"It is not expensive, and it is also not cheap. iboss is priced right in the sweet spot for the number of features it offers."
"It is probably in line with other solutions, but I do not deal with the financial side."
"The tool is a little bit expensive."
"The product is very expensive."
"I rate the tool's pricing an eight out of ten."
"Recently, they have simplified the licensing"
"The licensing, although I can't remember the exact cost, was very affordable. I want to say it was maybe $40 per license."
"For licensing, if I remember right, we told them how many users we have, and they told us the price, which we okayed. There were no add-ons. There might be a slight increase like everybody else, but there weren't any add-ons."
"WebTitan helps reduce costs associated with web filtering. In the event that somebody was compromised due to browsing the Internet, there will be at least one device offline. The time and energy spent cleaning that thing up and getting it back online, as well as having that user set up with some sort of a solution so they can continue working, makes it well worth the money. If a single device has been compromised, my time and the potential of having to buy additional hardware is worth at least a couple thousand dollars. Worst case scenario, if our entire organization or the majority of our organization got compromised, then it could get into the 50,000-plus for recovery. It depends on if it is a massive ransomware attack where it has pretty much crippled our entire business."
"The pricing of WebTitan is good. It's the right price. We paid more and more for Cisco Umbrella."
"The pricing is good. It's a substantial cost, but they've held their prices over the years, which has been good."
"It's very aggressively priced, which is something that we definitely like."
"We pay an annual subscription for this. They have good pricing. They are not expensive compared to other solutions that we evaluated. I like the fact that it is just one price for the year. I don't have to worry too much about fluctuations."
"The cost could be lower, though it is not currently prohibitive for larger companies."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Government
10%
Computer Software Company
21%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Educational Organization
7%
Financial Services Firm
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about iboss?
Content filtering is the most useful feature of iboss.
What needs improvement with iboss?
I have the same complaint about them that I have about other software companies. Sometimes when you call in support, ...
What is your primary use case for iboss?
We are a PreK-12 public school district, and we use iboss to filter internet content for our students at home and sta...
What do you like most about F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM)?
In my opinion, the GUI is perfect with the configuration options provided. F5 BIG-IP has given customization options ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM)?
F5 products are more expensive than other solutions but are valued for their quality and reliability, akin to purchas...
What needs improvement with F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM)?
F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM ( /categories/application-performance-monitoring-apm-and-observability )) does n...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for TitanHQ WebTitan?
The pricing of TitanHQ is more or less similar to other tools. I would be willing to pay more for a better service.
What needs improvement with TitanHQ WebTitan?
The technology employed by TitanHQ doesn't learn enough and is still on the basic side. I had previously used 'only m...
What is your primary use case for TitanHQ WebTitan?
I mainly use TitanHQ for email protection, specifically for no false alarms and minimal spam.
 

Also Known As

iBoss Cloud Platform
F5 Access Policy Manager
WebTitan, WebTitan Web Filter
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

More than 4,000 global enterprises trust the iboss Cloud Platform to support their modern workforces, including a large number of Fortune 50 companies.
City Bank, Ricacorp Properties, Miele, American Systems, Bangladesh Post Office
Clarks, Pepsi, Purple, Comcast, Virgin, McDonalds, Sprint, Adtran, Xirrus, Eir, ViaSat
Find out what your peers are saying about F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM) vs. TitanHQ WebTitan and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
846,617 professionals have used our research since 2012.